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Last month Dr. Perrin Hamilton Long of Johns Hopkins risked criticism by presenting a brief, preliminary report concerning Prontosil to the Southern Medical Association. Up to last week the Journal of the American Medical Association, which has the biggest (95,200) circulation of all medical publications, printed not a word about Prontosil or Prontylin. Cautious Editor Morris Fishbein, who was educated to be a pathologist, has on at least one previous occasion nearly scorched his editorial nose by prematurely poking it into news of chemical drugs. It will be a long time before he forgets publishing in his Journal a hasty report by Drs. Cutting & Tainter of San Francisco that dinitrophenol was a useful drug for fat people to take to reduce weight speedily. Dinitrophenol does reduce weight. But as Dr. Fishbein warily editorialized, ". . . it is a two-edged sword with appalling possibilities for harm as well as for good." It was soon found that dinitrophenol also causes cataracts, scarcity of white blood cells, other disabilities (TIME, July 31, 1933 et seq.).
Like dinitrophenol, Prontosil is an aro matic coal tar product. Prontosil's full chemical formula is the disodium salt of 4-sulph-amido-phenyl-2-azo-7-acetylamino-1-hydroxynaphthalene 3.6-disulfonic acid. All doctors fear new drugs derived from coal tar. They may exhibit unexpected deadliness. In the case of Prontosil, since like dinitrophenol it affects the production of white blood cells, it comes under the medical rule of thumb: what ever stimulates may also destroy. And it may be that the new drug by which Dr. Tobey cured Franklin Roosevelt Jr.'s septic sore throat may have exhausted the young man's reserve of white blood cells to be used against some other infection.
* Trade name copyrighted by Winthrop Chemical Co. Inc. of Manhattan, the German Dye Trust's U. S. representatives.