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Gerhard Domagk, the German pathologist who had developed sulfa drugs into the first effective tools for fighting bacterial infection, had demonstrated their effectiveness in his own family. To them antibiotics were a miracle, and it started not with penicillin but with sulfa drugs. And had they been lucky enough to survive the waves of diarrhea, bronchitis and other infectious diseases that came on then as dependably as summer, plenty of other children hadn’t. They had known children who died of blood poisoning from causes as trivial as a splinter, never mind a bullet wound. But the soldiers who fought in World War II had grown up in another world. If we get a fever, we visit the doctor, swallow a few pills and call back,a little irritated, if our condition has not cleared up after three or four days. The outcome of the entire war, and the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers, hung in the balance. At the outset of 1944 penicillin was the object of a massive Anglo-American effort to ramp up production ahead of the D-Day invasion.
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Penicillin was so precious, and flushed so rapidly out of a patient’s body, that researchers still commonly recovered it from urine and purified it for reinjection. Pulvertaft did not even have enough of the drug-or enough he could be sure was nontoxic-to risk treating the prime minister. Pulvertaft predicted a “revolution in treatment” of wounded soldiers and that “sepsis as we know it might almost disappear” if sufficient penicillin were available. Pulvertaft, published an article in The Lancet medical journal about his successful experiments with penicillin. Even as Churchill lay ill with pneumonia, one of his attending physicians, Lt. The first precious shipments had already demonstrated an almost miraculous ability to prevent and treat infections during field trials on wounded soldiers in North Africa and Italy. And while the sulfa derivatives had seemed like wonder drugs when introduced in 1935, penicillin was clearly superior. The new wonder drug was a British discovery, while the sulfa drugs had originated in Germany. The mythmaking about penicillin was perhaps understandable.
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Instead, as he publicly declared soon after, he was saved by “this admirable M&B”-a sulfa (or sulfanomide) antibacterial drug manufactured in England by May & Baker Ltd. And what cured the prime minister’s pneumonia wasn’t even penicillin. The Churchills and Flemings were not acquainted. That son, Alexander Fleming, had in turn discovered the penicillin that supposedly saved Churchill’s life.īut the “wondrous fable,” as Fleming himself referred to the ironic sequence of events, had fundamental fact-checking issues: Churchill had experienced no near drowning in his youth. British newspapers enshrined the new wonder drug penicillin as the prime minister’s savior, and their reports quickly grew into legend: When Churchill was a boy, the story went, a man had saved him from drowning, prompting Churchill’s grateful father to pay for the man’s son to attend medical school. What followed, despite the patient, was reportedly a triumph of modern medicine-though, in retrospect, of propaganda. He agreed to lay off cigars and take his whiskey more or less watered, but he continued to see visitors and do business. As his heart went into fibrillation, doctors were unsure if they could save the man who had once rallied the beleaguered British nation with his battle cry of “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”Ĭhurchill was far from an ideal patient. And now, as his Avro York transport Ascalon dropped down into Tunisia, he presented a nasty case of pneumonia, to which he was prone. He was 69 years old, tired, overweight, and an avid drinker and smoker with a bad heart.
Making history the second world war help guide series#
In December 1943 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was homeward bound across North Africa after a series of meetings with world leaders in the Middle East. How mold in a petri dish became the soldiers’ lifesaver.