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Doctors and amateurs also began to grow the mold on their own. The usual method was to let penicillium grow on gauze, then use the gauze for a bandage (TIME, Oct. 25).
The Miracle. Last year penicillin patients were still rare enough to be frontpage news. First such case was two-year-old Patricia Malone (see cut) of Jackson Heights, Queens. The New York Journal-American, which begged enough penicillin from Dr. Keefer to save her life from staphylococcic septicemia, last week won the Pulitzer Prize for the story. After that, the whole nation watched one "hopeless" case after another get well.
There were the three doctors in the California mountains last winter who saved a seven-year-old girl when gas gangrene had forced repeated amputations of her left arm up to the shoulder: "As a last resort, penicillin was given after all hope had been abandoned for a recovery, which came like a miracle." There was a doctor in Sioux Falls, S.D., who was astonished to save a man moribund with osteomyelitis and septicemia after sulfadiazine had failed: "This being the first case in which I have employed penicillin therapy, I feel that the results obtained, to say the least, were miraculous."
Doctors now know in general which diseases penicillin helps, have worked out a tentative schedule of dosage. Present consensus is that 40,000 to 120,000 units daily, given gradually by vein or intramuscular injection for about a week, should cure the average case with a systemic infection. Treatment for gonorrhea is usually much shorter; treatment for subacute bacterial endocarditis, much longer. For application to wounds, about 50,000 units in salt solution is used, varying with the size of the wound.
Penicillin seems to cure most of the bacterial diseases that the sulfa drugs cure and cures them more quickly, effectively and less dangerously. It also seems to be a quick cure of early syphilis—the first safe and effective drug to kill the spirochete. Sulfa drugs are not effective against syphilis. But penicillin will not entirely supplant sulfa drugs. The sulfa drugs are still necessary for: 1) intestinal infections (penicillin is destroyed in the digestive tract); 2) bacillus coll infections of the urinary tract (penicillin does not attack b. coli); 3) as prophylactics in epidemics of certain diseases like meningitis, pneumonia, gonorrhea (penicillin is excreted too fast to be used for this purpose).
Only a Beginning. Penicillin is already big business, yet Dr. Fleming (who discovered it) and Dr. Florey (who made it tick) have got nothing out of it but praise—doctors generally do not patent drugs. Penicillin will save more lives than war spends, but there has been no military citation. Most tangible recognition so far was the Award of Merit of the American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association given to Drs. Fleming & Florey last December. Several months ago, a proposal to give Dr. Fleming a grant from the public funds was brought up in Parliament, but nothing came of it.