This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

David Goldblatt, MD
University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry Rochester, NY 14642

Arch Neurol. 1986;43(2):105.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—Simon,¹ in his review of neurosyphilis for the ARCHIVES, limited his discussion of therapy to penicillin, but the editors (not including me) have cleverly added a reference to salvarsan, the organic arsenical that was the first agent to be used effectively throughout the world in the treatment of syphilis. Paul Ehrlich, its inventor, was both a biologist and a chemist; before 1910, when he formally announced the efficacy of salvarsen,² he had studied the specificity of antibodies—his "magic bullets"—and had shared the 1908 Nobel Prize for his research in immunity. Using similar concepts to improve the specificity of organic compounds that might kill parasites, he originated the field of chemotherapy.³

Salvarsan was also known as 606, because it was the 606th compound to be tested by Ehrlich and his collaborators against such organisms as trypanosomes and the newly-identified spirochete. (Neosalvarsan was the 914th compound . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?