What If Penicillin Was Never Discovered? A Blister Could Still Win.

What if penicillin was never discovered? In 1924 the president's sixteen year old son got a blister playing tennis at the White House and was dead within a week. This episode follows Alexander Fleming's unwashed dish, the first Oxford patient in 1941, the woman in New Haven who received half of all the penicillin in America in 1942, and the factories that made millions of doses before D-Day. The second half is labeled speculation. It imagines medicine, hospitals, towns and family habits growing up without penicillin, and then returns to the real fight against drug resistant infections today. This episode is history and imagination, not medical advice. Full sources and archival credits are in the YouTube description.