|
|
|
|
|
|
  |
The early days of antibiotics To the editor: I read with great interest John Curtis’ recent article on the first use of penicillin in this country [“Fulton, Penicillin and Chance,” Capsule, Fall 1999/Winter 2000]. It brought back memories of my own role in that event. Mrs. Miller was a private patient of Dr. John Bumstead in the old Isolation Building of the New Haven Hospital. As such she was under the direct care of Dr. Bumstead, assisted by the junior intern assigned to the isolation service. I was that low man on the house-staff totem pole. The more senior members of the house staff were not involved with the care of a private patient. I remember Dr. Bumstead giving me the small bottle of penicillin—a yellow powder—with instructions to take it over to Dr. Morris Tager’s laboratory in the bacteriology department of the medical school and dissolve it in saline solution and pass it through a Seitz filter. This removed bacteria but not viruses. I then returned to the patient’s bedside and under Dr. Bumstead’s supervision gave her 5,000 Oxford units of penicillin intravenously. This dose was repeated every four hours for the rest of her hospital stay. Mrs. Miller said she liked my “needlework” and Dr. Bumstead asked me to continue to give her the injections every four hours around the clock including days and nights when I was otherwise off duty. The intravenous route was chosen because, in our ignorance, we were afraid that intramuscular injections might cause a sterile abscess. As Mr. Curtis reported, all of Mrs. Miller’s urine was sent to Merck in Rahway, N.J., so that the penicillin could be recovered and returned to us in New Haven. After Mrs. Miller had recovered and was discharged, we had enough penicillin left to treat and cure a man with septicemia due to Staphylococcus aureus. Finally we had enough penicillin to start treating a young man with subacute bacterial endocarditis due to Streptococcus viridans. At that time this was a uniformly fatal disease. He improved, his blood cultures became sterile, but we ran out of penicillin completely and he relapsed and died. In the early 1970s the School of Medicine sponsored a documentary film on the first use of penicillin in this country at the New Haven Hospital. It featured an interview with Mrs. Miller and the film crew visited my office in Washington, D.C., and interviewed me regarding the events I described above. I was then chief of gastroenterology and clinical professor of medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine as well as in private practice. Thomas S.
Sappington Sr., M.D., HS ’45
Before penicillin, the sulfa drugs To the editor: Your story on the first use of penicillin bought back memories of another first use, an earlier one, that of the first sulfa drug, which I administered to patients when I was an intern at the New Haven Hospital during 1936-1937. The first sulfa drug was called Prontosil; it was a red liquid and was given by intravenous infusion. I cannot claim I was the first to use it, but it was the first sulfa drug and the first antibiotic that was available when I was on duty in the little isolation building next to the Fitkin pavilion. I doubt if anyone remembers whether there was an effective treatment for infectious disease before the first antibiotic, but it was available. If anyone wishes to pursue the question further, it is told in my story “Quellung,” which can be found in my Web page. The URL is http://www.azstarnet.com/~jerritt/remember.htm Jerome Ritter
M.D. ’36
Eyewitnesses to disaster To the editor: Thank you for the fine article about the circus fire of 1944 [“A Tragedy’s Medical Aftermath,” Capsule, Spring 2000]. My late husband’s (Albert S. Atwood, M.D. ’45) account of his classmates’ help with the disaster obviously stirred up many vivid memories. I was a student nurse at Hartford Hospital at the time. I recall how uncomfortable and helpless the victims of the fire were and how much care they needed from the staff. I am grateful that the medical students’ part in the tragedy was able to be told. Harriet Atwood
Other hands helped with healing To the editor: At the proper interval after the Hartford circus fire several of the house staff and perhaps a few fourth-year students spent several one-day trips back and forth to Hartford skin grafting the fire victims. I was one, as was Philip Brezina, Guido DeBlasio and probably Gervase Connor, who might have been an attending at the time. There were others whom I cannot remember. We hoped we did a service, but we certainly learned how to use the Padgett Dermatome. F.J. Lepreau,
M.D., HS ’40
Sorry to bug you To the editor: Oops! Someone pulled out the wrong slide. The image inside the cover of the spring 2000 issue of Yale Medicine is clearly that of a parasite belonging to the genus Trypanosoma, rather than Plasmodium. My guess is that it is either T. brucei gambiense or T. brucei rhodesiense, the causes of West African and East African trypanosomiasis respectively, although it could be Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiologic agent of Chagas disease. In any event, it’s not the cause of malaria as stated in the caption. Louis V. Kirchhoff,
M.D. ’77, M.P.H. ’77 Thanks to
Dr. Kirchhoff for spotting the error. The image in question shows
not a malaria-causing agent, but a member of the Trypanosoma genus.
T. Brucei brucei, which is carried by tsetse flies and
causes sleeping sickness. |
