WI: Penicilin accidentally discovered in antiquity?

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 than Jin (which is also an excellent Japanese TV-Drama about an ISOT):

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.
 
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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.
 
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