Added to your basket:
On the antibacterial Action of Cultures of a Penicillium, with special Reference to their Use in the Isolation of b. influenzae … Reprinted from The British Journal of Experimental Pathology, 1929, Vol X., p. 226.

Checkout now

Second edition of Fleming’s study announcing the discovery of penicillin, one of 250 copies which Fleming commissioned to be printed in 1944. The original offprint, issued in 1929 in 150 copies and liberally distributed by Fleming to the scientific community at large for the prompt furthering of much-needed research, is now virtually unobtainable.

In 1928, while working with culture plates of Staphylococcus bacteria at St Mary’s Hospital in London, Fleming noticed that some of his plates had become contaminated with a mould and that the bacterial colonies in contact with it had become transparent or dissolved. He reported his discovery in 1929 in a paper published in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology, naming the bactericidal substance ‘penicillin’ and proposing that an extract from it ‘may be an efficient antiseptic for application to, or injection into, areas infected with penicillin-sensitive microbes’. However, as the substance proved too intractably unstable and Fleming remained unable to produce a stable and reliable drug, the paper failed to achieve an immediate impact. Only over a decade later, in 1940, did Ernst Chain and Howard Florey succeed in stabilising the drug and prescribing dosages for treatment.

Provenance:
The virologist Fred Himmelweit (1902–1977), who fled Germany in 1933, ending up in London with a job at the Wright-Fleming Institute at Saint Mary’s Hospital, first under Sir Almroth Wright (1861–1947) and then under Fleming. There he studied viruses and the development of influenza vaccines, and eventually became director of the Department of Virus Research.

Norman 799. See Garrison-Morton 1933; Heirs of Hippocrates 2320; One hundred Books famous in Medicine 96; and PMM 420a.

You may also be interested in...

山本 讃七郎 YAMAMOTO, Sanshichiro.

Views of the North China Affair 北清事變寫真.

First and only edition, rare, of this ambitious photographic project published in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, with portraits of troops and soldiers, as well as architectural and landscape views in areas which were affected by the warfare.

Read more

SHANGHAI UNDER ATTACK AH FONG, photographer.

The Sino-Japanese Hostilities 1937.

Excellently preserved copy of this rare album of photographs documenting the bombing of Shanghai at the opening of the Second Sino-Japanese war, a haunting and moving visual record of what is considered by many to be the first battle of World War II.

Read more