Early antibiotics?

Sulfa drugs came from the aniline dye industry in Germany, and could have been made substantially earlier. The basis of sulfa drugs was first synthesized and had it been tested as an antibacterial, or found out accidentally (like penicillin) it would have in use before 1910. You could even push it up sooner if this synthesis had been tried sooner, certainly possible. Absent ASBs the 1880s/1890s are the soonest you could see this as you need both the germ theory/bacteriology and the aniline dye industry to see sulfa drugs. Penicillin, being an "accident" can theoretically anytime, but since the accident happened in a petri dish growing bacteria, you need the germ theory/bacteriology first.

Folk medicines like putting moldy bread on wounds don't really qualify - not all molds will produce "penicillin" or other natural antibiotics, nor will any such be present in adequate amounts.
 

Jerry Kraus

Banned
Can we turn this into an early development of antibiotics? Given some proof of battlefield efficacy, maybe we knock 15-20 years off of the OTL development timeline and have them available for alt-WWI or earlier?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dinwiddie

Actually, people had known about Penicillin mold and its antibiotic properties from the dawn of time. The "Ice-Man" Otzi, was found with penicillin mold in his pouch, when he died 5,000 years ago in Switzerland. Casanova used penicillin mold to treat his syphilis, as he tells us in his memoirs.

So, what you're really talking about is mass production of chemically extracted Penicillin. So, the related technologies are mass production, and chemical extraction, both of which had been fairly advanced, for decades. Certainly, if anyone had really been interested, antibiotics could have been developed during the First World War, rather than the Second World War. Much earlier than that, and, we don't really have microscopes good enough to see the related bacteria, so, scientific development of a systematic type seems unlikely. Seeing is believing, you know. One of the problems with much of nuclear physics is that we simply can't build microscopes to look inside the atom, for example.
 

Ak-84

Banned
Well, Sir John Scott Burdon-Sanderson reported in 1871 that Penicillium inhibited the growth of bacteria, based on studies with culture fluid.
And that meant fuck all. As did Fleming's findings. The method by which Penicillin was converted from a lab curiosity to a medicine which was efficacious and could be administered safely, required the resources of the planet's richest nations and millions of human guinea pigs who were available. It still took years.
 
There are basically two types of antibiotics: those which are purely chemically derived, like sulfa drugs, and those which are derived from natural precursors like penicillin. With the second type, once the basic form is discovered and found to be efficacious, you have further "synthetic" manipulation to see if this or that change to the basic structure is better but the start point still comes from some natural product. Antibiotics which are synthesized from the get-go are easier to produce is mass quantities with more basic technology, the development of penicillin commercially being an example of the difficulties. As I posted before using bread mold is a folk remedy that is hit or miss on many levels.

FWIW the first "antibiotic" was Ehrlich's Salvarsan, which was an arsenical used to treat syphilis (Treponema Pallidum) in the first decade of the 20th century.

The technology to manufacture sulfa drugs or Salvarsan is simply not there before around 1880 at the earliest, and unless you have bacteriology there is no way to see what works by doing lab experiments, let alone a rationale for making these drugs.
 
Even without antibiotics, presumably knowledge of bacterial infection would have some effects on things like sterilization and hygienic practices, no? Although I know that there's evidence of quite involved medieval surgeries where the patients survived.
 
Actually, people had known about Penicillin mold and its antibiotic properties from the dawn of time. The "Ice-Man" Otzi, was found with penicillin mold in his pouch, when he died 5,000 years ago (......)

Yep. But unlike most "mold" cures the Nubian tetracycline brewing process was as controlled, concentrated as we got before penicillin or sulfa drugs in modern times. The article explains it in more detail. That what I found so interesting compared to lucky examples like Casanova, who had to hope that they got a decent mold and even than they were one shot happy accidents.
 
Prior to the 1867 article in the Lancet (journal of the British Medical Association) where Lister described success with several (seven I recall) case of open tibial fractures treated with antiseptic technique (dilute carbolic acid) and no infection combined with the Pasteur experiments with bacteria, sterilization and even "normal" cleanliness procedures were simply not done. There had been some experimentation and thinking about substances applied locally to prevent infection, "cleanliness" was seen as a good thing. True sterilization, and the sorts of hygiene/cleanliness we think of was not a thing.

Antiseptic and later aseptic technique began to be developed in the late 1860s, and by the late 19th/early 20th centuries was the norm. These procedures significantly reduced infections from surgery/wounding.

Certainly you had people surviving major wounds/surgeries long before antiseptic technique, before anesthesia (1840s) as far back as we have recorded accounts of medicine. Most did not, and it was not until the mid/latter 19th century that the idea that infection was a part of normal wound healing was put aside. There is documentation that often a wound healing clean and dry was seen as abnormal and was manipulated until the appearance of "laudable pus".

If you look at the herbal and other folk remedies that are well documented, it becomes blindingly obvious that the vast majority were at best harmless, and many were either dangerous or downright harmful. One example of helpful is the use of foxglove for dropsy - foxglove contains digitalis, dropsy is heart failure. The problem is not everything that was diagnosed as dropsy was heart failure, so digitalis was either useless or dangerous, and also the dosage given would depend on exactly each plant and how it was dried so even if appropriate the dosage could be too little or fatal.
 
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