A bedpan, a bedpan, my kingdom for a bedpan.

Amongst my prouder possessions is an autographed standard issue British hospital bedpan (male ward), dating from mid, probably even pre, WW2. The pan itself is made from, I think, rough unglazed clay; it’s not particularly fragile, but it would break if you dropped it; it’s most definitely utilitarian in design, and no, I don’t have it on public display. But the public do owe this bedpan and some few others like it, their lives.

Bedpans are a breeding ground for germs. My bedpan was critical to the development of the germ, the mould in fact, that in 1928 Alexander Fleming, discovered as the first of the life-saving antibiotics - penicillin. Although Fleming had made this discovery in the late twenties, by the outbreak of war no progress had been made on turning his discovery into a viable drug suitable for use on humans. Once war did break out, the need for easily administered life-saving drugs became all too obvious. Not least because of the ‘collateral damage’; venereal disease claimed a huge number of number casualties amongst Allied forces in the desert campaigns, for example.

While British servicemen were flying the flag in the brothels of Cairo , Oxford-based scientists Florey and Chain headed the team working on this hugely beneficial variety of germ-warfare. The human body, they found, proved remarkably stubborn when it came to ingesting and processing penicillin, peeing out quantities of the substance before it could properly take effect. The scientists realised that they needed much more of the penicillin mould than they had previously realised so they could dose patients with large enough quantities to fight infection. And initially, they just couldn’t produce enough mould.

I learnt of this, standing on the roof of the Oxford University labs one bright autumn day, from one of the scientists in that team, Norman Heatley, the man who donated and signed the bedpan.

Dr. Heatley recounted a vivid story showing just how frustrating this shortage of raw penicillin mould was, a story that still chills me with its sheer mundane bad luck, and emphasises the fragility of life before antibiotics. A policeman and keen gardener was badly scratched by the thorns on his rosebushes. The scratches became infected and the Chain/Florey team worked with the doctors at the local hospital to treat the infection with the new wonder drug. To no avail. They couldn’t get enough penicillin and what they did have, they couldn’t get to ‘stick’ in the patient. Despite their best efforts the poor policeman died. The work to produce more and to stabilise penicillin as a drug went on.

These were the darkest days of the war remember, and Dr. Heatley remembered the scientists discussing what they would do in the event of invasion. The penicillin mould was absolutely critical to the war effort, and of course, had to be protected. They hit upon the idea of rubbing the penicillin mould into the lining of their ubiquitous and unremarkable tweed jackets, which of course by that stage of the war were pretty ancient and nicely populated with all manner of food for all kinds of living organisms.

It’s a charming story but standing on the roof of that Oxford lab. listening to Dr. Heatley, and looking out over our ‘green and pleasant land’, you could sense the grim and dogged determination behind the scientists’ ingeniously simple contingency plan.

My bedpan’s heroic role in this story was as one of many out-sized Petri dishes. In a time of wartime shortages, the bedpans were used to grow the penicillin in the quantities the research scientists now realised they required. And it worked. In 1945 Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the Nobel Prize.