- When Pasteur heard of his success, he was determined to make more discoveries as France had just embarrassingly lost the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-1
- 1887 began working on curing anthrax
- 1880 – work interrupted as he was asked to find a cure to chicken cholera
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Chamberland responsible for injecting chickens → left it uncovered and went on holiday → on his return injected the chickens but they didn’t die
- Attenuation – weakened by being exposed to air
- Used this knowledge and applied it anthrax... heated for eight days to make it weak
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Pouilly-le- fort, 5th May 1881 Mr Rossignol challenge – lots of media
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1882 Rabies - germs from dead rabbits – 6th July 1885 – untested – Joseph Meister .
- Koch 1890 TB – worked on animals only, pressured into releasing it by government, lost much of his credibility
Industry (technology) – MICROSCOPES and chemical dyes which helped Koch
War – Franco-Prussian 1870-1 – nationalism/patriotic →rivalry which pushed each other
Chance – Chamberland, discovery of attenuation/ Joseph Meister appearance
Individuals – Intelligent, persistent, determined + good public speakers
Communication – Koch heard of Pasteur – worldwide exposure
Research – Both had capable/researched teams
Paul Ehrlich & Gerhard Domagk
- Magic bullet – looked for dyes that killed microbes in 1889
- 1909 – Sahachiro Hata – Salversan 606 – repeated on hundreds of animals with syphilis
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Thick → painful to inject
- Condoned promiscuous lifestyles
- Inspired by Ehrlich - determined to find more cures
- 1935 – his daughter became ill with streptococcus – tried untested prontosil – worked
- Used to cure scarlet fever + puerperal fever
Penicillin
- 1928 - Fleming was cleaning Petri dishes... discovered a mould with no germs around it – tested on animals – no-one was prepared to help/give money - published his findings
- 1938, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain – read about his findings and successfully made small amounts of pure penicillin powder.
- In 1940 tested on first human, made recovery but there wasn’t enough and so he died
- However, Britain was in WWII and therefore chose not to fund them so he went to America where he was again initially rejected. But in December 1941 they agreed in an attempt to save soldiers.
- Mass production by British firm in 1943
- 1944, enough to supply all the allied forces
- 1945 – All three shared a Nobel Prize
Surgery
Anaesthetics - James Simpson
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4th November 1874, Simpson and two other doctors were testing different chemicals to find a better anaesthetic than ether
- Discovered chloroform and tested it on 50 patients before declaring it a success
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1853 – approved by Queen Victoria in childbirth of her 8th child Leopold
Opposition: 1. Some worried surgeons were too inexperienced
2. Confusion on how much to give + side effects (Hannah Green,1848, 15yrs for a minor operation)
3. Calvinist Church → women had to experience pain in childbirth (Bible)
4. The surgeon had total control of the patient
5. 1854, John Hall, Chief of medical staff – good to know if patient is alive and fight the pain
Infection – Joseph Lister
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1846 – 1870 Black period of surgery because surgeons were more confident as the patient wasn’t conscious → Performed operations they never would have previously →Many deaths
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1840 Ignaz Semmelweis noticed doctors went from handling dead people and delivering babies. Created a substance to wash hands with → widely rejected as the substance he made damaged the skin
- Joseph Lister, hearing about the germ theory, realised infection was killing his patients.
- Noticed operation room smelt like sewers and as carbolic acid was used there, decided to spray it in the operating theatre (doctors, patient, equipment). Soaked bandages in it
- Unpleasant for surgeons but in 1912 when he died mortality rates had plummeted