*George Orwell, Traces on Letter Suggest He Caught TB From Spanish Hospital
"Traces On George Orwell Letter Suggest He Caught TB From Spanish Hospital," The Guardian, July 31, 2018.
- Scientist claims it is likely that the illness that killed the novelist was contracted after he was wounded in the Spanish civil war.-
- Passport photo of Orwell taken during his early years in Burma.
Scientific tests carried out on a letter sent by George Orwell shortly after his return from the Spanish civil war have suggested he may have caught the tuberculosis that killed him in a Spanish hospital. The letter, written after the author came home from fighting against Franco’s fascist uprising in July 1937, was sent by Orwell to Sergey Dinamov, the editor of the Soviet journal Foreign Literature.
It was tested by Gleb Zilberstein, a scientist who has previously identified traces of kidney disease on the manuscript of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Although it is well known that Orwell died from a haemorrhage caused by tuberculosis, it has not been clear where he caught it. Zilberstein used acetate film to extract traces of bacteria and morphine from the letter. He and his team checked the bacteria’s characteristics against medical registration records in the archives for those who fought against Spanish fascism. He told the Times that the similarities suggest Orwell could have caught tuberculosis while in a Spanish hospital. Orwell had been hospitalised in Spain after being hit by a bullet in his neck.
“The level of infection was very high and the [hygiene standards of] hospitals were very poor,” Zilberstein told the Times. “The civil war in Spain was the last war in the 20th century without penicillin. Most wounded people got infections in hospital in Spain and mortality was higher from infections. Orwell got TB at a period of the civil war when there was a higher probability of hospital infections.” According to Zilberstein, there is a “very high probability” that Orwell was infected during his treatment in the hospital, although he said it could have been from contaminated food. The morphine traces are likely to have been from the painkillers Orwell used in hospital.
Orwell’s biographer DJ Taylor told the paper it “wouldn’t surprise me at all” if Zilberstein was right, adding that the author had suffered from ill health for his whole life after being born with defective bronchial tubes in 1903, getting dengue fever in Burma in the 20s, and several bouts of pneumonia in the 30s. “In early 1938, he was so bad that he had to be taken off in an ambulance – terrible haemorrhaging and that kind of thing. He took ages to recover.”...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/31/traces-on-george-orwell-letter-suggest-he-caught-tb-from-spanish-hospital
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/george-orwell-killed-by-civil-war-he-survived-36g90h5fb
= new reply since forum marked as read
Last edited Tue Jul 31, 2018, 07:48 PM - Edit history (1)
"The Real Story Behind Penicillin," PBS Health, Sep 27, 2013. The discovery of penicillin, one of the world’s first antibiotics, marks a true turning point in human history — when doctors finally had a tool that could completely cure their patients of deadly infectious diseases. Penicillin was discovered in London in September of 1928. As the story goes, Dr. Alexander Fleming, the bacteriologist on duty at St. Mary’s Hospital, returned from a summer vacation in Scotland to find a messy lab bench and a good deal more. Upon examining some colonies of Staphylococcus aureus, Dr. Fleming noted that a mold called Penicillium notatum had contaminated his Petri dishes. After carefully placing the dishes under his microscope, he was amazed to find that the mold prevented the normal growth of the staphylococci.
- Sir Alexander Fleming (1881 – 1955), studying a test tube culture with a hand lens.
It took Fleming a few more weeks to grow enough of the persnickety mold so that he was able to confirm his findings. His conclusions turned out to be phenomenal: there was some factor in the Penicillium mold that not only inhibited the growth of the bacteria but, more important, might be harnessed to combat infectious diseases. As Dr. Fleming famously wrote about that red-letter date: “When I woke up just after dawn on Sept. 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did.”
Fourteen years later, in March 1942, Anne Miller became the first civilian patient to be successfully treated with penicillin, lying near death at New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, after miscarrying and developing an infection that led to blood poisoning. But there is much more to this historic sequence of events.
Actually, Fleming had neither the laboratory resources at St. Mary’s nor the chemistry background to take the next giant steps of isolating the active ingredient of the penicillium mold juice, purifying it, figuring out which germs it was effective against, and how to use it. That task fell to Dr. Howard Florey, a professor of pathology who was director of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University. He was a master at extracting research grants from tight-fisted bureaucrats and an absolute wizard at administering a large laboratory filled with talented but quirky scientists.
This landmark work began in 1938 when Florey, who had long been interested in the ways that bacteria and mold naturally kill each other, came across Fleming’s paper on the penicillium mold while leafing through some back issues of The British Journal of Experimental Pathology. Soon after, Florey and his colleagues assembled in his well-stocked laboratory. They decided to unravel the science beneath what Fleming called penicillium’s ”antibacterial action.”...
In the summer of 1941, shortly before the United States entered World War II, Florey and Heatley flew to the United States, where they worked with American scientists in Peoria, Ill., to develop a means of mass producing what became known as the wonder drug. In the war, penicillin proved its mettle. Throughout history, the major killer in wars had been infection rather than battle injuries.
*In World War I, the death rate from bacterial pneumonia was 18 percent; in World War II, it fell, to less than 1 percent*.. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/the-real-story-behind-the-worlds-first-antibiotic
- A penicillin table at a US evacuation hospital in Luxembourg in 1945.
_______
~ George Orwell, like millions of other people just missed the use of penicillin, the new landmark medicine c. 1942.
