Book Review: Miracle Cure

Miracle Cure: The Creation of Antibiotics and the Birth of Modern Medicine
William Rosen
Medicine

Miracle Cure is the last book by the late author of the superb Justinian's Flea. There's a sad irony in the title: Rosen died of cancer after finishing the manuscript. For him, there was no miracle.

But less than eighty years ago, curing pneumonia or typhoid or plague or any of dozens of other bacterial infections would equally have required a miracle. Before then, it's quite likely true that no healer of any stripe had ever cured anyone of any disease whatsoever--except, perhaps, accidentally. If you got sick, you got better on their own. Or you died.

Miracle Cure isn't quite the achievement that Justinian's Flea is. Its scope is narrower. It requires somewhat more in the way of background knowledge. I spotted a few places where the copy editor should have caught a problem. There's a rather large cast of characters, although Rosen is pretty good at giving the major ones a few vivid identifying characteristics.

It's still a darned good read, though. The pacing is excellent--almost novel-like--and the substance fully justifies the title. Rosen puts together a clear, connected narrative that starts with Louis Pasteur and winds its way almost seamlessly to the 21st-century drug-resistant-bacteria crisis. Along the way he makes it breathtakingly clear how massively, how thoroughly, and how phenomenally fast everything about disease changed. In 1942, half the nation's supply of penicillin was used to treat one patient. By 1956,  Aureomycin (a tetracycline version) was making a roughly $40-million-dollar annual profit for its maker . . . and that's just one of dozens of drugs that were on the market.

I'm sorry that William Rosen won't be writing any more books. As valedictions go, though, Miracle Cure is nothing to be ashamed of.

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The classic older work in this area is Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters. On cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies is unbeatable.