This gentleman's work keeps coming up in a lot of what I have been reading lately, so when I came across a file that I could break down into parts to add to the collection of books here I did so. It seems electricity is one of those 'things', they just don't want everyone looking into....

..I remember how it was before penicillin. I was a medical student at the end of World War II, before the drug became widely available for civilian use, and I watched the wards at New York's Bellevue Hospital fill to overflowing each winter. A veritable Byzantine city unto itself, Bellevue sprawled over four city blocks, its smelly, antiquated buildings jammed together at odd angles and interconnected by a rabbit warren of underground tunnels. In wartime New York, swollen with workers, sailors, soldiers, drunks, refugees, and their diseases from all over the world, it was perhaps the place to get an all-inclusive medical education. Bellevue's charter decreed that, no matter how full it was, every patient who needed hospitalization had to be admitted. As a result, beds were packed together side by side, first in the aisles, then out into the corridor. A ward was closed only when it was physically impossible to get another bed out of the elevator.

Most of these patients had lobar (pneumococcal) pneumonia. It didn't take long to develop; the bacteria multiplied unchecked, spilling over from the lungs into the bloodstream, and within three to five days of the first symptom the crisis came. The fever rose to 104 or 105 degrees Fahrenheit and delirium set in. At that point we had two signs to go by: If the skin remained hot and dry, the victim would die; sweating meant the patient would pull through. Although sulfa drugs often were effective against the milder pneumonias, the outcome in severe lobar pneumonia still depended solely on the struggle between the infection and the patient's own resistance. Confident in my new medical knowledge, I was horrified to find that we were powerless to change the course of this infection in any way.

It's hard for anyone who hasn't lived through the transition to realize the change that penicillin wrought. A disease with a mortality rate near 50 percent, that killed almost a hundred thousand Americans each year, that struck rich as well as poor and young as well as old, and against which we'd had no defense, could suddenly be cured without fail in a few hours by a pinch of white powder. Most doctors who have graduated since 1950 have never even seen pneumococcal pneumonia in crisis.

Although penicillin's impact on medical practice was profound, its impact on the philosophy of medicine was even greater. When Alexander Fleming noticed in 1928 that an accidental infestation of the mold Penicillium notatum had killed his bacterial cultures, he made the crowning discovery of scientific medicine. Bacteriology and sanitation had already vanquished the great plagues. Now penicillin and subsequent antibiotics defeated the last of the invisibly tiny predators.
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2022/03/part-1-body-electric-hydras-heads-and.html