Thirty years of penicillin therapy

Three decades have passed since the publication in the Lancet (Abraham et al. 1941) of the paper by our group at Oxford in which it was, for the first time, reported that the mould metabolite penicillin exhibited remarkable chemotherapeutic effects in clinical bacterial infections, including those caused by Staphylococcus aureus, against which no member of the only then known group of antibacterials possessing in vivo chemotherapeutic activity, the sulphonamides, was fully effective. A year earlier, in 1940, we had published, also in the Lancet (Chain et al. 1940), our first paper on the chemotherapeutic power of penicillin in experimental bacterial infections in mice which was dramatic and of unprecedented magnitude. The introduction into clinical medicine of penicillin therapy and of the antibiotics therapy stemming from it has, by general consensus of opinion, completely revolutionized the treatment of bacterial infections in both man and animals, and rendered the large majority of them, including the most severe ones, amenable to successful therapeutic control.