"ONE OF THE GREAT OBSERVATIONS IN WESTERN MEDICINE": MEMORABLE ASSOCIATION COPY OF ALEXANDER FLEMING'S LANDMARK 1929 STUDY OF PENICILLIUM CULTURES

FLEMING, Alexander. On the Antibacterial Action of Cultures of a Penicillium, with Special Reference to Their Use in the Isolation of B. Influenzæ. IN: The British Journal of Experimental Pathology. Vol. X. No. 3. (pages 226-36, with one plate). London and Toronto: H.K. Lewis and Macmillan, June 1929. Slim quarto, modern black cloth, extract from The British Journal of Experimental Pathology. Vol. X. No. 3. (pages 226-36, with one plate).

First edition, from the journal issue (and thus virtually the earliest obtainable—only a few copies of the offprint are known), of Fleming's "On the Antibacterial Action of Cultures of a Penicillium…," the groundbreaking research that led to the development of the first antibiotic, an important association copy from the library of the renowned cardiologist Meyer Friedman, "an originator of the theory linking heart attacks to impatient, angry 'Type A' behavior" (New York Times).

"In September 1928 Fleming made one of the great observations in Western medicine. He had been working with staphylococcus—found in abscesses, boils and various other infections—and noticed that a mold of some kind was killing off the bacteria on one of the petri dishes in his laboratory. He subsequently performed experiments with the mold, which was (and remained) of unknown origin. He discovered it had some interesting properties. Notably, it was harmless to blood cells while killing bacteria more readily than carbolic acid. However, Fleming did not immediately recognize its therapeutic importance when he described the 'penicillin effect' and published his first results in 1929," in The British Journal of Experimental Pathology (Scientific 100, 456). Although in the paper Fleming suggested that the Penicillium mold's antibacterial properties might prove "an efficient antiseptic for application to, or injection into, areas infected with penicllin-sensitive microbes" (page 236), he "had to abandon clinical trials due to his inability to make a pure and stable preparation of the drug, and subsequently used the 'mold juice' primarily to isolate pencillin-insensitive bacteria. In 1940 Ernest Chain, Howard Florey and their co-workers succeeded in stabilizing and purifying the drug. Soon afterwards it began to be produced on a large scale at factories in the United States; it was responsible for saving innumerable lives during World War II. Fleming, Chain and Florey shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1945" (Norman 978). Only a few copies of the original author's offprint of this paper are known; this copy, disbound from the original journal issue is thus, for all practical purposes, the earliest obtainable version.
Garrison & Morton 1933. PMM 420a. Grolier One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine 96. Heirs of Hippocrates 2320. Milestones in Science and Technology, 94. From the library of Dr. Meyer Friedman with his bookplate. Dr. Friedman, along with fellow cardiologist Dr. Rosenman, originated the Type A theory of heart attacks. Their research "showed that people with Type A behavior were significantly more prone to heart attacks… Dr. Fuster, director of the cardiovascular institute at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and past president of the American Heart Association, said: 'He's the first one who gave a sense to the medical community that there was some relationship between personality and heart attack'" (New York Times).

A fine copy.