'Sorry. I was giving a hand to Charles Fletcher.'
Dr Fletcher was working at the Radcliffe Infirmary as a Nuffield research student. 'Today he's trying some penicillin for Florey on a patient,' David whispered.
This was clearly of greater interest to David than my wedding. 'I didn't know Florey had enough to treat a case,' I whispered back.
'He may not have enough, boy. The patient's pretty sick. He's a middle-aged policeman who's been in for a couple of months already, with staphylococcal septicaemia. All from a scratch at the angle of his mouth while pruning his rosebushes.'
'None of the sulphonamides touched it, I suppose?'
'Not a hope. By now, he's got abscesses everywhere, osteomyelitis of the head of his humerus, an abscess perforating his eye. So we're risking trying penicillin on him by intravenous drip. He wouldn't have lasted much longer, anyway.'
'You mean, you're not absolutely certain that penicillin itself is non-toxic to the human?' The organist paused and changed his tune. The congregation was shuffling and coughing.
'Fairly certain. Charles Fletcher tried it on a volunteer last Monday,' David informed me, still in a whisper. 'There was panic stations over that-she threw a temperature. Luckily, it turned out the effect of an impurity.' The organist broke off, playing a triumphant chord. My bride had arrived. We stood up. I realized that David had been working with his morning suit under his white coat. 'Florey's extracting the excreted penicillin from the patient's urine, of course,' he told me. 'Every drop helps. We have to rush the bottles across to the Dunn Labs.'
'How?'
'On the handlebars of my bicycle.'
I had to turn my attention to personal matters.
The policeman died, as Rosie had died. After five days they ran out of penicillin. A fortnight later Florey tried again, in a boy with an infected leg bone. 'It brought his temperature down to normal,' my wife told me in the small, awkward flat I had taken in north Oxford. 'Florey's going to concentrate on treating children.'
'That shows a nice humanitarian approach.'
'Oh, no. They need smaller doses.'
Between February and May, four more cases of overwhelming infection with the sulphonamide-defying staphylococcus were treated with penicillin at the Radcliffe. Three were children. One died. He had a brain infection which normally killed swiftly, but the post mortem (which my wife attended) showed that penicillin was killing off the germs. The others were cured of infected bones and infected urine. So was a labourer with a carbuncle.
The hospital did not hold its breath and look on admiringly. It was a busy place, everyone had his own work to do, and new drugs were always being tried and forgotten. Florey and the people in the Dunn Labs were anyway thought tedious academics, curers of mice and guinea-pigs, always an intrusive nuisance among the practical doctors. As the forgotten father of the mould, I was naturally interested that after 13 years in the lumber-room of science it might after all have a practical use-if Florey could produce enough of it. Apart from recovering penicillin from the patients' urine, every flask and syringe was carefully rinsed, while the Heath Robinson apparatus in the animal house was now complicated with milk churns, milk coolers and a discarded domestic bath-tub.
'A bronze letter-box comes into the process somewhere,' Florey explained to me when we met one evening in South Parks Road.
It was the end of June 1941 and the blitz had stopped-though Britain had by then lost more civilian dead than Servicemen. Hitler had turned on his Russian allies, exactly as Lamartine had foreseen. 'I've at last persuaded a little chemical firm in the East End to grow the mould, and send up the juice in more milk churns,' Florey imparted. 'We're getting to look like prosperous dairy farmers. But a single bomb any night could put an end to that contribution.'
Florey asked if I had read his penicillin paper in the recent Lancet. I nodded. It was not overinformative. Florey and Chain stated simply that after their work on Fleming's lysozyme, penicillin seemed promising to investigate. They described its purification as a stable brown powder, its killing various germs in the test-tube, and more significantly its saving the lives of twenty-five infected mice. The Lancet had added a short and tepid leading article.
'I suppose you realize that copy of the Lancet will be opened in Stockholm?' I could not prevent myself asking. 'The conscientious German intelligence service will snip out your article, and in a few days a translation will be sitting on Gerhard Domagk's desk in Wuppertal. If the Gestapo now feel they can trust him.'
'Perhaps we should have done everything in secrecy, but it's difficult,' Florey said resignedly. 'We'd no encouragement from the Government to hush our work up. If it comes to that, we've had precious little encouragement from the Government about anything. They seem to have lost all interest, since risking your life in France for it. I suppose they've plenty of other things to worry about.'
'Did publication of your paper produce any result?'
'Yes. Flem appeared in Oxford.'
'I heard he'd come up for the day. At least he's proved that he's alive.'
We had reached the Science Library at the top of South Parks Road. Florey was going to dine in Queen's, I was going home. I asked, 'Does Flem really think that penicillin has possibilities?'
'Oh, yes. He thinks it could oust the sulphonamides.'
'That's rather grandiose, isn't it?'
Florey cautiously made no reply.
'Is Flem bitter at all over your success with it?'
'I think he's envious that I've got Chain on my staff here. Chain discovered how to purify it only after so many chemists had failed. Raistrick, and so on. But you know, Jim, if Flem really had faith in his discovery in the 1920S, he'd have nagged the chemists, or searched for one with the right trick up his sleeve. After all, Flem wasn't working in some isolated lab in an attic He had all the resources of the Inoculation Department at St Mary's at his beck and call.'
'Don't forget Sir Almroth Wright couldn't stand chemists at any price.'
'Well, Wright was getting doddery by then,' Florey said realistically. 'Flan would have got his own way, if he'd pushed hard enough.'
'He missed the bus, as the late Chamberlain said about Hitler?'
'I hope I'm not being vain, but penicillin would be unknown today if I hadn't decided to reinvestigate it in 1938. That delay of ten years was perfectly inexcusable. Old Flem missed the significance of his own paper.'
We parted. As I walked home, a half-forgotten fact impishly tickled my memory. I looked out my signed copy of _The British Journal of Experimental Pathology_ containing Fleming's paper. I read again the list of editors. They included H. W. Florey. He had missed the significance of Fleming's paper, too.
30
The following morning I had a telephone call from Ainsley inviting me to dinner at his London club (clubland, like high table, was undaunted by the war). He had never before issued a social invitation, nor even offered me a drink. I wondered what was up.
Ainsley's club in St James's had the lower floor sandbagged, the roof blown off, and the front windows replaced by boarding. He led me to a small smoking-room in the rear, where an oval table stood with glasses and bottles. 'Most of the club servants have been called up,' he grumbled. 'So we help ourselves and sign for it. We're allowed one whisky a day, but a lot of the members cheat, particularly the ecclesiastical ones.' I asked for a glass of chablis. 'Thank God the wine committee had more sense than Chamberlain in 1939, and anticipated a long war.' He sniffed. 'I could swear that's a cigar. Someone must have found a box in the cellar.'
We sat down, inevitably discussing Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. 'Did you know that Hitler invaded Russia on exactly the same day as Napoleon?' Ainsley passed a hand over the bald patch of his grey head, a characteristic gesture. 'June 22, 1812 or 1941. Obviously, _plus зa change, plus c'est la mкme chose_ applies equally to megalomaniacs.'