Father of Toxicology

We have already seen in earlier chapters that even essential metal ions can be toxic — as the historical father of toxicology, Paracelsus (1493—1541), wrote... 

Paracelsus (1493-1591), a Swiss physician and chemist, is best known as the Father of Toxicology. Along with many of his predecessors, he wrote of the toxicity related to mining. In his work On the Miners Sickness and Other Diseases of Miners, he established the important concepts of acute and chronic toxicity. Unique to Paracelsus was his claim that all substances were poisons—the dose differentiates a poison from a remedy. This concept is the basis for the Dose-Response relationship. 

Spanish physician and chemist Mateu Orfila, sometimes called the father of toxicology, published the first comprehensive text on forensic toxicology in 1813 his work emphasized the need for identification and quality assurance in the pharmaceutical, clinical, environmental, and industrial fields. 

Today, the concern is less about the lethal quantity of these relatively benign substances, but rather about pollutants in our food, water, and air. Yet despite our lack of sophistication, my young friends and I weren t actually so far off the mark. We didn t realize it at the time, but we were channeling a sixteenth-century physician, Paracelsus. Considered the father of toxicology, Paracelsus is credited with the first and most important tenet of the field, the idea that the dose makes the poison All things are poison and nothing is without... 

A third historical strand that has helped to create modern toxicology consists of the labors of occupational physicians. Some of the earliest treatises on toxicology were written by physicians who had observed or collected information on the hazards of various jobs. The man some have called the father of the field of occupational medicine was Bernardino Ramazzini, an Italian physician whose text De Moribus Artificum Diatriba (1700) contributed enormously to our understanding of how occupational exposure to metals such as lead and mercury could be harmful to workers. Ramazzini also recognized that it was important to consider the possibility that some poisons could slowly build up in the body and that their adverse effects do not make themselves apparent for a long time after exposure begins. 

Much later, Paracelsus, the father of modem toxicology (1493-1541), pronounced a dictum of his own Sola dosis facit veneum, meaning only the dose makes the poison. There is a glorified commonness to these ancient thinkers, neither knowing the other and from different periods of time. 

It is not essential for a substance to cross the placenta in order to act as a developmental toxicant. Chemicals can cause developmental toxicity by acting on the father (see section 5.3.1.3), the mother, the fetoplacental unit or the fetus directly (Bloom, 1981). In addition, postnatal development can be affected by changes in the quality or quantity of a mother s breast milk, which can occur directly or as the milk enters into the feeding pup. Chemicals may act at only one of these sites or at more than one of these sites. The role of maternal factors in developmental toxicology is discussed more fully by Daston... 

An alternative theoretically possible mechanism of the paternal occupational contribution fw an excess of childhood cancer would be a transmission of chemicals to the mother via the seminal fluid. Maternal exposure with consequent in utero exposure can occur theoretically from chemicals brought home as contaminants on the fathers skin, clothing, etc, either as the parent compound or its metabolites in the fathers expired air. For a specialist with toxicological knowledge this possibility will always remain speculative until quantitative data for specific exposures are available. This hypothesis was suggested for a paternal contribution to fetal mal-development [29]. It is difficult to accept... 

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