The Almost Cure-All Urine of Albert Alexander

Hennig Brand, playing with pee, discovering the philosopher's stone.

Urine is useful.  The Latin poet Catullus mocked the Spanish for brushing their teeth with their own pee.  Drinking your mid-stream morning tinkle is recommended by some practitioners of yoga.  The Roman world collected piss to use for washing clothes--the ammonia would help bleach the coarse fibres.  And it was curiosity about the magical properties of wee which led Hennig Brand in the 17th Century to experiment with urine and so discover phosphorous.

None of this mattered for Albert Alexander, an Oxford County policeman who in 1941 was hospitalized with a severe infection resulting from an unfortunate rosebush scratch on his mouth.  He came down with vicious blood poisoning, and his face became so matted with weeping red abscesses that one of his eyes had to be removed.  The infection then spread to his lungs.  If he was not cured, he would die in writhing agony.  But the only cure at the time, the drugs called sulfonamides, were not effective with cases when the patient was as utterly suffused with pus as Alexander was.  He had no hope at all.

Enter Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, two scientists who had been experimenting with a drug that could very well become the magic bullet--the medicine that would destroy all infection.

To make the drug, they'd been culturing 500 liters of mold every week.  They hired three or four girls to grow the mold in every receptacle they could find--they used baths, bed pans, pie dishes, and even food trays, before finally settling on a purpose-made ceramic jar.

After successful trials on rats, Florey and Chain were finally ready to try the panacea on a human subject.  But they were concerned.  The drug was so strong it would probably reveal itself to be highly toxic to humans.  Would the cure be worse than the disease?

The mold was penicillin, and Albert Alexander was going to be the first person to be cured by it.

The magic mold itself.

On February 12th 1941, Florey injected Alexander with a large dose of penicillin, and the results were considered miraculous.  By the next morning Alexander's temperature had returned to normal and he had even regained his appetite.  He was cured!  But there was a problem.  To fight off the infection Alexander required an injection of about a gram of penicillin a day, and there just wasn't that much penicillin to go around, no matter how fastidiously the three or four 'penicillin grils' tended to their mold vats.

Enter urine.  The enterprising scientists collected Alexander's urine and processed it, retrieving whatever penicillin Alexander happened to piss out.  This was duly injected into Alexander again, and for nearly a week, his infection was beaten back.

But it was not beaten.  After five days, with their reserves of penicillin completely depleted and longer able to retrieve more penicillin from Alexander's urine, Alexander was left with his infection.  He succumbed to it on March 14th.

Albert Alexander did not die in vain.  His initial miraculous recovery was proof that penicillin actually worked in humans, and more--it proved non-toxic to people.  The next person to be treated with the magic bullet, a teenager whose temperature had shot up to almost 100 degrees as a result of an infected hip--was back to normal in two days.  A new era opened up in human history--one where we didn't ever have to worry about death from rose-thorn scratches.  In part, for this we have to thank that first brave medical guina pig, Albert Alexander, the constable from Oxford County who had an unfortunate pruning accident.

I heard about the case of Albert Alexander from Dr. Karl's Podcast.  My other sources are an interview with Norman Heatly on Science Watch, and the article the Discovery of Penicillin from the American Chemical Society.

A Pipe A Day Keeps The Plague Away

17th Century summers were seasons of plague.  Those rich enough to escape left the cities for the countryside.  Those who couldn't escape waited, fearful that soon they too would have to paint the tell-tale red cross of the plague on their doors, and watch their family be consumed by the pestilence.  Autumns sometimes fell with one in seven Londoners dead.

Bubonic plague, spread by fleas on the body of the black rat, is one of the most painful diseases observed on our sweltering earth.  Buboes--big pus-filled lumps--form around the lymph nodes in the neck, underarm and groin.  Sometimes they even explode.  Other symptoms range from fever to gangrene.

All the glories of 17th Century medicine were brought to cure the plague.  One of the most exciting panaceas touted at the time was a new miracle herb from the New World.  Think of it as the acai berry of the 17th Century.  It could cure migraines, toothache, worms, bad breath, cancer, lockjaw, and even poor fingernails.  Best of all--it tasted great!

Beloved diarest Samuel Pepys writes of prescribing himself the miracle cure after seeing a plague house:

This day, much against my Will, I did in Drury-lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and "Lord have mercy upon us" writ there - which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell to and chaw - which took away the apprehension.

Yes, you read right.  During the 17th Century tobacco was considered medicine of the highest potency.  Some students at Eton were punished for not smoking.

The idea wasn't as crazy as it sounded.  The best-educated doctors of the time believed that the plague was spread by bad air.  Accordingly a lot of preventative medicine had the same character as potpourri:  replace the bad smells with good ones.  Doctors carried poultices, herbs, vinegar and masks--all to reek away the bad air.  Tobacco smokers, cloaked in a billow of non-pestilent smoke, were thought to be especially protected from malodorous vapors.

The other cures for plague out to be as effective as smoking a bowlful of tobacco.  Plague was caused by fleas, not noxious odors, so even the most expensive pot pourri was completely ineffective.  The best thing you could do when plague season came?  Run.  Run far away.  And don't keep pet rats.

My inspiration for today's post is the fantastic Shakespeare's Restless World episode, Plagues and Playhouse.