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Penicillin Man: Alexander Fleming And The Anitbiotic Revolution New Edition
Author(s): Kevin Brown (Author)
- Publisher: The History Press
- Publication Date: 15 Sept. 2005
- Edition: New
- Language: English
- Print length: 376 pages
- ISBN-10: 0750931531
- ISBN-13: 9780750931533
Book Description
The time may come when penicillin can easily be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant. . .Mr X has a sore throat. He buys penicillin and gives himself not enough to kill the streptococci but enough to educate them to resist penicillin. He then infects his wife. Mrs X gets pneumonia and is treated with penicllin. As the streptococci are now resistant to penicillin the treatment fails. Mrs X dies. Who is primarily responsible for Mrs X’s death? Why Mr X. whose negligent use of penicillin changed the nature of the microbe. Moral: if you use penicillin, use enough.’ Fleming, in his Nobel Lecture, 1945.
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About the Author
Kevin Brown has been Trust Archivist and Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum Curator at St Mary’s NHS Trust, Paddington since 1989. Educated at Hertford College, Oxford and at University College, London, he is chairman of the London Museums of Health and Medicine.
