Fevered nurse is saved by penicillin to become first of many millions
Anne Miller was dying. On an isolation ward at New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, the 33-year-old nurse was losing the fight against a streptococcal infection that had invaded her bloodstream after a miscarriage, leaving her unconscious and battling a fever.
She had been hospitalised for a month, often delirious, with her temperature reaching nearly 107 ˚ F.
Doctors had tried everything to cure her, including antibiotics, a blood transfusion, a hysterectomy – even rattlesnake serum.
Her obstetrician, Orvan Hess, was so concerned he called on a colleague,
Dr John Bumstead, for advice. While waiting for Bumstead, Hess read a Reader’s Digest article on the use of bacteria to kill streptococcal infections in animals. What happened next was a remarkable series of coincidences and good luck.
Hess mentioned the article to Bumstead, who told him to speak to another patient at the hospital, Dr John Fulton, who had attended Oxford University with Howard Florey, a researcher who was working to develop penicillin as a treatment for humans.
Penicillin had been discovered by Scot Alexander Fleming at St Mary’s Hospital in London in 1928 but its development was slow, being difficult and expensive to extract from its original mould source.
Nearly a dozen years passed before scientists fully appreciated its significance and were able to produce it for experimental use in humans.
Largely forgotten, it came to the fore only when researchers, including Florey, picked up on it again at Oxford University at the outbreak of the Second World War.
A few early test patients in England had died after seeming to recover because there wasn’t enough of the drug to complete the course of medicine.
When German planes bombed London, Florey sent his children to New Haven to live with the Fultons. Florey followed two years later and Fulton helped him secure support for the production of penicillin, impossible in wartime England.
Hess used Fulton’s connection to get the US Government – which had tight control over key medicines during wartime – to release roughly a tablespoon of penicillin for his patient. It was a full half of the entire store of the antibiotic in the whole US.
On March 14, 1942, Miller was given the penicillin. Her hospital chart, now at the Smithsonian Institution, registered a sharp overnight drop in temperature, and by the next day she was no longer delirious and soon was eating full meals.
The small quantity of penicillin came from a laboratory in New Jersey, and news of her full, seemingly miraculous recovery helped inspire the American pharmaceutical industry to begin full production of penicillin.
Miller’s life was saved, and so eventually were the lives of all those previously felled by infections of bacteria like streptococci, staphylococci and pneumococci.
Penicillin also saved the lives of an untold number of servicemen and civilians wounded in the Second World War; in earlier wars, people died by the thousands from infections from their injuries.
Miller lived for another 57 years, dying at the age of 90 in 1999.