The twentieth-century world, Year 11: penicillin and modern surgery (Health and the people option)

1928

HintThe year before the Wall Street Crash.

The whyHe had left the dish out while on holiday. He named the substance penicillin and wrote up what he had seen, but he could not purify it and moved on to other work.

Howard Florey and Ernst Chain

HintThey shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Fleming.

The whyTheir team purified enough to test it on a patient, a policeman named Albert Alexander, in 1941. He began to recover, but the supply ran out and he died.

The United States

HintBritish factories were busy with war work and under threat of bombing.

The whyFlorey travelled there in 1941 to ask for help. By D-Day in June 1944 there was enough to treat Allied casualties. It is an example of war and government speeding up a medical development.

The bacteria have evolved resistance to them

HintHeavy use gives the toughest survivors the chance to multiply.

The whyFleming himself warned of this in 1945. Strains such as MRSA no longer respond to some common antibiotics.

Thalidomide

HintThe disaster became public in 1961.

The whyIt was withdrawn in 1961. Britain then set up a committee to check the safety of new drugs, and testing rules were tightened in many countries. The growth of the drug industry brought new risks as well as new cures.

Harold Gillies

HintA New Zealander; a younger cousin carried the work on in the next war.

The whyShells and bullets caused terrible injuries to faces. Gillies developed new ways of moving skin from one part of the body to another, and kept careful records so that others could learn from them.

Archibald McIndoe

HintA cousin of the plastic surgery pioneer of the earlier war.

The whyHe improved the treatment of burns and paid attention to how his patients would cope with life afterwards, encouraging them to go out into the town and be seen.

Blood groups

HintIt explained why some transfusions killed the patient.

The whyBefore this, transfusions often killed the patient, because blood of the wrong type makes the cells clump together. Matching donor to patient solved one problem; storing blood was the next.

It stopped the blood clotting, so it could be stored

HintOutside the body, it soon sets solid.

The whyUntil then the donor had to be present beside the patient. Stored blood could be taken to where the wounded were, and the first blood depots were set up for the army in France in 1917.

Wilhelm Röntgen

HintA German physicist.

The whyTheir use in medicine was seen almost at once. In the First World War, Marie Curie developed mobile X-ray units that served hospitals close to the battlefield.

1967

HintTwo years before the first Moon landing.

The whyThe operation took place in Cape Town, South Africa. The patient lived for eighteen days. The great obstacle was rejection of the new organ by the body, which better drugs later helped to control.