When I first became a doctor, I cared for an older man whom I’ll call Ted. He was so sick with pneumonia that he was struggling to breathe. His primary-care physician had prescribed one antibiotic after another, but his symptoms had only worsened; by the time I saw him in the hospital, he had a high fever and was coughing up blood. His lungs seemed to be infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bacterium so hardy that few drugs can kill it. I placed an oxygen tube in his nostrils, and one of my colleagues inserted an I.V. into his arm. We decided to give him vancomycin, a last line of defense against otherwise untreatable infections.
Ted recovered with astonishing speed. When I stopped by the next morning, he smiled and removed the oxygen tube, letting it dangle near his neck like a pendant. Then he pointed to the I.V. pole near his bed, where a clear liquid was dripping from a bag and into his veins.
“Where did that stuff come from?” Ted asked.
“The pharmacy,” I said.
“No, I mean, where did it come from?”
At the time, I could barely pronounce the names of medications, let alone hold forth on their provenance. “I’ll have to get back to you,” I told Ted. He was discharged before I could. But, in the years that followed, I often thought about his question. Every day, I administer medicines whose origins are a mystery to me. I occasionally meet a patient for whom I have no effective treatment to offer, and Ted’s inquiry starts to seem existential. Where do drugs come from, and how can we get more of them?
この記事は The New Yorker の September 09, 2024 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は The New Yorker の September 09, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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