Re: What is success?!

[melyndah@mail.wsu.edu]

>From <http://www.snopes.com/spoons>, an extremely reliable and
well-researched site specializing in modern legends:

"Alexander Fleming's father saved a young Winston Churchill from drowning in
a bog. Or young Alexander Fleming himself saved a young Winston Churchill
from drowning in a swimming hole. Or young Alexander Fleming helped Winston
Churchill's father get his carriage out of the mud and back onto the road.
Well, whatever -- we've got two fathers and two sons: one of the four helped
one of the other three, and one of the remaining two paid for somebody's
education. Or something like that. It's a good story, so let's not weigh it
down with a bunch of
pesky details. 

"The facts of none of these versions jibe with what we know of these
people's lives. No Churchill biography we've found mentions young Winston's
chance encounter with a Fleming, father or son. Alexander Fleming was born
in a remote, rural part of Scotland and lived on an 800-acre farm that was a
mile from the nearest house -- not the sort of place where a vacationing
Winston would have been likely to wander, or to be discovered by anyone if
he had. As well, Winston was seven years older than Alexander, so young
Alexander would probably have been too small to physically rescue the older
and larger Winston from drowning. 

"But we don't have to speculate about those matters to disprove the tale.
Alexander Fleming did not leave the farm to rush off to medical school to
become the doctor he had supposedly always longed to be. In fact, young Alec
(as he was then known) departed for London when he was 14, where his older
brother Tom had studied medicine and opened a practice. Alec attended the
Polytechnic School in Regent Street; after graduating, he entered the business
world at the urging of his brother, worked as a clerk for a shipping firm
for a few years, then joined a Scottish regiment when the Boer War broke
out. It was not until after all of this that Alec decided to try his hand at
medical school, and even then it was the encouragement of his older brother
that was the deciding factor, not a lifelong yearning on Alec's part to
become a doctor. Additionally, Alec's medical school education was financed
with a £ 250 inheritance from a recently-deceased uncle, not an endowment
from a grateful Randolph Churchill. 

"Nor is the other end of this tale true. Winston Churchill did come down
with a sore throat and a high fever while in Tunis (on the way home from his
December 1943 meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin in Tehran), and the
diagnosis of the medical team called in from Cairo by his personal physician
(Charles Wilson, later Lord Moran) was pneumonia. According to Wilson's
biography, Churchill was treated with sulphonamide (an antibiotic, but one
unrelated to penicillin) and digitalis (for his heart) and sent to bed to
rest. By the time a specialist, Professor
John Scadding, was flown in from London, Churchill was already well on his
way to recovery. In short, Alexander Fleming was neither present nor
consulted when Churchill was diagnosed with pneumonia, nor was penicillin
used to treat the British prime minister. According to the Churchill
Archives Centre in Cambridge, Churchill publicly denied the Fleming story in
1946. 

"This latest bit of netsam aside, Alexander Fleming's life has already been
the subject of  considerable mythologizing. His discovery of penicillin was
not the instant boon to medicine that we now assume it was. In fact, Fleming
himself did not realize the significance of his findings -- thinking he had
developed a mere antiseptic that was too slow-acting and too difficult to
produce in large quantities, Fleming failed to test his penicillin
thoroughly, wrote a tepidly-received paper about it, and moved on to other
work. There ended his real involvement with the "greatest medical advance of
the 20th (or any other) century." In 1935, two specialists-- Howard Florey,
head of Oxford's William Dunn School of Pathology, and Ernst Chain, a
Cambridge biochemistry PhD -- took up where Fleming's paper left off and
spent several years at the arduous laboratory work of refining and testing
pencillin to produce the world's first effective antibiotic. Fleming visited
the two men at the Dunn School after they published their
first paper on penicillin in 1940 (by which time Chain thought Fleming was
dead) and didn't reappear on the scene until after penicillin had proved
itself invaluable during World War II. The press lauded the newly-emerged
Fleming as the lone genius responsible for the miracle of  penicillin, and
he was awarded numerous honors, including a knighthood and the 1945 Nobel
Prize for medicine. (The Nobel Prize committee, at least, was on the ball
and named Florey and Chain as co-recipients of the honor.) 

"By the way -- after Fleming visited the Dunn School in 1940, he quietly
disappeared for another two years. His next contact with Florey was to
request some penicillin for a friend of his who was suffering from
meningitis. The "discoverer of penicillin" had to wait patiently for Florey
to supply it to him - along with instructions for administering it."

     Sightings:   The 1 September 1999 issue of Family Circle passes along
the Fleming/Churchill
     tale as a true story. 
Melynda Huskey, Ph.D.
Director, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Allies Center
Washington State University
Pullman WA 99164-7204
509.335.6428
509.335.4168 fax
melyndah@mail.wsu.edu