Alexander Flemming

Alexander Fleming 1881 - 1955 was born in a remote part of Scotland. When he was 14, he went to London to stay with his elder brother and to go to school. After having fought in the Boer War in South Africa, Alexander returned to London and decided to become a doctor.

Although wanting to become a surgeon, he was persuaded to work on bacteriology instead. (This means studying germs and how they infect wounds.) Not long after, he had to go to France to fight in the First World War, and when he was there, he saw thousands of soldiers dying from infected wounds. It wasn't the injury that was killing these men, but the germs entering their bodies through the wounds.

Before going to war, Alexander had seen other medicines being discovered to cure other diseases, and decided that he had to try to find one that would kill off the germs infecting the wounded soldiers.
He worked hard at this for years. He would grow germs in little dishes, and then drop mixtures of chemicals onto them to see if the germs could be killed off.

He wasn't very tidy, and he didn't like clearing up and washing the dishes, but one day, when he was having a big clear out, he saw on one of the older dishes, that the germs were being killed off. He found out that it was penicillin that had killed the germs.

Today, doctors still use different kinds of penicillin. We call them antibiotics now, and your doctor will prescribe them for you if you get a bad cut of graze, to stop infection.

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