The Early Days of Antibiotics

Abstract

Today most of us take antibiotics used in our everyday practice very much for granted. Few of us, indeed, have escaped being dosed with them at one time or another. Yet professionals of my generation, as nurses, medical students or doctors in the 1940's, will well remember our amazement at the seemingly miraculous recoveries we saw of desperately ill septic patients when Penicillin, dispensed in little ampoules of brown powder, first became generally available in civilian hospitals.