Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4
Intoxicated by Implants?
Die Furcht vor dem
vermaledeiten Mercurius
und seiner Gefolgschaft trieb ihn auch
wahrend des Winters die Abteilungssittzungen bei ge offneten Fenstern abzuhalten.
...Wirkungen einer schleichenden Quecksilbervergiftung ohne die er
in jeder Hinsicht viel
mehr hatte leisten konnen
.
1
The chemistry of the hydrides of boron is indissolubly linked with the name of
Alfred Stock. Mentioning Alfred Stock in the context of this topic goes back to
what happened in his schoolboy laboratory where he experimented with mercury.
There probably was planted the seed for his later
hypersensitivity
to mercury. His
professional work on hydrides and the development of high vacuum apparatus and
other instruments implying the use of mercury in Breslau (now Wroclaw) and
Berlin developed further his
erethism
or
chronic mercurialism
. He suffered from
headaches, dizzy spells, memory loss and catarrh. After one of his collaborators
had a tooth abscess in 1924, a toxicologist finally discovered that his collaborator's
as well as Stock's disease was due to mercury poisoning. From that time on, Stock
began his research on mercury poisoning and contamination, which were to span the
final 20 years of his life. From this work emerged what is called the
second amalgam
war
. The first amalgam war took place in the 1840s between the American Asso-
ciation of Dental Surgeons and those dentists who insisted on using the then new
techniques of making fillings with dental amalgam. The next war was Stock's one.
His fight against amalgam was based on his analytical determinations of mercury
content in urine of patients having amalgam fillings.
1
From a biography by Egon Wiberg [113
, XLVI- XLIX]. The text in italics refers to parts of
Stock's diary. Alfred E.Stock is born in 1876 in Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland) and died after
a brilliant academic career in Breslau, Berlin, Karlsruhe and died in Aken an der Elbe in August
1946 in painful postwar circumstances. For a shortened version in English of this story: see [
114
].
