Topical and local antiseptics versus life-saving antibiotics

When did 'the miracle of penicillin' , as opposed to just penicillin itself - really begin ?

If your life is in imminent danger from a massive bacterial infection your medical team may well use antibiotics topically (around the skin next to an opening in the skin) or locally (inside that opening).

But unless your doctors are criminally insane, they will not limit their use of antibiotics to these two methods.

Instead, their main weapon will be massive repeated doses of antibiotics given by needle (perhaps also by mouth).

Only by this method will the drug be able to travel quickly and thoroughly, via your bloodstream, to every single living cell in your body to engage any and all the offending bacteria all at once : a full-out , full-frontal attack.

So, to the public - and to all but pedantics in the medical world - giving 'antibiotics' without a qualifying adjective , really means the systemic (through the bloodstream to all the body) use of those drugs on human patients.

Penicillin had been occasionally used on patients for twelve years before that fateful October day in Manhattan - topically and locally with mixed results .

As well it had found use in hospital labs as a simple means to clear most regular oral bacteria from suspected samples of "flu" bacteria (sic).

But penicillin had never been used as an antibiotic (and nor had any other microbe-produced metabolite) in the common meaning of that word.

Not until Dr Martin Henry Dawson gave those first shots of hospital-grown penicillin to two young men dying of subacute bacterial endocarditis (the dreaded SBE) : October 16th 1940 , in Manhattan's CUMC (Columbia University Medical Centre) .

Thats when the miracle of penicillin truly began ....