Paul Ehrlich’s Standardization of Serum: Wertbestimmung and Its Meaning for Twentieth-Century Biomedicine

Abstract

As is amply illustrated in other chapters in this volume, Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915) was a key figure in the introduction of new methods to standardize drugs at the end of the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1890s, the Berlin bacteriologist and immunologist created a method to measure the efficacy of therapeutic sera. This method had a wide impact on scientific medicine in the twentieth century, but for Ehrlich it constituted just one step, albeit a very important one, in his intellectual and scientific career. This paper argues for the importance of Ehrlich’s method for medicine in general, and, more particularly that it was representative of developments in nineteenth-century scientific medicine that prepared the ground for the rise of biomedicine in the twentieth century. In this respect, Ehrlich’s standardization method participated in an ensemble of fundamental cultural changes that underwrote scientific medicine.¹