Background/Introduction Arsenic is a naturally occurring element that has been known to be a very toxic poison for hundreds of years. This metalloid has properties of metals and nonmetals. It has two forms, the organic forms including arsenobetaine, arsenocholine, MMA and DMA and the inorganic forms including As (III) and As(V). This poison can be dated as far back as 3000 years ago in Chinese medicine that is still used today. Egyptians used arsenic as a way to harden copper and as embalming fluid
Only four years later, in 1909, a German scientist named Paul Ehrlich and the members of his lab discovered a cure for the disease, originally named Ehrlich 606 due to it being the 606th arsenic compound he’d tested, and scientifically known as arsphenamine (Yarnell 2005). Only months after its discovery, Ehrlich 606 began to be mass produced and marketed to the public under its new name, Salvarsan (Yarnell 2005). Salvarsan then became the globally most prescribed drug until the 1940 public release