On December 15,
1943, Lord Moran wrote these words in his diary:
"What will
they say if Winston slips through my hands before his job is finished?"
He added another
thought that revealed the burden he carried:
"Well, if I
am going to be shot at if things go wrong, I am going to use my own judgment to
prevent them from going wrong."
He did.
It was December,
and during a visit to North Africa, Winston Churchill had fallen gravely ill
with pneumonia. Today, antibiotics make pneumonia far less frightening than it
once was, but in 1943 it was often a death sentence, particularly for a
sixty-nine-year-old man already exhausted by the relentless demands of leading
Britain through the Second World War.
Churchill's
condition became so serious that his physicians feared he was dying. The public
was never told how critical his illness had become.
His chief
physician, Lord Moran, faced a decision unlike any he had encountered before.
Should he use
penicillin?
The drug had
shown extraordinary promise, but it remained experimental. Doctors were still
learning how to use it safely. Allergic reactions and other complications were
possible, and no one could predict how Churchill would respond.
If the treatment
failed, the consequences might reach far beyond one patient.
Churchill was
not merely another man lying in a hospital bed.
He was the
wartime leader of Great Britain.
Lord Moran
understood that if Winston Churchill died under his care, history itself might
take a different course.
He made his
decision.
Churchill would
receive the newly developed antibiotic.
Within days, the
Prime Minister began to recover. Before long, he had made a full recovery.
It was a
remarkable demonstration of penicillin's life-saving potential—and perhaps one
of the most consequential medical decisions of the twentieth century. Had
Churchill died in December 1943, the course of the war, and perhaps the shape
of the modern world, might have been very different.
Ironically, the
story had begun fifteen years earlier in an untidy laboratory.
In 1928,
Alexander Fleming noticed something curious. A mold had accidentally
contaminated one of his bacterial cultures. Instead of ruining the experiment,
the mold had destroyed the surrounding bacteria while leaving those farther
away untouched.
Fleming
identified the mold as Penicillium notatum and named the antibacterial
substance it produced penicillin.
It was a
remarkable discovery.
But discoveries
alone rarely change the world.
For the next
twelve years, penicillin remained more scientific curiosity than practical
medicine. It wasn't until Howard Florey, Ernst Boris Chain, and Norman Heatley
developed methods to purify and mass-produce the drug that its extraordinary
potential could finally be realized.
Even then,
supplies were scarce.
In late 1943,
penicillin was still precious, difficult to produce, and unavailable to most
patients. Using it on Britain's Prime Minister was both a medical gamble and a
calculated act of faith.
History often
turns on battles, speeches, and political decisions.
Occasionally, it
turns on the judgment of a single physician standing beside a sick man's bed.
On a December
day in 1943, the future may well have rested in the tip of a syringe.
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