Among the Wonders of Penicillin

No doubt we have all heard the story of the discovery of penicillin — that fabulous story which showed us how a little mold came in through an open window into St. Mary's Hospital at Paddington in London — and settled on a culture dish on which Professor Alexander Fleming was carrying out certain experiments in culturing the bacteria called "staphylococcus"; and how Fleming noticed that a strange body was forming in the dish, and concluded from this that either the mold was killing the poisonous bacteria, or it was preventing their growth.

And now I shall tell you of the services penicillin renders in saving the lives of soldiers who receive the gravest of wounds in the field; among the deadly diseases which that magic medicine has done away with is the poisoning, "gangrene," which strikes the wounded in the field.

I was paying a visit to one of the Allied hospitals, and I talked with some of the soldiers whose bodies had been torn by shells and mangled by machine-gun bullets in Normandy, and who had returned to Britain after penicillin had saved their lives from death.

The hospital consists of a number of huts and tents with level paths running among them, surrounded by fields of golden wheat. The hospital stands within a hedge of thick shrubbery, and there drifts into it on the air the scent of the grasses and wild flowers that are the mark of the village. In those English villages these soldiers of Normandy, whom the war has broken, find rest and peace of mind.

In one of those huts I met a soldier lying on his back — and I learned from him that he had been on a reconnaissance mission in Normandy when the bullets of a Nazi machine gun struck him — one of them pierced his bowels, another pierced his lung, a third lodged in his arm and a fourth in his leg. The specialist doctor who was guiding me showed me the detailed medical reports describing his condition. When he was found on the field his chest was covered with blood, his intestines were all but visible through a great hole in his abdomen, and his condition was extremely bad.

He was found in that state at two forty-two in the afternoon and was given first aid by a transfusion of blood — at half past twelve after midnight he was given another forty thousand units — at five in the morning he was given twenty thousand units of penicillin, and at two in the morning he was given ninety thousand units. He was carried by airplane to Britain, and he is still being given penicillin.

I talked with that young man and found him cheerful and smiling, and he spoke to me at length of his town and his wife. He told me how he came by all those wounds, saying: You cannot see the Germans' machine guns — I could see my comrades dropping to the ground with the life gone out of them, and suddenly those bullets struck me, and I fell to the earth and lay there until those who were coming behind found me. After I was carried onto the stretcher I lost consciousness, and I do not know what happened to me after that. Then he smiled at me again and said: That penicillin is wonderful — it kills all the poisons and keeps them from destroying a man. It saved my life, and I believe I shall be well within a few months.

I talked with another man who had been hit by a shell near Saint-Lô — he believes it came from a gun of 88-millimeter caliber. A splinter from it struck his left leg, in the thigh and at the knee joint. While he was telling me about it he stretched out his hand, trying to grasp a wooden crutch that hung at his side, and tried to stand leaning upon it, but he swayed and failed. Then he said to me, "Hand me that pouch" — a little pouch in which he kept his personal belongings. From it he drew a piece of black metal and said: This is a piece of the shell that struck me and lodged in my flesh and my bones. That shell hit him while he was in a trench, and he was sent at once to Britain by airplane, and was treated with penicillin along the way.

The camp doctor told me that but for that marvelous medicine the patients' condition would have worsened and grown complicated — for it brings down fever, keeps wounds from festering, and kills the germs. He spoke also of "the golden hours of wounds" — the first six hours that used to follow the infliction of a wound before the discovery of penicillin. If the surgeon did nothing in those hours to make its healing easy, that became impossible thereafter.

With the discovery of penicillin, those golden hours have stretched from six hours to two or three days.

I watched the injection of penicillin — an extremely simple operation which the orderlies perform to assist the doctors. The penicillin is brought in a small vial

the size of a thumb, with a rubber cap fitted with a screw valve. Penicillin is a fine, glistening yellow powder — the screw valve is opened and a fixed proportion of distilled water is introduced through the rubber cap — then the patient is injected — a simple operation that gives no hint of the arduous processes carried out in the laboratories to extract penicillin. It is necessary to determine the nature of the injury and the degree of sensitivity of the injured organ with respect to penicillin, and the proportion of penicillin in the blood is checked again and again, so that the doses injected into the patient can be varied.

All the doctors I spoke with praised penicillin in the highest terms, and said: our task is to save lives so that the war can be won. In cases of injuries to the joints and the spinal cord, and of deep wounds, penicillin renders splendid services, and the soldier returns to the performance of his duty in the shortest possible time.

Among penicillin's brilliant results are those achieved in cases of the venereal diseases, such as syphilis, whose treatment used to require more than 18 months — then its method of treatment advanced, so that it came to require six months; and with penicillin it can be treated in seven days only. Gonorrhea, likewise, can be treated in a single day. And if the world can produce sufficient quantities of penicillin, all the venereal diseases can be wiped out.

How strange that this magic medicine should be the outcome of a little mold that slipped into a London hospital through an open window!