Tradename of the arsenic antisyphilis compound arsphenamine, which was developed by Paul Ehrlich. The name is derived from Latin salvare = rescue and sanus = healthy. This product, which in 1910 came on the market by Hoechst AG (Frankfurt, Germany), was the first in a long series of chemicals in the today ongoing century of chemotherapy and was so successful that is was transported even during the First World War (1914–1918) from Germany to the USA by help of submarines. Starting point of this very successful chemical compound was the Atoxyl, which Robert Koch and others tested against African trypanosomiasis.
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Ehrlich P, Bertheim A (1912) Ueber das salzsaure 3.3-diamino-4.4-dioxy-arsenobenzol und seine nächsten Verwandten. Berichte dt Chem Gesell 45:754–766
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Mehlhorn, H. (2016). Salvarsan. In: Mehlhorn, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Parasitology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43978-4_4311
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