Five Photographs of Early Penicillin Apparatus at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford, Early 1940s

Mounted together on card, with typed caption and text.

The photographs represent one of the earliest stages in the attempt to produce large quantities of penicillin, once its effectiveness had been proved (in 1940) but at the same time it had been realised that large quantities were needed even to save a single life; so makeshift vessels like tin cans, bed-pans, and milk-churns filled the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. The next stage was their replacement by large numbers of the specially designed pottery culture vessel, based on the bed-pan which had proved the most appropriate of the makeshift vessels; the next stage after that was the transfer of the project to large-scale industrial production in the United States of America.