Antibiotic

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 THE EVOLUTION OF ANTIMICROBIC DRUGS
• No one recently qualified, even with the liveliest
imagination, can picture the ravages of bacterial
infection which continued until rather less than 40
years ago.

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 THE THREE ERAS OF CHEMOTHERAPY
There are three distinct periods in the history of
this subject :
1. Alkaloids
• This era may be dated from 1619, since it is from this year
that the first record is derived of the successful treatment of
malaria with an extract of cinchona bark, the patient being
the wife of the Spanish governor of Peru. Another South
American discovery was the efficacy of ipecacuanha root in
amoebic dysentery.
• Until the early years of this century these extracts, and in
more recent times the alkaloids, quinine and emetine,
derived from them, provided the only curative chemotherapy
known.

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 2. Synthetic compounds
• Therapeutic progress in this field, which initially and for
many years after was due almost entirely to research in
Germany, dates from the discovery of salvarsan by Ehrlich in
1909. His successors produced germanin for trypanosomiasis
and other drugs effective in protozoal infections.
• The belief that bacteria are by nature insusceptible to any
drug which is not also prohibitively toxic to the human body
was finally destroyed by the discovery of Prontosil.
• This, the forerunner of the sulphonamides, was again a
product of German research, and its discovery was publicly
announced in 1935. All the work with which this book is
concerned is subsequent to this year: it saw the beginning of
the effective treatment of bacterial infections.

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 3. Antibiotics
• The therapeutic revolution
produced by the sulphonamides,
which included the conquest of
haemolytic streptococcal and
pneumococcal infections and of
gonorrhoea and cerebrospinal fever,
was still in progress and even
causing some bewilderment when
the first report appeared of a study
which was to have even wider
consequences.

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 Antibiotics Definition
• Of many definitions of the term antibiotic which have been
proposed, the narrower seem preferable.
• It is true that the word ‘antibiosis’ was coined by Vuillemin
in 1889 to denote antagonism between living creatures in
general, but the noun ‘antibiotic’ was first used by
Waksman in 1942 (Waksman & Lechevalier 1962), which
gives him a right to re-define it, and definition confines it
to substances produced by micro- organisms antagonistic
to the growth or life of others in high dilution (the last
clause being necessary to exclude such metabolic products
as organic acids, hydrogen peroxide and alcohol)

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 • To define an antibiotic simply as
an antibacterial substance from a
living source would embrace
gastric juice, antibodies and
lysozyme from man, essential oils
and alkaloids from plants, and
such oddities as the substance in
the faeces of blowfly larvae which
exerts an antiseptic effect in
wounds.

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