But when it searched for scientific articles using the term "lifesaving antibiotics", we got 373 articles.
So Martin Henry Dawson and his tiny pioneering penicillin team always sold themselves terribly short.
Yes, a thousand times yes, they were the very first outside the UK to use penicillin clinically , as they claimed.
But that was only after it had been used many times clinically in the UK - as penicillin-the-antiseptic - in the dozen years since its discovery. So ho hum.
(Those cures included some simply amazing (but not life-saving) cases - that were never ever published and publicized.)
But what no one in the Uk, no one on earth , no one in history in fact had ever done, was use it as penicillin-the-antibiotic.
That is, use penicillin as a life-saving systemic medicine, one that is applied internally by pill or needle, to flow throughout the entire body to fight microbe diseases that were active throughout the body and hence were capable of threatening the patient's life.
75 years of Lifesaving : world's first penicillin shots , Manhattan Oct 16 1940
That is what Dawson did that is so historically unique - to dare to give the first penicillin shots --- 12 wasted years after it was first discovered.
He largely failed to have any medical affect with systemic penicillin on his first go at it (because he took on the very gold standard of incurable infections, SBE) but he was still eager to talk about those failures publicly.
Pfizer and the world only heard about penicillin because Dawson was more willing to talk about his failures than all the Limeys were willing to talk about their successes.
If only the Brits had done their jobs as doctors properly , Dawson won't have needed to step in the breech - when he was needed ...
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