Treatments before penicillin

Treatments before penicillin

Public Health

An audio clip that describes medical treatments before the introduction of penicillin.

Public Health compilation on https://specialcollections.le.ac.uk/digital/collection/p15407coll1/id/547/rec/5

EMOHA

You may use this item in accordance with the licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

.mp3

English

Oral History

1 min 18 sec

Penicillin first appeared at the Infirmary about 1943, in the middle of the Second World War. But prior to that, we had the sulphonamides for four or five years and they were a great advance. They were not so effective, of course, as the antibiotics, which began with penicillin, but were a great advance on what we had before, because there was nothing before. And people who used to come in with sepsis or infected conditions of tissue, soft tissue or bone, sometimes were in hospital for months on end, especially for a condition of bone called osteomyelitis... which was not uncommon in young people that had bone injury, and some of those would be in 9-10 months. The bone was usually opened by a surgical operation in order to get at the pus, which was in the inside of the bone, and the bone was left open and the whole thing was laid open and just with daily dressings and irrigations until such time as it healed up.

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