When Was the First Antibiotic Used on a Patient?

Although Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin mould in 1928, it took over a decade to purify enough for human use. Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain at Oxford University developed methods to produce usable quantities. Their first patient, Albert Alexander, had developed life-threatening sepsis from a scratch on his face. Penicillin injections produced dramatic improvement within 24 hours, but supplies ran out after five days — they even extracted penicillin from his urine to recycle it — and Alexander relapsed and died on 15 March. By 1943, mass production was underway in the US, and penicillin saved thousands of Allied soldiers wounded in World War II. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Today, antibiotic resistance threatens to undo this miracle — the WHO calls it one of the biggest threats to global health.