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Major Modern Medical Discoveries - Coggle Diagram
Major Modern Medical Discoveries
magic bullets
robert koch's assistant, paul Ehrlich, found chemicals that would not only stain a specific type of bacteria, but kill it too!
erlich discovered a chemical cure for syphilis in 1909
the chemical cures were known as "magic bullets"
prontosil, a red chemical, worked against the germs that caused blood poisoning.
more magic bullets or "sulpha drugs" were developed to cure or control meningitis, pneumonia, and scarlet fever.
the first antibiotic
3: Fleming became determined to find a better way to treat infected wounds and conducted detailed experiments
4: in 1928 Fleming went on holiday and left several plates of staphylococcus germs on a bench in his laboratory ; when he came home , he noticed a large blob of mould in one of the dishes
2: during the first world war the bacteriologist Alexander Fleming had seen how soldiers were suffering from the ill effects of the staphylococcus germ
5: upon investigation, he noticed that the staphylococcus germs next to the mould had been killed
1:by the 1920s, the highly-resistant staphylococcus bacteria (which could cause food and blood poisoning) remained undefeated by any magic bullet
6: Fleming took a sample of the mould and found ait to be penicillin mould ; it appeared that a spore from this mould grown in a room below Flemings had floated up the stairs and into his laboratory
Alexander Fleming
Fleming realised the germ-killing capabilities of penicillin and published his findings that year.
Even though we know that today penicillin is an antibiotic, Fleming did not realise this and concluded that it was a natural antiseptic.
Fleming didn't inject penicillin into an infected animal, which would have shown that it could be used to kill infections. this would have sparked great interest in penicillin, and could have advanced its development.
as a result, few people regarded Flemings work as a major breakthrough and gradually even Fleming himself lost interest in it.
the development of penicillin
in the 1930s, researchers at oxford university read about penicillin's ability to kill germs.
scientists Florey and Chain successfully tested penicillin on 8 mice.
their next step was was to to use it on humans. over a brief period of months, they produced enough penicillin to use on a patient with a bad infection.
when the patient was injected with penicillin, the infection began to clear up. however, the patient died when the penicillin ran out
the next step was to work out how to mass produce masses of it.
how was penicillin mass manufactured
the second world war was a major factor in transforming the supply of penicillin because a steady supply of it was vital in treating soldiers with infected wounds
in June 1941, florey met with the us government who agreed to pay several huge chemical companies to make millions of gallons of it.
by the end of the war in 1945, Britain and the USA were working closely together and 250,000 soldiers were being treated. drug companies began using their production methods to make penicillin for public use as soon as the war ended.