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appalachiablue

(42,903 posts)
Fri Sep 27, 2024, 04:59 PM Sep 27

The Greatest Scot, Alexander Fleming, Changed History - Discovered Penicillin, Antibiotic Resistance

By D-Day in 1944, enough penicillin had been produced to treat all the wounded of the Allied troops.

- Sir Alexander Scot, (Wiki, Ed). Fleming was knighted for his scientific achievements in 1944. In 1999, he was named in Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century. In 2002, he was chosen in the BBC's television poll for determining the 100 Greatest Britons, and in 2009, he was also voted 3rd "greatest Scot" in an opinion poll conducted by STV, behind only Robert Burns and William Wallace. --
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- Sept. 28, 1928 penicillin discovered. (2 mins).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin

- Sir Alexander Fleming FRS FRSE FRCS (6 Aug. 1881 – 11 March 1955) was a Scottish physician and microbiologist, best known for discovering the world's first broadly effective antibiotic substance, which he named penicillin. His discovery in 1928 of what was later named benzylpenicillin (or penicillin G) from the mould Penicillium rubens has been described as the "single greatest victory ever achieved over disease". For this discovery, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.
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Early life, education: Born 6 Aug. 1881 at Lochfield farm near Darvel, in Ayrshire, Scotland, Alexander Fleming was the 3rd of 4 children of farmer Hugh Fleming & Grace Stirling Morton, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer.

Hugh Fleming had 4 surviving children from his first marriage. He was 59 at the time of his second marriage to Grace, and died when Alexander was 7. Fleming went to Loudoun Moor School and Darvel School, and earned a 2-year scholarship to Kilmarnock Academy before moving to London, where he attended the Royal Polytechnic Institution. After working in a shipping office for 4 years, the 20-year-old Alexander Fleming inherited some money from an uncle, John Fleming. His elder brother, Tom, was already a physician and suggested to him that he should follow the same career, and so in 1903, the younger Alexander enrolled at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington (now part of Imperial College London); he qualified with an MBBS degree from the school with distinction in 1906.. In 1908, he gained a BSc degree with gold medal in bacteriology, and became a lecturer at St Mary's until 1914.

Commissioned lieutenant in 1914 and promoted captain in 1917, Fleming served throughout World War I in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and was Mentioned in Dispatches. He and many of his colleagues worked in battlefield hospitals at the Western Front in France.. Scientific contributions: Antiseptics. During World War I, Fleming with Leonard Colebrook and Sir Almroth Wright joined the war efforts and practically moved the entire Inoculation Dept. of St Mary's to the British military hospital at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Serving as a temporary lieutenant of the Royal Army Medical Corps, he witnessed the death of many soldiers from sepsis resulting from infected wounds. Antiseptics, which were used at the time to treat infected wounds, he observed, often worsened the injuries...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming
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