The Demon Under The Microscope
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Narrated by:
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Stephen Hoye
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By:
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Thomas Hager
About this listen
Sulfa saved millions of lives, among them, Winston Churchill's and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr.'s, but its real effects have been even more far reaching. Sulfa changed the way new drugs were developed, approved, and sold. It transformed the way doctors treated patients. And it ushered in the era of modern medicine. The very concept that chemicals created in a lab could cure disease revolutionized medicine, taking it from the treatment of symptoms and discomfort to the eradication of the root cause of illness.
A strange and vibrant story, The Demon Under the Microscope illuminates the colorful characters, corporate strategy, individual idealism, careful planning, lucky breaks, cynicism, heroism, greed, hard work, and central (though mistaken) idea that brought sulfa to the world. This is a fascinating scientific tale with all the excitement and intrigue of a great suspense novel.
©2006 Thomas Hager (P)2006 Tantor Media, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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A great scientific mystery
- By David on 11-04-06
By: D.T. Max
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The Secret History of the War on Cancer
- By: Devra Davis Ph.D.
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 19 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The War on Cancer was run by leaders of industries that made cancer-causing products and sometimes also profited from drugs and technologies for finding and treating the disease. Filled with compelling personalities and never-before-revealed information, The Secret History of the War on Cancer shows how we began fighting the wrong war, with the wrong weapons, against the wrong enemies, a legacy that persists to this day.
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Silly Book
- By Adam Smith on 12-24-14
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The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl
- How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis
- By: Arthur Allen
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.
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An Unforgettable book
- By Jean on 09-01-14
By: Arthur Allen
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Bellevue
- Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital
- By: David Oshinsky
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution.
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Fascinating
- By Jean on 12-14-16
By: David Oshinsky
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Splendid Solution
- Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio
- By: Jeffrey Kluger
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Salk became a cultural hero and icon for a whole generation. Now, at the fiftieth anniversary of the first national vaccination program, and as humanity is tantalizingly close to eradicating polio worldwide, comes this unforgettable chronicle. Salk's work was an unparalleled achievement, and it makes for a magnificent listen.
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Excellent book
- By Tim on 08-10-06
By: Jeffrey Kluger
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Beating Back the Devil
- By: Maryn McKenna
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The universal instinct is to run from an outbreak of disease. These doctors run toward it. They always keep a bag packed. They seldom have more than 24 hours before they are dispatched. They are told only their country of destination and the epidemic they will tackle when they get there.
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Interesting Stuff - Only criticism is pacing
- By Tim on 07-23-05
By: Maryn McKenna
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The Pandemic Century
- One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris
- By: Mark Honigsbaum
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu to the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 "parrot fever" pandemic, through the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last one hundred years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms.
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Pretty good
- By Baz 12345 on 04-03-20
By: Mark Honigsbaum
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The Moth in the Iron Lung
- A Biography of Polio
- By: Forrest Maready
- Narrated by: Forrest Maready
- Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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A fascinating account of the world’s most famous disease - polio - told as you have never heard it before. Epidemics of paralysis began to rage in the early 1900s, seemingly out of nowhere. Doctors, parents, and health officials were at a loss to explain why this formerly unheard-of disease began paralyzing so many children. Why did this disease start to become such a horrible problem during the late 1800s? Why did it affect children more often than adults? Why was it originally called teething paralysis by mothers and their doctors?
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Root Cause
- By Circlekay1 Gulfport MS on 10-24-19
By: Forrest Maready
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Asleep
- The Forgotten Epidemic That Became Medicine’s Greatest Mystery
- By: Molly Caldwell Crosby
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1918, a world war raged, and a lethal strain of influenza circled the globe. In the midst of all this death, a bizarre disease appeared in Europe. Eventually known as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, it spread worldwide, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. Asleep, set in 1920s and '30s New York, follows a group of neurologists through hospitals and asylums as they try to solve this epidemic and treat its victims - who learned the worst fate was not dying of it, but surviving it.
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Scary, and still unsolved, medical mystery
- By joyce on 12-14-14
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The Butchering Art
- Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
- By: Lindsey Fitzharris
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters - no place for the squeamish - and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. They were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. A young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister would solve the deadly riddle and change the course of history.
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Not one boring moment!
- By WRWF on 12-22-17
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The Emperor of All Maladies
- A Biography of Cancer
- By: Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 22 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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The Emperor of All Maladies reveals the many faces of an iconic, shape-shifting disease that is the defining plague of our generation. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance but also of hubris, arrogance, paternalism, and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out "war against cancer".
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Incredible
- By S.R.E. on 03-02-16
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King of Hearts
- The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery
- By: G. Wayne Miller
- Narrated by: Patrick Cullen
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.
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Loved every minute
- By Brian on 02-05-08
By: G. Wayne Miller
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From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes to...Aliens?
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As late as the 1930s, virtually no drug intended for sickness did any good; doctors could set bones, deliver babies, and offer palliative care. That all changed in less than a generation with the discovery and development of a new category of medicine known as antibiotics. By 1955 the age-old evolutionary relationship between humans and microbes had been transformed, trivializing once-deadly infections.
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Stick to the science and drop the political slant.
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During the Roaring Twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would be 10 times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy, and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society.
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Feels incomplete
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The Family That Couldn't Sleep
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For 200 years, a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces raw before collapsing. What these strange conditions share is their cause: prions.
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A great scientific mystery
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Do No Harm
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The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. In this book Michael Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and "reclaim" it and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations.
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This is not Jiminy Cricket's river
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The Panic Virus
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The Panic Virus is a gripping scientific detective story about how grassroots radicals, snake-oil salesmen, and cynical journalists have perpetrated the biggest health-scare hoax of all time. It explores what happens when the media treats all viewpoints as equally valid, regardless of facts, from parents who are convinced that vaccines caused their children's autism to right-wing radicals who believe that climate change is a myth
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Incredible thorough journey
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By: Seth Mnookin
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Black Holes Explained
- By: Alex Filippenko, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Alex Filippenko
- Length: 6 hrs and 19 mins
- Original Recording
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Performance
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Story
Imagine a region in space where the force of gravity is so strong that nothing - not even light - can escape. This phenomenon is a black hole: one of the most exotic, mind-boggling, and profound subjects in astrophysics. Nearly everyone has heard of black holes, but few people outside of complex scientific fields understand their true nature and their implications for our universe. No movie, novel, or other fictional treatment of black holes matches Professor Filippenko’s absorbing presentation of the actual science behind these amazing objects.
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Based on material from 2009
- By John L Orrell on 04-09-19
By: Alex Filippenko, and others
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Plagues, Pandemics and Viruses
- From the Plague of Athens to COVID-19
- By: Heather E. Quinlan
- Narrated by: Samara Naeymi
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It can come in waves - like tidal waves. It changes societies. It disrupts life. It ends lives. As far back as 3000 B.C.E. (the Bronze Age), plagues have stricken mankind. COVID-19 is just the latest example, but history shows that life continues. It shows that knowledge and social cooperation can save lives. Viruses are neither alive nor dead and are the closest thing we have to zombies. Their only known function is to replicate themselves, which can have devastating consequences on their hosts.
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Somewhat elemental
- By Bertha Watkins on 10-23-21
What listeners say about The Demon Under The Microscope
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- peter
- 03-06-09
Fascinating for the Science Buff
Thomas Hager has done extensive, detailed research and written his story in a concise style which makes him easy to follow. His characters are alive; the life of the scientist well described. I know of no other book which covers this subject matter; the development of the most commonly used medicines and some insight as to what life was like before this became available. Its relevance is brought to life by stories of two US Presidents' sons who became sick: one lived; one died. Absorbing detail in both cases.
Is it for everyone? Probably not. History buffs, science minded enthusiasts, medical students: I used it for some marvelous facts concerning the discovery of bacteria which parallels what is happening today in nanoscience. I can put that in PowerPoint in a second.
I have one comment for Audible, if they can do anything about it. The reader has a wonderful voice tone, speaks clearly and at the perfect speed for me. However, he has the annoying habit of dropping his tone at the end of just about every sentence or phrase, giving emphasis to the word in a way that lends sad reflection. Have you any idea how irritating this can be? I rather think it might be the same reader as ruined 'Slaughterhouse 5' for me, although the effect was a lot less intrusive in this book than there.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Rosalinda
- 04-17-15
So interesting
This is really a very good book . It surpassed my expectations. I am going to listen to it again . The narrator has a good voice
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2 people found this helpful
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- deborah
- 12-03-11
One of the Best of the Medical History Audiobooks
Well researched and narrated, this is the story of Sulfa, the pre-curser antibiotic to penicillin, and the stories of its discovery, use, and consequences for public health. Though lengthy, I finished it in two days. For those who are interested in the subject, or medical professionals, the book covers a class of drugs no longer studied. Wonderful book that had me checking wiki for further info on topics.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Calliope
- 10-02-16
Great book of history, medicine, and health
This is a very interesting and well-told story about something so common most people take it for granted -- antibiotics. But it's more than just the story of how the first medicine to fight bacterial infections was discovered, it's also the story of what life was like before antibiotics, how the Nazi's affected the development of medicine, and how even national boundaries affected what and how drugs were used around the world.
And it's written so well; it flows nicely and holds the readers' attention well.
There's a lot of dovetailing with Hager's "The Alchemy of Air" (also excellent, but with better narration), in that it occurs after that book but also involves the talented and innovative work of the men at Bayer in the early 20th century.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- kate
- 11-09-10
Interesting topic, difficult to listen to
The subject and story are engrossing, but it was hard to listen to this narrator's overly dramatic inflections and his misproununciations. I gave up half way through.
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- Susan K Treiman
- 01-30-13
Interesting read
Fascinating tale that unfolds in the midst of wartime Germany. Although I cringed at some of the main characters' connections to the Nazis, I found the story interesting and revealing. Great delivery, too.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-22-18
Fascinating Listen
Surprisingly easy listen with loads of interesting details. Paints the picture of early drug development and early Western medicine in a carefully thought out manner. The author does takes a few rabbit trails at times and, in my opinion, ended the book about a chapter too soon. Recommended read.
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- budsmom
- 07-01-13
Fascinating!
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Yes, it was one of the best books I've ever read. A fascinating read!
What other book might you compare The Demon Under The Microscope to and why?
The Great Influenza because of the medical information they contain, written in an easy to understand, descriptive way.
What about Stephen Hoye’s performance did you like?
He was great. All the characters seem real and it was easy to keep them straight.
Any additional comments?
I was amazed at the lack of medical care as we know it in the US. In a country that was one of the world's leaders in inventions and innovations in the late 1800's - 1930's, it was appalling how ignorant the so called physicians were about disease, infections, and how to treat them properly. So many people died unnecessarily due to lack of sanitation and proper medicine. I was shocked to find out that doctors used many of the same methods that were used during the Middle Ages! No medical schools in the US were regulated or accredited; no research was done for anything and a man (no woman) could become a doctor with as little as 2 years of training. Almost all medical discoveries happened in Europe, Germany/France mostly. Here is where the first discoveries of molecules to produce antibiotics and antibacterials happened. This book not only explains very scientific ideas clearly, and in a way for anyone to understand.
This is the history of modern medicine as we know it today. It was not until 1937 that the first antibiotic was produced. The results amazed the world and changed the history of medicine. It is also the modern history of pharmacology. A fascinating read!
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- Cora Keegan
- 02-27-13
Great but 50% too big
What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?
This story details how modern medicine was changed by the first antibiotics. A real eye opener especially about child birth infections and battle field surgery. The author details how dangerous and short life was before these drugs came out before world war 2. However, the book is too verbose. The details of some of the research are boring, for example in one point of the book they read off 10 minutes of numbers that were lab sample numbers, I let out a groan half way through that mind numbing detail. I took to pushing the skip 15 seconds ahead button a lot. Really about half this book could be edited out. It has a lot of details about unsuccessful experiments, some people's names and locations that don't real add much to the story.
Do you think The Demon Under The Microscope needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?
Nope, enough said.
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- Angie M.
- 06-28-15
The first miracle Drug and sacrifices to find it
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Yes, but I would let them know it often goes very in depth in discussing the lives of the doctors and not everything is easy to listen to. This isn't a comfortable book at all times and a basic understanding of medical practices of the time is useful.
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Demon Under The Microscope?
There isn't one particular moment. There are so many people discussed in the book and their work was in concert.
Have you listened to any of Stephen Hoye’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
No this was my first. He did an excellent job in making the book interesting and giving his voice gravity when the subject matter became darker.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No, this was a book that took some time to listen to. I had to take breaks to let things settle in my mind.
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