×

The miracle of penicillin makes its way to Marquette in 1944

St. Luke’s Hospital, Marquette. (Marquette Regional History Center photo)

By ANN HILTON

FISHER

MRHC Volunteer

Special to the Journal

Recently a 97-year-old friend took a fall as she was leaving our house after dinner. As she was being stitched back together in the emergency room at UP Health System- Marquette, she told the doctor about a broken arm she got in a riding accident when she was a young woman. She explained that the head of the orthopedic clinic where she was working in Europe had put the arm back together with a number of screws and pins, but that an infection had set in and they all had to be removed and the wound cleaned out again. She said she might have lost the arm to the infection “but we had penicillin then.”

It may have been my imagination, but I could almost see the young doctor startle at the realization that he was treating a patient who remembered when penicillin first became available and it made me wonder when penicillin made its way to Marquette.

Like most school children, I knew how the London doctor Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin when he found a mold had invaded one of the Petri dishes where he had been culturing bacteria. But the path between that discovery, in 1928, to the widespread commercial availability of penicillin, was new to me.

It wasn’t until 10 years after Fleming’s discovery that a group of researchers at Oxford University, led by Doctors Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, began to aggressively pursue whether this discovery could really be used to treat disease. In 1940 an Oxford police constable who had developed severe infections after he scratched his face working in his rose garden, became the first person to be treated with a “purified penicillin.” Unfortunately, the researchers had not been able to grow enough of the antibiotic, and although the constable began to recover, he ultimately died from the infections.

In 1941 the effort to ramp up penicillin production came to the U.S., when Dr. Florey, and a biochemist in Florey’s lab, Dr. Norman Heatley, came to a U.S. Department of Agriculture research lab in Peoria, Illinois with briefcases containing freeze-dried penicillin spores (and more smeared in their coat pockets in case their briefcases were lost or taken). Within two weeks the Illinois lab was reproducing the molds and soon the War Production Board and the US Office of Scientific Research and Development were overseeing 21 factories and 57 research contracts. The effort was even helped by the discovery of a “super strain” of penicillin found on an overripe cantaloupe purchased at a fruit market near the Peoria lab.

The results on wartime casualties was remarkable. In World War I the death rate among soldiers who contracted pneumonia was 18%. In World War II it was less than 1%. An article by Andrew Carroll in American History Magazine sums up the effect on war:

“By June 1944, right in time for the D-Day landings at Normandy, drug companies were churning out an estimated 100 billion units of penicillin per month, enough for an estimated 40,000 U.S. and British combatants. Hitler’s forces had to rely on less effective sulfa drugs and, consequently, experienced higher fatality rates, more amputations and longer recovery times for injuries, diminishing their overall troop strength.

On and off the battlefield, penicillin cured an ever-expanding range of afflictions–pneumonia, strep throat, gas gangrene, septicemia, spinal meningitis, scarlet fever, puerperal sepsis, to name just a few–and with virtually no side effects, the new drug became as indispensable to the Allied war effort as any weapon.”

All this rapid increase in production meant that there was finally enough penicillin available for civilian use. An article in the Mining Journal on May 5, 1944 announced that the federal Office of Civilian Penicillin Distribution had designated St. Luke’s Hospital in Marquette as the “depot hospital” to receive the supply for the Upper Peninsula.

That month the hospital received 10,000,000 units of the drug, though a Mining Journal article announcing the first use in the U.P. on May 11th of that year cautioned that since 100,000 units were used for each dose, so it was still not to be used as a cure-all, but only for those cases where the sulfa drugs were ineffective.

Unfortunately, we don’t know much about who the first beneficiary of penicillin in the U.P. was or even what doctor administered the injection (oral penicillin did not become available until 1952).

But we know it was for a patient at St. Luke’s Hospital who had “a severe infection of the abdominal wall.”

My mother’s friend is doing well. No infections from her fall, so no need for an antibiotic. But how interesting to think that as she was telling us about the penicillin that saved her arm more than 70 years ago, we were sitting just around the corner from the site where the first person in the U.P. had been treated with the new miracle of penicillin.

To find out more about the region’s medical history, visit the Marquette Regional History Center’s special exhibit, The Changing Face of Medicine: A History of UP Healthcare, spanning from the time of patent medicines, home visits and the growing understanding of germs, to the St. Luke’s School of Nursing and beyond. Hear first-hand accounts from the people who have cared for this community’s health. Learn about the battles against epidemics, tuberculosis, polio, and an early case of kidney disease in which the community rallied to provide the financial support for the necessary yet expensive dialysis.

The exhibit is open until Dec. 31 and is included with regular museum admission.

Newsletter

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

I'm interested in (please check all that apply)
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper *
   

Starting at $4.62/week.

Subscribe Today