One of the ‘jewish inventions’ that I found cited in Arnold Zweig’s book ‘Insulted and Exiled’ is one that I have seen elsewhere in different form as ‘jews invented the first effective treatment for syphilis’.
Zweig writes as follows lauding ‘jewish achievement’:
‘Paul Ehrlich, the discoverer of salvarsan’ (1)
Salvarsan for those who are unaware is the first trade name for compound where the active ingredient is the antibiotic Arsphenamine which Ehrlich is often falsely attributed with discovering even to this day (2) – he is also falsely attributed with having created Chemotherapy – (3) but the truth is hinted at later by Bosch and Rosich in their hagiographic article about Ehrlich when they write:
‘In 1905, Fritz Schaudinn (1871–1906) and Erich Hoffmann (1868–1959) discovered that the Treponema pallidum spirochete was the causal agent of syphilis, a disease whose impact on society was comparable to that of AIDS today. Given the similarity between spirochetes and trypanosomes, Hoffmann suggested that Ehrlich use arsenical compounds to treat patients with syphilis. Upon the arrival at the laboratory of his Japanese student and colleague Sahachiro Hata (1873–1938) (fig. 1; table 1), who had been able to infect rabbits with syphilis, Ehrlich asked him to reassess all arsenicals synthesized until then. When he tested compound No. 606, Hata observed that it had truly notable curative properties against syphilis. Ehrlich had just discovered the magic bullet he had so intently been seeking: arsphenamine. This substance, consisting of about 30% arsenic, showed ‘parasitotropic’ properties but lacked ‘organotropic’ properties.
However, severe hypersensitivity problems in patients treated with arsenophenylglycine led the researchers to use extreme caution with arsphenamine. Only after the results of animal experiments had confirmed its safety and efficacy was it administered to patients. Soon afterwards, samples were sent to the Magdeburg Hospital and other centres for the first clinical trials in large numbers of patients with primary syphilis. On 19 April 1910, at the Congress for Internal Medicine at Wiesbaden, Ehrlich and Hata reported the discovery of arsphenamine and their encouraging preclinical and clinical results. Their announcement at this congress led to a large number of requests, which Ehrlich's institute fulfilled by dispensing 65,000 free samples so that further clinical trials could be done. Faced with the high demand worldwide, Hoechst marketed the drug under the name Salvarsan, ‘the arsenic that saves'. This was the first truly effective drug against syphilis, and gained Ehrlich international recognition and popularity. The enthusiasm with which the drug was received was reflected in newspaper headlines and scientific journals. Such was the popular impact that in 1940 Warner Brother Studios produced a feature film about Ehrlich titled Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet.’ (4)
Bosch and Rosich here allude to the fact that work that led to the discovery of Arsphenamine (then known as Compound 606) was actually that of the Japanese doctor Sahachiro Hata who worked under Ehrlich at his ‘National Institute for Experimental Therapeutics’ in Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany in 1909 and had already been extensively experimenting with treatments for syphilis. (5)
Ehrlich then appears to have stolen the credit that should have gone to Hata by co-publishing his discoveries with Hata from 1910 onwards after Ehrlich had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1908 and then seems to have prevented Hata from being awarded the Nobel Prize although Hata was actually nominated three times (in 1911 for Chemistry as well as 1912 and 1913 for Medicine).
Now you could forgive one such instance but this in fact happens at least twice with Ehrlich since in 1907 a German doctor named Alfred Bertheim synthesized Arsphenamine in Ehrlich’s lab and also later was responsible for putting together the compound we know as Salvarsan later. (6) As Williams implies in his article on the history of Arsphenamine the credit for creating Arsphenamine should rightly sit with Bertheim as he led the team that conducted the experiments that originally created Arsphenamine as well as did the experiments himself while Ehrlich merely took the credit as his boss. (6) Similarly, Williams correctly implies Hata should have been primarily credited for the experiment that showed Arsphenamine treated syphilis not Ehrlich. (8)
So why do we not hear anything about Bertheim and Hata but only about Ehrlich?
Well it seems that Ehrlich was a consummate self-publicist where-as Bertheim and Hata were not but rather simply scientists doing their job – although as before noted it does seem that Ehrlich deliberately hobbled Hata’s friends attempts to get his contributions recognised in the form of three unsuccessful Nobel Prize nominations – and so Ehrlich as the jewish Nobel Prize laureate was falsely promoted by both himself and fellow jews like the Warner Brothers as the ‘discoverer’ of Arsphenamine and the creator of Salvarsan.
References
(1) Arnold Zweig, 1937, ‘Insulted and Exiled: The Truth about the German Jews’, 1st Edition, John Miles: London, p. 156
(2) For example: Felix Bosch, Laia Rosich, 2008, ‘The Contributions of Paul Ehrlich to Pharmacology: A Tribute on the Occasion of the Centenary of His Nobel Prize’, Pharmacology, Vol. 82, No. 3, p. 171
(3) See my articles: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-chemotherapy and https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-chemotherapy-68c
(4) Bosch, Roisch, Op. Cit., pp. 177-178
(5) Gervase Vernon, 2019, ‘Syphilis and Salvarsan’, British Journal of General Practice, Vol. 69, No. 682, p. 246
(6) https://www.whatisbiotechnology.org/index.php/exhibitions/antimicrobial/index/salvarsan
(7) K. J. Williams, 2009, ‘The introduction of ‘chemotherapy’ using arsphenamine – the first magic bullet’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 102, No. 8, pp. 343-344
(8) Ibid.