Penicillin

“The discovery of penicillin had provided him with a most valuable reagent in his main routine occupation, the production of vaccines [in Almroth Wright’s Inoculation Dept. at St. Mary’s Hospital], and he had been quick to apply it in this way. . . . Penicillin favoured the selective culturing of the acne, influenza, and whooping cough bacilli. Fleming directed Craddock to this work in preference to his attempts with Ridley to purify penicillin. Crude penicillin was, in fact, perfectly satisfactory for the selective culture of these three organisms in the production of vaccines, and so it was itself produced for this purpose in weekly batches. . . . When it became quite obvious that penicillin was proving itself as a systemic antibacterial agent of unparalleled power, Fleming changed his stance. He reported the results of his own in vitro tests on the Oxford material, found them superior to the sulphonamides, and began to predict that, if penicillin could be synthesized, it would supersede them. And, by quoting the two predictions he had made, on in his 1929 paper, and one in the paper for the British Dental Journal, he was able to claim that he had always been aware of the potential therapeutic value of penicillin. Though it would seem that these two predictions referred to a possible local use of penicillin, many subsequent writers have interpreted them as referring to its systemic injection. This view seems to be unsupported, not only by the actual wording of Fleming’s pronouncements, but by the course of events” (Macfarlane, 254, 255).