Tuberculous Scrofula: Belfast Experience

Abstract

The Belfast blitzes of 1941 are blamed in our family for the scrofula of my younger brother and sister and myself. Guinea pigs and rabbits at Musgrave Park proved that each of us had bovine derived TB infection caused by failure to pasteurize milk when tuberculin-tested milk was not available. The clinical head of Harvard Medical School’s anti-tuberculosis effort contacted his boss, Professor Maxwell Finland, who ascertained from Selman A. Waksman that his antibiotic streptothricin was bacteriostatic against TB but too toxic for humans. Finland, born 1902, knew Waksman (born 1888) well, each having emigrated from the Czarist-ruled Ukraine. Waksman , in 1942, had hopes for an analog to streptothricin he intended to name streptomycin: an antibiotic from Actinomyces griseus which had been culture-isolated in 1916 for his M.Sc. thesis. Streptomycin was still 6-9 months away from animal testing. The same Actinomyces species was also able to produce actinomycin C and D which was later supplied to Professor Sidney Farber of Harvard to start successful human cancer chemotherapy.