Penicillin : biologic 1929-1939 , chemotherapeutic 1939-1949

In 1944, Frank M Berger ( later creator of the post-war drug Miltown but then just a worker in a local municipal public health lab in the remotes of northern England)  came up with an unique way of making and using penicillin.

On second thoughts, his method might well have been done first by Alexander Fleming's Wright-Fleming vaccine institute and their pharmaceutical distributor Parke-Davis about 15 years earlier : Penicillin the Biologic.

On further further reflection : should have been done first by Alec Fleming.

Berger's penicillin was only concentrated and purified to the point that not too much penicillin was lost or too much scarce labour and expensive equipment used to create and extract it.

This biological penicillin, Berger claimed,  was safe, potent and cheap  ---and liquid.

Liquid --- and stored cold in the hospital that made it, ( not usually stored more than a week at most), until the next life-threatening case of blood poisoning in that same hospital was cured by its systemic (ie by needle) application.

The immediate use of whole liquid blood (another biologic dismissed earlier in the war) right at the front lines of combat was/is vital for survival of the badly wounded soldier.

But immediately pouring penicillin or sulfa into the man's dirty wound (ie via "local" application) - counter-intutively - is not.

Quickly getting him back to a hospital-like setting where penicillin or sulfa can be given him systemically, and under more carefully monitored conditions, was still useful.

But, it proved not essential to do so immediately even there ; often the staff could afford to wait to first see if signs of systemic infection were present (usually via a temperature rise.)

Ie, Howard Florey's 1939 claim that penicillin was only useful if made into a dry powder that remained stable at room temperature for months at a time was totally in error --- if life-saving was to be its main (wartime) role.

Berger's efforts were merely the best thought out among the number of doctors advocating biologic penicillin, not by any means the first (Dawson) or the most stunning (Duhig) .

By contrast, Florey was the chief high priest of Penicillin the  Chemotherapeutic, (pure,dry,powdery), from first to last its leading advocate....

Aside from VEGEMITE, what did Aussies Gray & Duhig have that Alexander Fleming totally lacked ? (Moral Fervour)

6 million might have lived

In the Fall of 1943, fifteen years after Nobel Prize winner Alexander Fleming proved that penicillin - at least his method of making penicillin - could NOT save lives, two intrepid Aussies using his very same penicillin strain and his very same methods (right down to the use of Seitz asbestos filter pads) plucked a half dozen patients from the jaws of certain death.
  Aussie "Men at Work" , under tough wartime conditions

"They came from a land down under" - working in fact in then remote Brisbane Australia , under severe wartime shortage of staff and materials, their methods displayed NO technical improvements over what Fleming and his two young assistants had managed 15 years earlier.

Unfortunately, Altruism was never Alexander Fleming's long suit...

The key difference was that they had the moral fervour ( that Fleming totally lacked) to try almost anything to save people who were certain to die in days if not hours , by pumping extraordinary amounts of impure ("crude") penicillin water into their bodies.

Even at that late stage in penicillin's development, when the whole middle class world was talking up the miracle of penicillin, most doctors would rather see a patient die, than publicly admit that they injected an impure natural substance into a human being's bloodstream.

(It, after all, was an age of eugenics, and pure breeds, families of good blood and evil half bloods , pure-blooded Indians, when 1/32 or even one drop of black blood made you legally black and when the American Red Cross would not allow the mixing of black and white blood in transfusions : pureness and blood had a quasi-scientific, almost mystical , quality in those years .)

 Nothing impure went into such a symbol of purity as human blood.

So even in late 1943, only a few doctors let the two pioneers, Duhig and Gray, inject raw penicillin juice into their patients - and even they, only when their patient seemed at death's door.

So these were not average very sick patients - they were gravely weakened patients given up for dead - so their recovery was all the more remarkable.

Penicillin's Holocaust

If Fleming had displayed any of their moral fervour in the 12 peacetime years when he had penicillin virtually to himself, an estimated six millions lives might have been saved.

Including - tragically - his own favourite brother  John in 1937 - whose pneumonia case was easily curable by even modest amounts of crude penicillin water - if only Alexander Fleming  had tried.

Instead it was left to the moral fervour of another Scot, Nova Scotian born  Martin Henry Dawson, to first put impure penicillin into a patient's bloodstream, in 1940.

Fewer doctors than you can count on your hands followed Dawson's moral fervour when it came to fighting for the right of impure - natural - penicillin's  to save lives,  in those all important  years between October 1940 and May 1944....

* They used Vegemite in the making of their penicillin juice , as a growth stimulant