One hundred years since the ‘Magic Bullet’

In 1909 Paul Ehrlich, working with his Japanese student Sahachiro Hata at the National Institute for Experimental Therapeutics in Frankfurt, discovered that the 606th substance tested in their attempts to discover a specific chemotherapeutic agent to cure syphilis, the arsphenamine compound named ‘Salvarsan’ did in fact destroy the spirochaete, treponema pallidum, which caused syphilis.

In the early years of the twentieth century this sexually-transmitted disease was a major public health problem: it had long-term lingering effects on the infected individual, and was also the cause of much disability in their offspring.

The discovery of Salvarsan was also an important breakthrough in the development of specifically targeted chemotherapeutic agents. It was rapidly taken up by the medical profession, replacing the previous much less efficacious treatment with mercury.

Its history is reflected in a number of archival collections in the Wellcome Library: the Paul Ehrlich transcripts include his work on arsphenamine, case-notes among the papers of Surgeon-General Knapp, RN (GC/85) show the early use of salvarsan trreatment in the Royal Navy, while Sir Bernard Spilsbury’s index cards of autopsies include some early deaths from toxic side-effects while dosage levels were still being worked out. These are also documented (with other material on Salvarsan) in the papers of Frederick Parkes Weber.

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 the supply of Salvarsan (and the later developed Neosalvarsan) was cut off since they were produced in Germany. Substitutes – Kharsivan and Neokharsivan - were developed and manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome and Co Ltd. Further information can be found in the company records.

Contemporaneously, the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases (1913-1916) was hearing evidence on the best and most effective ways to bring this radical new treatment and sufferers together. Its reports and minutes of evidence are held in the Library.

Other items of relevance in the Wellcome Library, besides numerous printed works, include the 1974 BBC educational film The Search for the Magic Bullet as well as the famous Hollywood movie, starring Edward G Robinson (better known his gangster roles) as Ehrlich, Dr Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940).

Although it was replaced in the 1940s by penicillin, a treatment which took much less time and had far fewer dangerous side-effects, Salvarsan and its clones played a major role in the reduction of syphilitic infection in the UK between the two world wars.

Happy birthday, Paul Ehrlich!

Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) was a leading medical researcher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries particularly famed for his work in bacteriology and immunology. He won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1908. He is best remembered for 'Dr Ehrlich's Magic Bullet', Compound 606, the arsephanemine drug salvarsan discovered in 1909, which provided a cure for syphilis,.

Shortly after the Second World War, Gunther Schwerin, one of his grandsons, located Ehrlich's copybooks in Germany, and sent them, along with other material, to the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in London for safekeeping. While they were there, his former secretary Martha Marquardt, who was also his biographer, and the co-editor of the four volumes of his collected papers, one of the few people able to read his handwriting, prepared seven sets of typewritten transcripts. These carbons are the 3rd set (of 4) copies, formerly in the possession of Sir Henry Dale, and presented by him to the Library early in 1958. The originals, and 3 sets of copies, are now held with the Paul Ehrlich archive in the Rockefeller Archive Center, New York, by whose kind permission this particular set of copies is made available in the Wellcome Library

There are 6 series, representing both copies of letters sent by him, and experimental notebooks. There are not complete sets of transcripts for all of these: in some cases the originals themselves appear to no longer exist. According to a letter from Dr E A Underwood, Director of the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, to Gunther Schwerin, 25 Mar 1963 (WA/HMM/CO/Eau/13), there are some misreadings by Marquardt of scientific terms in the originals, as, although she was capable of deciphering Ehrlich's writing, she was not herself a scientist.

Ehrlich's name is one of those on the frieze of names of the most distinguished figures in medical science, created in 1913 for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum when it was based in Wigmore Street. The frieze is now viewable around the gallery of the Wellcome Library Reading Room at 183 Euston Road