Book Napoleon’s Buttons by Penny le Couteur and Jay...

The book, Napoleon’s Buttons, gets its name from an event that happened with the French leader, Napoleon Bonaparte. The authors of the book, Penny le Couteur and Jay Burreson, found it interesting that there could be a possibility of there being a link between the death of the French soldiers during the 1812 winter war and the fact that their coat buttons were made of tin because tin behaves differently when temperatures drop. That propelled Couteur and Burreson to write this book. The book talks about seventeen molecules that changed history. These molecules range from being used in food that people consume, in the form of salt to clothes that people wear in the form of dyes. Various fields where these chemical molecules play an important role have been covered and they include the biological as well as biochemical industries. The focus of this book review would be on the use of these chemical molecules in the line of medicine. Medicine is interconnected with our lives to such an extent that we cannot do without them nor their effects, hence this is the focus of this book review. Medicinal herbs were used to cure an array of illnesses such as wounds and helped in relieving pain. However, the effectiveness of such herbs were limited because they could not help in curing infections. Infections were a main reason behind the deaths of people in the past because once a person was infected, there was no way to deal with that infection and cure it. That is how thousands of