History
By Catherine Rose
Twentieth Century Medical Marvel The last century saw some incredible developments in the field of medicine, including the ongoing identification of viruses, the discovery of DNA and perhaps one of the most important of all, the invention of penicillin, an invaluable weapon in the fight against bacterial infections. The antibiotic era truly began eighty years ago in 1941, when the US developed widespread availability of penicillin. Although invented by Alexander Fleming in 1928, previously it had only been available in small batches. It seems hard to imagine a life without antibiotics now, but prior to its development people would routinely die from even minor bacterial infections. Antibiotics are produced from bacteria and fungi compounds that attack microbes, including other bacteria. But before Fleming’s discovery, human
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beings were already benefitting from antibiotics although they did not necessarily fully understand or appreciate why. Traces of Tetracycline, possibly absorbed through diet or natural remedies, have been found in the skeletons of the Nubian people in Sudan dating back as early as 330AD and the ancient Egyptians would place poultices made of mouldy bread onto infected wounds, demonstrating that they knew this helped curb infection and promote healing. In the late nineteenth century, a German physician named Paul Erlich noted that the newly invented chemical aniline dyes could stain and even destroy some bacteria but not others. This led him to believe that there must be chemical substances that could kill certain microbes while leaving others unharmed. He subsequently used a chemical called
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