Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

Fleming never became angry. He reminded me of another Scots doctor, described by Robert Louis Stevenson in _Jekyll and Hyde_ as 'about as emotional as a bagpipe'. But his taciturnity could make you feel horribly uncertain and guilty. As I was hastily carrying the bowl away, he picked up the top Petri dish and said, 'That's funny.' _I_ saw it was contaminated with a blob of greenish mould. Fleming saw that the mould was killing off the colonies of staphylococcus germs all round it.

Sir Edward started stroking a black cat which had leapt into his lap. 'I must admit, it was canny of Flem to notice his colonies of staphs turning to ghosts of their former selves. Thank God it was Flem who baptized the mysterious mould-juice "penicillin". Did you know that penicillium is the Latin for "a brush"?' I shook my head. 'Wright is so damn proud of his Classical education, he would have anointed the stuff with jaw-breaking polysyllables, far beyond Flem's limited powers of speech.' He took his glass of sherry from my father. 'Her ladyship won't be in to dinner tonight, Elgar.'

'Very good, sir.'

'There must have been a good many chances involved-even the weather-to let those staphs grow cheek by jowl with the mould,' Sir Edward mused. I always admired how he effortlessly switched the level of conversation from my father to myself. It must have come from handling all manner of men in his profession. 'I suppose the mould floated from Praed Street or Heaven, or the funnel of the Cornish Riviera Express in Paddington Station, for all I know. He's kept the dish, you know. He showed it me this morning.'

It is now in the British Museum-fittingly, history being largely the record of man's lucky or unlucky mistakes.

'So Flem's ended up with a neat little laboratory toy,' Sir Edward continued. 'Do you know what he does with this penicillin?'

'Not exactly. I never heard of it again, until you mentioned it after I got back from Germany.'

'He mixes it with the agar jelly in his Petri dishes, and it kills off all the bugs causing the common diseases-you know, pneumonia, gonorrhea, diphtheria, septicaemia and all that. But it doesn't touch such odd birds as _Bacillus Influenzae._ So Flem makes his patients cough all over a Petri dish soaked in his mould juice, and if they're incubating the influenza bacillus it will grow in lovely colonies instead of being crowded out by the other common or garden bugs.'

'That's rather neat.'

'Oh, it's a very elegant experiment. But of course Flem's one of the most stylish lab workers I've ever come across. I wish we had someone like him at Blackfriars-my own hospital suffers a very ham-handed lot in the bacteriological department. Though unfortunately the experiment is not of the slightest importance whatever.' He laughed. 'Andrews and the bright boys at the Medical Research Institute have discovered that flu isn't caused by the influenza bacillus at all. It's due to a virus.' He drained his sherry. 'No more, thank you, Elgar. That will do.'

My father withdrew, by custom turning at the door to leave backwards, as though Sir Edward were royalty rather than its medical attendant.

'So Flem goes on boring us about his wretched mould-juice at the Research Club. But I suppose Edward Jenner utterly bored his friends for twenty years over his smallpox vaccination theories. At any rate, they tried to chuck him out of something called the Convivio-Medical Club down in Gloucester. But the story may have a happy ending for you. Sir Almroth would like to see you again. He's even asked you to tea.' Sir Edward produced his pocket diary, screwing in his monocle. 'Tuesday, July 3. GBS will be there.'

He paused for me to look impressed. I knew that Shaw was a regular visitor to the ceremonial if unappetizing teas in Sir Almroth's department. 'So you'd better sharpen up your wits,' he advised. 'Sir Almroth may offer you a job, but of course I can't promise. The Inoculation Department at Mary's is hardly running with money like your German drug companies.' He pushed the black cat off his lap and stood up. 'Now I must run along, I've a hundred things to finish before I dine in solitary state. My wife is out tonight in the company of an old admirer.'

He tried to say this lightly, but in a sentence his voice plummeted down like a singer's. We both looked embarrassed. He struggled to resume in his usual manner, 'Let me give you some advice-never get married.' But he failed. Then he stroked my cheek. That was the only gesture he ever made towards me. I was frightened to discover how miserable he was.

I can remember today that speck of mould on Fleming's Petri dish. It was fluffy and white, its centre dark green, almost black. I remember wondering at the time if it was the same mould as grew upon the loaves we ate in the basement, too stale to set before our betters above stairs. My mother would often bandage it on my septic cuts, an old wives' remedy which sent me to school with my fingers in the form of a sandwich. The mould from a dead man's skull was apparently more effective, had she been able to lay her hands on any.

The mould had at least not lodged me unfavourably in the memory of Sir Almroth Wright. As I left for tea with him three weeks later, I daringly slipped into my tweed jacket pocket the phial of Domagk's 'Streptozon'. I decided that the King's physician had been a shade off-hand about the drug. Today I realize that Sir Edward had little faith in any treatment at all, because there was little treatment to have any faith in, even for a King. He had only insulin for the diabetic, liver for the anaemic and digitalis for the cardiac, X-rays were ghostly and the electrocardiograph a delicate toy. He used mostly his own eyes, hands and ears, dextrously assembling round the sick man a fragile scaffolding of the medicaments available until Nature cured.

I had not set eyes on St Mary's Hospital since leaving with my scholarship, after working there and enjoying free its first-year lectures. It was an exorbitantly solid building of red brick and stone, its first and second floors with verandahs looking upon the passing bus tops in Praed Street. The Prince Consort laid its foundation stone in 1845, it grew amid the shrieks of engines from Paddington Station, the miasmas of the Grand Junction Canal and the stink of a nearby carter's stables. The hospital itself was sick in my time. It was the most popular among the medical students in London, being the worst and therefore the easiest to get into. But the new dean was already effecting a cure, as in World War II he effected it with the health of Winston Churchill.

The terrace of seedy Victorian shops opposite was the same, so was the Fountains Abbey pub on the corner. But the turret which had housed the Inoculation Department, in converted poky wards and sisters' sitting-rooms, was superseded by a handsome, rectangular, five-storied building joined to the hospital by a bridge and known to everyone as 'The House of Lords'.

'Ah! Young Elgar. Been on your travels, I hear.'

I found Sir Almroth Wright in his own laboratory, at his elbow a row of metal drums packed with test-tubes plugged by cotton wool, on the bench before him microscope, Petri dishes, platignum loops, a throaty Bunsen burner, behind him shelves of chemical reagents and dyes. A bacteriologist, like an airline pilot, has to keep everything within finger-tip reach.

He immediately started talking to me in German, which he had learned fifty years before as a student in Leipzig. It seemed to suit his taste for polysyllabled pomposity. Pink cheeked, white hair brushed across the dome of his head, white moustached, he had a Nordic look inherited from his grandfather, once Director of the Swedish Mint. He had a protruding lower lip, circular steel-rimmed glasses half way down a stubby nose, a dark suit with the hopelessly ill-fitting look of a growing schoolboy's, and only a wing collar to show respect for his professional position.