on this cheat sheet
Everything on the GCSE History Antibiotics and War: Penicillin and Wartime Medicine poster is written out below, section by section. Use it to search the sheet, copy parts into your own notes, or check a fact quickly.
Two forces drove medicine forward in the 20th century: the first antibiotic, penicillin, and the pressure of two world wars, which pushed surgery, blood transfusion and the care of the mind.
Fleming discovers penicillin
- In 1928 Alexander Fleming noticed by chance that a mould, Penicillium, had killed the bacteria growing on a dish he had left out.
- He saw that it destroyed harmful bacteria without harming the body, and named the substance penicillin.
- But he could not purify it or make it in useful amounts, so he gave up, and the discovery sat unused for over a decade.
Turning penicillin into a cure
- Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, at Oxford, worked out how to purify penicillin, treating infected mice in 1940 and a human patient in 1941.
- The first patient recovered at first but died when the supply ran out, showing how much was needed.
- Wartime demand for treating infected wounds pushed Britain and the USA to mass-produce penicillin from 1943, and Dorothy Hodgkin later mapped its chemical structure.
- It has saved huge numbers of lives, though overuse has since bred resistant bacteria, the "superbugs" that are hard to treat today.
War drives surgery: X-rays and blood
- The sheer scale of injury in the two world wars forced rapid medical progress.
- X-rays, discovered in 1895, were used to locate bullets and shrapnel, and Marie Curie brought mobile X-ray units to the front in the First World War.
- Blood transfusion became possible once blood groups were understood in 1901, and in the Second World War blood banks stored blood ready for the wounded.
War drives surgery: faces and minds
- Harold Gillies developed plastic surgery in the First World War to rebuild the shattered faces of soldiers.
- Archibald McIndoe went further in the Second World War, treating badly burned airmen, whose support group became the Guinea Pig Club.
- Shell shock was recognised as a real condition, and doctors such as William Rivers treated it with talking therapy rather than dismissing it as cowardice.