Who is gerhard domagk

In this environment minor scratches and scrapes could prove deadly, and pneumonia and tuberculosis killed even young adults. Visit the Science History Institute and see this item on display in our permanent exhibition, Making Modernity. Introduced in by Gerhard Domagk — , sulfa drugs, or sulfonamides, all of which are related to the compound sulfanilamide, provided the first successful therapies for many bacterial diseases. As such, they proved to be the forerunners of antibiotics, showing that bacterial diseases are vulnerable to substances not natural to the human body.

Born the son of a teacher in Lagow, Germany, Domagk decided early in life to become a physician. His medical studies at the University of Kiel were interrupted by his service as a grenadier and medical corpsman in World War I. He completed his medical degree in and then began an academic career, pursuing research in pathology. He adopted a dynamic approach to pathology, incorporating physiology and chemistry into his work. In this industrial setting Domagk felt at greater liberty to pursue his research and had far better resources at his command than in the university setting.

He would spend the rest of his career there. Domagk was hired to establish a special pharmacology laboratory and to collaborate with two chemists, Fritz Mietzsch and Josef Klarer.

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Copy to clipboard. Search Search articles by subject, keyword or author. He then became a medical student at Kiel and, when the War broke out, he served in the Army, and in December was wounded. Later he was sent to join the Sanitary Service and served in, among other places, the cholera hospitals in Russia. During this time he was decisively impressed by the helplessness of the medical men of that time when they were faced with cholera, typhus, diarrhoeal infections and other infectious diseases.

He was especially strongly influenced by the fact that surgery had little value in the treatment of these diseases and even amputations and other forms of radical treatment were often followed by severe bacterial infections, such as gas gangrene. In he resumed his medical studies at Kiel and in he took his State Medical Examinations and graduated.

In he moved to Greifswald and there became, in , University Lecturer in Pathological Anatomy. Farbenindustrie, at Wuppertal. In a new research institute for pathological anatomy and bacteriology was built by the I.

Farbenindustrie and there, in , Domagk made the discovery for which his name is so well known, the discovery that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for , namely, the fact that a red dye-stuff, to which the name «prontosil rubrum» was given, protected mice and rabbits against lethal doses of staphylococci and haemolytic streptococci.