What if Penicillin is discovered in 1897?

What if Penicillin is discovered in 1897?
In 1897, Ernest Duchesene, a young French army doctor, how the Beduin stable boys at the army hospital, used mold helped to heal the saddle sores. He did research on the mold and discovered Penicillium glaucum. Sadly his thesis was rejected, he was after all a unknown army doctor. So what if his discovery was accepted and worked on?
Penicillium glaucum, is unlike the one discovered bye Fleming, effective against TB, one of the bigger killers in Europe, (one in six death in France was due to TB in 1918).

So a higher population in Europe, less deaths from WW1. This will have a large effect on France at least, other ideas?
 
What if Penicillin is discovered in 1897?
In 1897, Ernest Duchesene, a young French army doctor, how the Beduin stable boys at the army hospital, used mold helped to heal the saddle sores. He did research on the mold and discovered Penicillium glaucum. Sadly his thesis was rejected, he was after all a unknown army doctor. So what if his discovery was accepted and worked on?
Penicillium glaucum, is unlike the one discovered bye Fleming, effective against TB, one of the bigger killers in Europe, (one in six death in France was due to TB in 1918).

So a higher population in Europe, less deaths from WW1. This will have a large effect on France at least, other ideas?

Big kick to microbiology research! And probably an earlier discovery of viral transmission for others, when they see that this miracle drug doesn't cure everything.

One problem that will crop up much earlier is antibiotic resistant bacteria. It might be too much of a challenge for pre-1960s technology to keep up with bacterial strains with new varieties of antibiotics in a timely manner, alas. What's worse is that penicillin will probably be given out with even more wild abandon than it was historically, promoting far more rapid development of resistant disease-causing bacteria.

It would be good news for war-wounded though, on both sides. By 1914(-ish), the antibiotic technique is probably going to have spread around the world at that point.
 
So numbers for thought. Available calculations indicate that over 100,000 French persons died annually of consumption before 1914. Now that is for French alone.
 
What if Penicillin is discovered in 1897?
In 1897, Ernest Duchesene, a young French army doctor, how the Beduin stable boys at the army hospital, used mold helped to heal the saddle sores. He did research on the mold and discovered Penicillium glaucum. Sadly his thesis was rejected, he was after all a unknown army doctor. So what if his discovery was accepted and worked on?
Penicillium glaucum, is unlike the one discovered bye Fleming, effective against TB, one of the bigger killers in Europe, (one in six death in France was due to TB in 1918).

So a higher population in Europe, less deaths from WW1. This will have a large effect on France at least, other ideas?
We have several problems here.

1) according to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discov..._effects_of_penicillium_moulds_before_Fleming
it was typhoid, not TB that was curable

2) it was clearly not anything we today would call Penicillium glaucum. as that doesn't have the effect you want. (Although, what ever it was, it would be effective against typhoid, which would be useful in and of itself. What else it might be effective against, no one knows, as we don't have a clue what he had.)

3) to make Penicillin useful, it has to be grown in industrial quantities. WWII involved a lot of effort to do so. The mould this guy discovered might be far tougher to grow.

4) as someone else said, it would lead to faster antibiotic resistance.


Still, it could make a huge difference in WWI, even if you just have a pure culture of the right stuff that's rubbed on wounds. Could prevent a lot of gangrene, I'd think. It wouldn't be so useful as a pill, because of the industrial production problem, and the chemical modifications you need before you can get a usable oral penicillin (if that's what he had).

Would also encourage the investigation of other moulds...


THere were several massively missed opportunities in antibiotics, this was one.
 
i based this out of QI actually and not wiki, and according to that he did call it Penicillium glaucum, and WW1 could push for a more industrial production? No modern standards, but syringes maybe?
 
i based this out of QI actually and not wiki, and according to that he did call it Penicillium glaucum, and WW1 could push for a more industrial production? No modern standards, but syringes maybe?
Ja, but what he called it doesn't matter, as apparently P.glaucum was used as a wide catchment of various fungi. In particular, what we call P.glaucum doesn't have the properties he claimed.

Syringes? ?? what's that got to do with anything? Oh. The oral route problem. Ja, that's true. You could use syringes as long as you had a pure enough antibiotic.

The problem that was solved in WWII was a) finding an appropriate strain and b) figuring out how to grow hundreds (or thousands) of pounds of the fungus to get smallish amounts of the active antibiotic. a) involved a lot of work. b) was quite tough.
 
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