Hardly dueling Scots, though.
Fleming's Cheadle Prize winning medical essay "DIAGNOSIS OF ACUTE BACTERIAL INFECTIONS" (the only time I know of that he seriously engaged the subject of endocarditis) was written in 1909 and published in the ST MARYS HOSPITAL GAZETTE (volume15 , pages 67-69,72-77).
Most biographers of Fleming felt this early essay nevertheless set out the course of his life's work - which extended for another 45 years - so it is well worth a close reading.
Dawson confounded the essay's conclusions on intravenous injections to treat endocarditis in March 1942, with his first success in reducing bacterial colonies in endocarditis patient's blood.
Critics of vaccines said endocarditis's constant shedding of small amounts of bacteria directly into the bloodstream should lead to a natural immunity against them but instead actually only led to death.
Fleming dosed himself with a staphylococcic vaccine via an intravenous injection directly into the bloodstream.
(Staph was then a far less virulent bacteria than it is today.)
He lived, having only a slight headache and fever, but gained no increased resistance to staph.
Intravenous injections of vaccines gave maximum infectious effects and minimal increases in natural antibodies said Fleming.
Despite the fact that all of Fleming's considerable wealth came from his great skill in injecting the very dangerous drug Salvarsan directly into veins, he seemed dubious on 'systemic' or intravenous medications in general.
I think this is partially why he never tested penicillin as a systemic medicine in humans - or animals.
Not till 1940 did Dawson do so for humans and Florey for animals...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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