The use of micro-organisms for therapeutic purposes.
Year: 1946
Type: article
Abstract: So much has been written and talked about penicillin, that I feel I am in serious danger of becoming like some other Australian birds-they sing perfectly a short series of notes, but repeat them so often that they become rather boring. So today I thought it might be more interesting to put before you an account of some of the work on the use in medicine of naturally occurring antibacterial substances. There are still many misapprehensions on this subject, and it is one of the fields in which some historical information is of help in the orientation of one's ideas at the present time. The use of the products of moulds for therapeutic purposes goes back to primitive medicine; there is good evidence that green moulds were especially cultivated in Central Europe for application to wounds, and there is also some evidence that the Mayans in Yucatan cultivated a mould that was called cuxum which was used in medicine, though undoubtedly the Mexicans go too far in claiming that the Mayans discovered penicillin. I have also come across the use of one of the field fungi, a sort of puffball, which was used by one of the Indian tribes in Brazil. It was as long ago as 1852 that the first record of the use of a micro-organism appeared in The Lancet-from a British general practitioner named Mosse.2 " He proposed to use yeast as a treatment for furunculosis. I need hardly say that it is still a popular treatment among some, although yeast has never been clearly shown to produce an antibacterial substance, and if there is any therapeutic benefit from its use, it is probably attributable to something else, possibly the vitamin content. In 1877 Pasteur and Joubert wrote the following, based on some of their experiments:32 Neutral or slightly alkaline urine is an excellent medium for the bacteria. If the urine is sterile and the culture pure the bacteria multiply so fast that in the course of a few hours their filaments fill the fluid with a downy felt.
Source: PubMed Central
Author: H W FLOREY
Language: English
Subfield: Food Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2277122287