C.G. Paine and the earliest surviving clinical records of penicillin therapy.

INTRODUCTION In August 1940, the Oxford team, which included Chain and Florey, made a preliminary announcement in the Lancet' of their successful development of penicillin into a partially purified preparation of reliable activity, which could be given by injection. They gave case histories to illustrate their success in a full article in the following year.2 Eleven years before these important announcements, in 1929, Fleming3 had published details of his fundamental discovery of penicillin as an antibacterial agent, but in the meantime the therapeutic potential of penicillin had not been much pursued, by himself or by anyone else. But, as this paper shows, penicillin was used therapeutically and successfully, as a local application, as early as 1930. Three claims that penicillin had been used effectively on patients around that time have arisen from work by Fleming himself, C.G. Paine, and A. Dickson Wright, but until now no claim has been substantiated by documented clinical notes. When the journalist David Masters interviewed Professor Florey with a view to writing a book on penicillin,4 Florey recalled that some early work on penicillin had been undertaken in Sheffield by a young hospital pathologist, Dr C.G. Paine, whose own words were later quoted by Florey in a book on antibiotics written by the Oxford team.5 Although he later rued the fact, Paine never submitted for publication the work he had done on penicillin in 1930-31, but his significant part in the penicillin story is now being related in greater detail than hitherto, together with his own recent comments on the subject.