August: Chemotherapy (Chemical Therapy)

In general terms, chemotherapy refers to any treatment of a disease by chemicals that kill cells, typically cancer cells.  However, the term also refers to antibiotics, also known as antibacterial chemotherapy.  In August 1909, German biochemist Paul Ehrlich discovered the first modern chemotherapeutic agent, arsphenamine used to treat Syphilis. Ehrlich in fact coined the term 'chemotherapy' (chemical therapy).

Ehrlich was initially looking for a treatment for 'sleeping sickness', he found that an arsenic compound 'Atokyl' worked very well but was unusable due to it being poisonous.  He entered into a search for a compound that would kill the disease but not the person; this became known as the 'magic bullet'.  After testing over 900 compounds, Ehrlich's colleague Sahachiro Hata returned back to the 606th ('Preparation 606') tested, it didn't cure the sleeping sickness but did cure a microbe found to cause syphilis.  The drug, Salvarsan was released a year later.

The RSC's collection contains a significant amount of material on the treatment of cancer, one of the older volumes being:

Principles and practice of chemotherapy: with special reference by J A Kolmer, 1926

The archive contains images of Ehrlich (see image) as well as letters written by him to Henry Roscoe.