Plausibility Check: Early Penicillin

What could possibility be the earliest time penicilin or other forms of antibiotics could be discovered? My premise is for a TL that averts the Dark Ages, and instead we get a Renaissance-style boost in arts and sciences in a Roman/Persian Golden Age (still working out who ends up dominant based on events of the TL). While I doubt extraction of the compound with the precision of today is possible, could more rudimentary forms of anti-biotics be discovered?
 
Use of mold (of various sources, including bread and spider webs) stretches back into Antiquity, and may well be prehistoric.

The problem with that is that like most pre-modern medicine, it was treated as more an art than a science, and so there was no rigorous effort to isolate which kind of mold it was, how to grow it successfully, etc (I'm not even sure how many cultures would have realized that there's more than one kind of mold).

Developing penicillin as anything more than a particularly effective folk/traditional/alchemical/whatever medicine is that it requires three things:
-An understand of germ theory (that disease is caused by little animals, i.e. removing the animals can stop the disease)
-An ability to culture molds effectively
-Ideally, a formalized scientific method to isolate the correct mold.

Germ theory was proposed in the mid-16th Century and enjoyed a brief revival in the mid-18th century, but ultimately was not universally well-regarded until Pasteur in the mid-19th.
The formal cultivation of samples (including molds) OTL became widespread in England around the mid 19th century.
Most people like to say that the scientific method per se comes with Sir Francis Bacon in the late 16th/early 17th centuries (though the "scientification of medicine" wouldn't happen until well into the 19th).

So - we can push penicillin up through the late 19th century with absolutely no problems. Earlier than that? OTL, maybe a century or two earlier. The big bottleneck in my opinion is germ theory, since cultures stem from that fairly easily (though, I mean, cell culture isn't a very technically vexing technology - if you skimmed some milk, then boiled it, then made sure to keep the result clean and covered, that's not crazy far from a modern petri dish).

And there...well, aside from a few references of Galen to "fever spores", I don't think the Romans had anything germ theory-ish. OTL germ theory was the result of a stream of studies that ultimately began from the microscope, though (there's tiny animals, oh god, there's tiny animals everywhere, wait, there appears to be some sort of mechanism to transmit disease between people close to each other, maybe the diseases are transmitted by these tiny animals?)

So...I guess, make microscopes.

Romans could make clear glass, and there was certainly enough knowledge of lenses and optics to figure it out. OTL, microscopes followed from high-quality telescopes, which I think were driven by sea exploration (both for navigation by precise sightings of the stars, and for looking at land to find landmarks etc).

I mean, you don't need any of that to realize that mold sometimes stops wounds from festering, but you need all that in order to make it into a consistent, reliable treatment.

Also, do note that unlike vaccination which are done once for each person and require a needle and some pus, treating people with penicillin in this manner would require large amounts of cultured mold. Culturing the mold and keeping it uncontaminated is going to be...non-trivial before modern antiseptic techniques. This treatment is definitely going to be only for the wealthy, and may not even work all the time if culturing techniques aren't sophisticated enough to make sure the cultures are always pure and never contaminated with something nasty (or just something that looks like but isn't penicillin mold). Plus, not every bacteria responds to penicillin, and your medieval physicks aren't exactly going to know ahead of time which will and won't respond to treatment (hell, even modern doctors have trouble with this).

Also, let me be the first in this thread to remind you that "dark ages" is a major misnomer and that the period actually saw a great deal of development of every kind :p
 
But you don't need to understand why the mold works (ie, germ theory). You just need to understand that, most of the times, it works. There is also no reason to wait until the 16th century for a systematic study about the mold, or any other medicine. Have a king of a reasonably wealthy and stable petty kingdom instruct his healers to research and study what works, what doesn't and what makes it work better. If his healers are illetarate, have him order a copyst to write down the research.

So you need general healing knowledge, the general idea of what an encyclopedia is (so this petty King orders the writting of a "Catalogue of healing methods") and probably paper for keeping the knowledge. I don't see why a treaty on common remedies, including antibiotic fungus, can't be written over the course of, say 20-30 years, by the 2nd century. Making that knowledge stick and go beyond the petty kingdom's borders is another matter.
 
What I am interested is what equipment are necessary to extract the penicillin to be used in sufficient quantities.
 
Use of mold (of various sources, including bread and spider webs) stretches back into Antiquity, and may well be prehistoric.

The problem with that is that like most pre-modern medicine, it was treated as more an art than a science, and so there was no rigorous effort to isolate which kind of mold it was, how to grow it successfully, etc (I'm not even sure how many cultures would have realized that there's more than one kind of mold).

Developing penicillin as anything more than a particularly effective folk/traditional/alchemical/whatever medicine is that it requires three things:
-An understand of germ theory (that disease is caused by little animals, i.e. removing the animals can stop the disease)
-An ability to culture molds effectively
-Ideally, a formalized scientific method to isolate the correct mold.

Germ theory was proposed in the mid-16th Century and enjoyed a brief revival in the mid-18th century, but ultimately was not universally well-regarded until Pasteur in the mid-19th.
The formal cultivation of samples (including molds) OTL became widespread in England around the mid 19th century.
Most people like to say that the scientific method per se comes with Sir Francis Bacon in the late 16th/early 17th centuries (though the "scientification of medicine" wouldn't happen until well into the 19th).

So - we can push penicillin up through the late 19th century with absolutely no problems. Earlier than that? OTL, maybe a century or two earlier. The big bottleneck in my opinion is germ theory, since cultures stem from that fairly easily (though, I mean, cell culture isn't a very technically vexing technology - if you skimmed some milk, then boiled it, then made sure to keep the result clean and covered, that's not crazy far from a modern petri dish).

And there...well, aside from a few references of Galen to "fever spores", I don't think the Romans had anything germ theory-ish. OTL germ theory was the result of a stream of studies that ultimately began from the microscope, though (there's tiny animals, oh god, there's tiny animals everywhere, wait, there appears to be some sort of mechanism to transmit disease between people close to each other, maybe the diseases are transmitted by these tiny animals?)

So...I guess, make microscopes.

Romans could make clear glass, and there was certainly enough knowledge of lenses and optics to figure it out. OTL, microscopes followed from high-quality telescopes, which I think were driven by sea exploration (both for navigation by precise sightings of the stars, and for looking at land to find landmarks etc).

I mean, you don't need any of that to realize that mold sometimes stops wounds from festering, but you need all that in order to make it into a consistent, reliable treatment.

Also, do note that unlike vaccination which are done once for each person and require a needle and some pus, treating people with penicillin in this manner would require large amounts of cultured mold. Culturing the mold and keeping it uncontaminated is going to be...non-trivial before modern antiseptic techniques. This treatment is definitely going to be only for the wealthy, and may not even work all the time if culturing techniques aren't sophisticated enough to make sure the cultures are always pure and never contaminated with something nasty (or just something that looks like but isn't penicillin mold). Plus, not every bacteria responds to penicillin, and your medieval physicks aren't exactly going to know ahead of time which will and won't respond to treatment (hell, even modern doctors have trouble with this).

Also, let me be the first in this thread to remind you that "dark ages" is a major misnomer and that the period actually saw a great deal of development of every kind :p

Thanks for the feedback. As for the Dark Ages comment, I perfectly understand that. I meant more the period of not just political instability, but also the loss of written knowledge from said instability.
 
But you don't need to understand why the mold works (ie, germ theory). You just need to understand that, most of the times, it works. There is also no reason to wait until the 16th century for a systematic study about the mold, or any other medicine. Have a king of a reasonably wealthy and stable petty kingdom instruct his healers to research and study what works, what doesn't and what makes it work better. If his healers are illetarate, have him order a copyst to write down the research.

So you need general healing knowledge, the general idea of what an encyclopedia is (so this petty King orders the writting of a "Catalogue of healing methods") and probably paper for keeping the knowledge. I don't see why a treaty on common remedies, including antibiotic fungus, can't be written over the course of, say 20-30 years, by the 2nd century. Making that knowledge stick and go beyond the petty kingdom's borders is another matter.

You hit the nail on the head with your last sentence. As I noted, use of mold as an antiseptic is very old; the problem is that it never became the treatment for infection, due to the state and methods of medieval medicine.

You also need something like germ theory in order to get people to go from packing mold into wounds (sometimes) to having people with pneumonia eat large quantities of mold (and also understand why it sometimes doesn't work, without giving up hope entirely)
 
Romans could make clear glass, and there was certainly enough knowledge of lenses and optics to figure it out. OTL, microscopes followed from high-quality telescopes, which I think were driven by sea exploration (both for navigation by precise sightings of the stars, and for looking at land to find landmarks etc).

I mean, you don't need any of that to realize that mold sometimes stops wounds from festering, but you need all that in order to make it into a consistent, reliable treatment.

Telescopes could come...I was thinking of having an expedition southward along the African coast, which launches a Roman attempts at conquering the Sub-Sahara (which would fail, but the attempts would spur an exploration boom, including to India and China) and that could mean advanced telescopes. Then would come a microscope when someone realizes you can point it down at things too, with added refinement. I'm giving it about a century after the exploration boom for that, however, and several more years before someone comes up with germ theory (as an idea they may believe germs to be/servants of lemures). Once germ theory is in place, it has to have time to set in, and from there it has to have time to be experimented with, especially with culture-growing.

But you don't need to understand why the mold works (ie, germ theory). You just need to understand that, most of the times, it works. There is also no reason to wait until the 16th century for a systematic study about the mold, or any other medicine. Have a king of a reasonably wealthy and stable petty kingdom instruct his healers to research and study what works, what doesn't and what makes it work better. If his healers are illetarate, have him order a copyst to write down the research.

So you need general healing knowledge, the general idea of what an encyclopedia is (so this petty King orders the writting of a "Catalogue of healing methods") and probably paper for keeping the knowledge. I don't see why a treaty on common remedies, including antibiotic fungus, can't be written over the course of, say 20-30 years, by the 2nd century. Making that knowledge stick and go beyond the petty kingdom's borders is another matter.

Hence why I'm trying to do it in a realistic "Rome never falls" TL. In such a case, a study that gets patrician backing can make its way to the Roman intelligentsia, which then sees it spread across the Empire. When Rome does shrink and start to split (which is inevitable, but doesn't require Rome falling to conquest), successor states maintain the knowledge due to a lack of sacking of major cities, maintenance of trade routes, and more educated populace.
 
The use of mold as an antiseptic is for local/topical use. Not all molds are the same, and most do no good. While you could discover penicillin in the late 19th century and see how it affects bacteria, you then need to be able to grow the mold in large quantity and extract the active ingredient. This took a lot of research during WWII where at first if both Churchill and Roosevelt had pneumonia only one could be saved. Also urine of patients treated with penicillin was saved so excreted but not metabolized could be salvaged. Also intravenous therapy is needed...

Realistically you can't have reasonable use of penicillin until the late 19th/early 20th century.

This comment assumes things are as OTL. If you have some major POD that brings forward the scientific revolution, bacterial theory of disease, etc then of course this can be moved up a lot more.
 
My response in a different thread
One of the real problems with this sort of question is that taxonomy (of diseases, of higher organisms, of microbiota) was almost non-existent.

So.... 'Mouldy bread heals wounds'. Well, IF your bread has the right strain of Penicillium spp., and IF the infection is caused by a) bacterium and b) specifically a gram-positive bacterium, and IF you're lucky, THEN the wound heals. If any of those aren't the case, it won't. Or it may, just by chance.

The amount of penicillin produced by current strains of Penicillium organisms used today is several orders of magnitude greater than a random Penicillium strain in the wild. So, most mouldy bread will have no positive benefit.

Even if you breed mould on bread (and have fun doing that on a repeatable basis), the culture will get contaminated with other strains and other species, and may end up being ineffective.
 
Ha ha ha... no. Naturally penicillin can be applied to wounds, but it has no ability to be ingested orally. With an added gene to make a protein to modify the penicillin molecule (or simply take the natural version and sue chemical synthesis) we created penicillin V, which can be taken orally. Guess which form of administration saves more lives?
 
sigh: techniques to either chemically modify natural penicillin and/or to accelerate production REQUIRE science and technology simply not available until the 20th century, arguably towards the end of the 19th. Absent a POD that moves up this science and technology you'll never get more than "some moldy bread will keep wounds from getting infected, but which bread molds we don't know so put some on the wound and pray."
 
Short answer - yes. It took a while before OTL folks realized how this happened, so even if you have "science" earlier this will still happen.
 
sigh: techniques to either chemically modify natural penicillin and/or to accelerate production REQUIRE science and technology simply not available until the 20th century, arguably towards the end of the 19th. Absent a POD that moves up this science and technology you'll never get more than "some moldy bread will keep wounds from getting infected, but which bread molds we don't know so put some on the wound and pray."

I'll be honest sloreck, you're a tad late on the draw :p

The answer I essentially got from the thread was that germ theory, taxonomy, and microscopes need to be developed. Given I have a lasting Roman Empire in this scenario that has an exploration boom, I was going to have early rudimentary microscopes in around 1000-1100 AD, but nothing truly groundbreaking. Chemistry will get a boom, and early taxonomy and classification arising at around the same time. Germ Theory is theorized in around 900, but not truly proven in any capacity until 1400. Even then, "penicillin" is still far away, but growing of fungus and testing which works better begins occurring around that time as well. No synthesizing, but apothecaries could begin growing these types of mold specifically, having it on hand for wounds. Not anywhere near perfectly effective, but it would certainly help. I'm thinking basic extracting of "pure" penicillin from that mold could be discovered circa late 1700s, which is far more effective, but still requires allowing certain molds to grow on their own. In any case, this TL idea is on the backburner for now as I work on my current TL Nation On A Hill.
 
Let's see if what we can move up without touching the issue of technology -- which would cover aspects like microscopes -- and focus purely on what can be done with nothing more advanced than medieval level tools. The scientific method could be developed earlier; or such has been argued frequently before, with claims of others (like the Mohists, Strato, Alhazen, etc) coming close. From a scientific method, I can't see why it shouldn't be possible to develop germ theory, provided you get an enterprising physician willing to invent epidemiology (as John Snow did OTL).

Taxonomy, as such, could advance TTL by with just rigorous methodology; that said, I don't know how far mycology comes without microscopes or similarly advanced tech. And from there... I can't really say if cultivation is possible or not, or anything else needed to meet the OP.
 
Let's see if what we can move up without touching the issue of technology -- which would cover aspects like microscopes -- and focus purely on what can be done with nothing more advanced than medieval level tools. The scientific method could be developed earlier; or such has been argued frequently before, with claims of others (like the Mohists, Strato, Alhazen, etc) coming close. From a scientific method, I can't see why it shouldn't be possible to develop germ theory, provided you get an enterprising physician willing to invent epidemiology (as John Snow did OTL).

Taxonomy, as such, could advance TTL by with just rigorous methodology; that said, I don't know how far mycology comes without microscopes or similarly advanced tech. And from there... I can't really say if cultivation is possible or not, or anything else needed to meet the OP.

I like several of these ideas, although I should say that this isn't just medieval technology. With no proper collapse of Rome, trade ways and communication are maintained, and written knowledge isn't lost to any major extent; in fact, literacy remains on the rise due to increasing membership in "homo novus" and their projects, spreading of Roman knowledge to other regions of the world.
 
This essay is probably the most comprehensive source on a discussion of earlier penicillin on the web, I really recommend reading the whole thing. Here is just a short excerpt. It goes even more into the details especially about the use of early crude penicillin before mass production . I post it occasionaly but that is because I think should be renembered.

Crude Penicillin: Potential and Limitations
Grantville Gazette, Volume 10 by Kim Mackey

Most improvement of penicillin yields will come about through active experimentation. While corn steep liquor was a preferred medium for commercial production in the mid-twentieth century, there are other media just as good, if we assume lower levels of production in a seventeenth-century environment. For example, “an extract of ground dried peas at 10 percent concentration has been reported as a successful penicillin media . . . ” [10, 695] Another media from the same source was cottonseed meal. Still a third possible surface culture medium was “wheat bran moistened with an equal weight of water.” [8, 262].


It seems clear given the historical evidence, that an adequate medium for relatively large-scale (beyond small laboratory batches) production of crude penicillin will be found and utilized.

But obtaining the media for crude penicillin production is just one factor. Another will be obtaining the appropriate containers and manpower to produce the crude penicillin on a regular schedule. Another factor that will be important is some substance or substances that can act as an effective “biocide.”

In terms of an effective biocide, the most useful for penicillin production is borax. In a 1945 study done in Wisconsin, “37 different chemicals were tested for their ability to prevent the growth of contaminants and still allow penicillin production in contaminated shake flask fermentations. Of the chemicals tested, only borax and boric acid could be used at a level high enough to delay the growth of contaminants and still not interfere with penicillin production.” [8, 515]. The importance of this to 1632 is that borax was one of some twenty-seven common mineral substances used in medicinal or cosmetic recipes [11, 125]. While the most expensive mineral ingredient (2–3 guilders per pound), borax nevertheless was available throughout much of Europe. The amount necessary to prevent contamination of penicillin cultures is quite small, two-tenths of one percent. Since borax has other important uses however, as in the making of borosilicate glass, it is likely that resources in Tuscany will be developed fairly quickly, helping to drive down the price.
 
Top