The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost―and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail
By Lina Zeldovich
Bacteriophages, usually shortened to phages, are viruses that infect and replicate within bacteria with the idea that the phages will kill the bacteria causing the infection. I first encountered the idea of bacteriophages while listening to episode Number Forty of the podcast “Bedside Rounds” by Dr. Adam Rodman entitled “Phage,” which was more of the Western view of bacteriophages.
I wasn’t familiar with bacteriophages and, in fact, I don’t think I’d ever encountered the subject during my decades of reading about medical history. I listened to the podcast and immediately forgot about it because, as I said, bacteriophages simply aren’t part of Western medicine.
When I received an invitation from the publishers to read the book The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost―and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail, I remembered the podcast and figured this would be a great book to read.
The book didn’t disappoint.
In fact, it’s a very detailed history of the history of bacteriophages, focusing mainly on the work of the scientists in the Soviet Union, especially during the time of Joseph Stalin’s authoritarian dictatorship, when his purges disrupted the vital research being done with bacteriophages.
If you have a keen interest in Soviet Union history of that era, even if you aren’t interested in medical history, the survival of the scientists against that backdrop of the purges of the time made very interesting reading.
Bacteriophages never really took hold in Western medicine due to the discovery of penicillin put it on the back burner. Penicillin and other antibiotics could cure a number of different bacteria while bacteriophages had to be created separately for each different bacterium. It was simply easier to mass produce an antibiotic that could cure many bacteria rather than devote time to producing a cure for one specific bacterium.
But with antibiotic resistant bacteria on the rise due to the overuse of antibiotics, bacteriophage therapy is being seriously looked at again in the West.
The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost―and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail is a book that I ended up finding completely fascinating, though I must warn you, it is long and very detailed. But the subject matter deserves the time, and it might just be a lifesaver in the future.
For those of you interested in first-hand account of bacteriophage application, check out the TED Talk from Steffanie Strathdee, “How Sewage Saved My Husband’s Life from a Superbug,” a fascinating look at how her husband became sick and how bacteriophage brought him back from death’s door.
4/5 stars
[Thank you to NetGalley and the author for the advanced ebook copy in exchange for my honest and objective opinion, which I have given here.]