Emil von Behring researched treatments for the common childhood disease diphtheria in Germany in the 1890s and early 1900s. Diphtheria is a lethal disease that infected approximately 40,000 people in Germany between 1886 and 1888 with a general mortality rate of twenty-five percent. Behring investigated treatment of diphtheria using serum therapy, which is an alternative to vaccination that uses protective agents from other people’s blood to defend a patient against disease. Behring termed those protective agents antitoxins. He received the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on serum therapy, which was one of the first Nobel Prizes given in the field of immunology. Additionally, Behring researched active vaccination as another way to protect patients from diphtheria. Behring’s studies lowered the mortality rate of diphtheria in Germany through serum therapy and vaccination, especially since vaccination confers protection to both mother and infant during pregnancy and after birth.

In 1944, Joseph Earl Moore and colleagues published “The Treatment of Early Syphilis with Penicillin: A Preliminary Report of 1418 Cases,” hereafter “Treatment of Early Syphilis,” in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Moore and colleagues’ article was one of the first to study and explore the use of penicillin, an antibiotic that can kill bacteria, as a treatment for humans with syphilis, which is a bacterial disease that spreads through sexual contact. In its early stages, syphilis can cause rashes and genital sores, but in its late stages, it can also lead to organ damage. In “Treatment of Early Syphilis,” Moore and his colleagues explain that they conducted a study to determine the effects and optimal dose of penicillin in humans with early syphilis. The authors found that giving individuals with syphilis specific doses of penicillin can heal their syphilitic lesions and eradicate the bacterium that causes syphilis from their bodies. “Treatment of Early Syphilis” was one of the first articles to demonstrate that syphilis, specifically early syphilis, could be effectively treated with penicillin, the drug that physicians still most commonly use as of 2024 to treat the sexually transmitted disease.