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| 1945 Merck Advertisement: "Penicillin: A Notable Production Achievement" |
Inside was a glass vial that contained a precious substance—5.5 grams of an experimental brown powder known as penicillin—half the total amount available in the United States at the time.
Waiting for delivery at what is now the Yale New Haven Medical Center, a young woman named Anne Miller was close to death. Mrs. Miller was a nurse, a mother and the wife of Yale University's Athletic Director. She had become ill following a miscarriage and was taken to the hospital in February 1942. Over the next few weeks, her condition deteriorated. She had developed a streptococcal infection—a common killer in those days.
As Mrs. Miller's condition worsened and her family prayed for a miracle, her family physician, Dr. John Bumstead, felt as though he was running out of options. Without success, he had administered a number of medicines. But as February turned to mid-March, the effort seemed hopeless and Anne's family prepared for the worst.
A Fruitful Collaboration
Along with Anne Miller, Dr. Bumstead had what he and his physician colleagues considered to be somewhat of a celebrity patient under his care. Dr. John Fulton, Sterling Professor of Physiology at Yale Medical School, had also acquired a serious bacterial infection while visiting a lab in California that was researching and cultivating infectious bacteria.
Dr. Fulton had been working with several prominent researchers affiliated with the U.S. and British governments to better understand and treat bacterial infections. His friend and occasional house guest, Howard Florey, had devised a small-scale fermentation process for penicillin in the U.K. and was travelling between his homeland and the United States to encourage large-scale production on this side of the ocean.
Aware of the research around penicillin and of Dr. Fulton's connections in particular, Dr. Bumstead discussed the long and thus far fruitless efforts to treat Mrs. Miller - and the possible role that penicillin could play. Excited at the prospect of facilitating a clinical test for the experimental medicine, Dr. Fulton began working the phones from his hospital bed to track down and secure a few grams.
He found his way to Dr. Randolph Major, head of Merck's research labs in Rahway, N.J., where a small sample of penicillin had been successfully produced.
Because the war efforts around the globe had heightened the need for an antibiotic such as penicillin, Dr. Major felt that he lacked the authority to release the medicine to Drs. Fulton and Bumstead. After tracking down a number of people overseeing the penicillin effort for the National Research Council in Washington, D.C., Dr. Fulton finally secured the release of a few grams of penicillin.
When word of the approval reached Merck's lab in Rahway, little time was lost before a vial was filled, carefully wrapped in the small package and prepared for its trip a hundred miles northeast to New Haven.
By then, Mrs. Miller was becoming increasingly ill, with fevers spiking to nearly 107 degrees. By the morning of Saturday, March 14, 1942, Anne Miller was stepping in and out of consciousness. Her doctors felt that the end was only hours away.
When Dr. Bumstead finally had the package of penicillin in his hand he realized that he lacked any information about administration and dosing for the experimental drug. Because the medicine had never before been administered in the U.S., and only a handful of times in Britain, little was known about its use. As a result, Dr. Bumstead convened a brief meeting with a few of his colleagues to discuss the possibilities for administration. With the best guesses of the medical experts on dosing, Mrs. Miller received her first injection of penicillin at about 3:30 in the afternoon. Within four hours, her temperature dropped to 99 degrees; by 4 A.M. on Sunday morning, it was normal. With the help of penicillin, Anne Miller walked away from death and on to another 57 years of life.
The hospital chart plotting Mrs. Miller's temperature since entering the hospital had grown to resemble the trajectory of the best bull markets. By Sunday morning her chart looked more like the great market crash of 1929. Today, that chart resides in the Smithsonian Institution.
In the years since that first dose of penicillin left Merck's lab, countless people like Mrs. Miller have been able to live longer, healthier lives because of new and better medicines. It was only a short time before penicillin was supplemented by generations of new and more potent antibiotics that have represented dramatic advances in treating serious infections.
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