He shouldn’t get credit for all the lives saved by blood transfusions, but it seems like he discovered a lot of important medical technology beyond the staining techniques (e.g. he started developing drugs that a target particular pathogen without affecting normal host cells, a novel enough concept that it got the fancy name “Zauberkugel”, which translates to “magic bullet”). Check out Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) and His Contributions to the Foundation and Birth of Translational Medicine if you want more details.
Not to be confused with the other Paul Ehrlich who incorrectly predicted mass starvation in the 1970s; my respect for your Ehrlich was significantly increased when I discovered they were different people.
There is a case to be made for Paul Ehrlich, the late 19th-century chemist recently highlighted by Cold Takes, who developed the staining techniques that allowed us to identify blood types, which enabled blood transfusions, which are estimated to have saved 1 Billion lives in this World Economic Forum article.
He shouldn’t get credit for all the lives saved by blood transfusions, but it seems like he discovered a lot of important medical technology beyond the staining techniques (e.g. he started developing drugs that a target particular pathogen without affecting normal host cells, a novel enough concept that it got the fancy name “Zauberkugel”, which translates to “magic bullet”). Check out Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) and His Contributions to the Foundation and Birth of Translational Medicine if you want more details.
Not to be confused with the other Paul Ehrlich who incorrectly predicted mass starvation in the 1970s; my respect for your Ehrlich was significantly increased when I discovered they were different people.