In this chapter I explore the political and material context of a post-war Spain suffering the tragic loss of civil rights and material goods under the Franco dictatorship . I review the early days of penicillin, utilising material published by fellow historians of science and medicine, such as the pioneering contributions of Gladys Hobby and Robert Bud. The circumstances surrounding the first batches of penicillin to reach Spain will be narrated, along with initial public revelations about its miraculous properties. The main objective of this book will then be outlined: to reflexively explore the historiographical arguments—discussed throughout the manuscript—on the circulation of penicillin through time and space during the long post-war.
In March 1944, the Madrid daily newspaper ABC reported that penicillin had been used in Spain for the first time ‘with magnificent results’. A new medicine ‘that is lacking here’ had arrived. The father of a severely ill little girl posed with his sister for a press agency photo distributed the day after being taken, holding in his hands a parcel of the drug to treat his young daughter. The next day an earlier use was reported: a young mining engineer in La Coruña , a sea port in North-West Spain, had been injected with penicillin for acute septicaemia: ‘The first injection was applied yesterday at 11 am, when he had a temperature of 39 degrees … today before a second dose he was at 37’, a clear improvement. 1 Penicillin had reached Spain through Gibraltar , the British harbour on the South coast of Spain, shipped from an ‘African port occupied by the Allies ’. 2
This penicillin that had entered Spain, the public fame of its therapeutic capacity, the methods to obtain and purify it and the protocols for its clinical use, composed a set of material, social and rhetorical practices embedded in the early days of the Franco dictatorship and the immediate post-Second World War years. The policies of Franco and the Allies interacted to disseminate this new drug during the long post-war period: the long aftermath of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the Second World War . Protracted negotiations authorised transportation of the drug from the United States to Madrid , and provided protocols for use, while black market penicillin circulated through unofficial channels.
Along with most of Europe , Spain had joined in the heroic reception afforded this new wonder drug since at least 1943, when penicillin first appears in Spanish archival material and newspapers. This heroic representation was based on a miraculous capacity to cure previously fatal infections: effects greeted as marvels by an impoverished population in the devastation of the wars and during the first decade of Franco’s dictatorship . Accounts of such healing crossed national and cultural boundaries effortlessly; as had infection, ingrained in memories across Europe , regardless of education, social position and age, since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic . 3 While infection rates increased during the Spanish Civil War , as they did during the Second World War , the treatment of war wounds improved. New techniques were in use, including a method for the treatment of broken bones devised by the Spanish orthopaedic surgeon, Josep Trueta . 4 Blood transfusion techniques were also developed and practised during the Civil War: the Barcelonian haematologist, Frederic Duran i Jorda , was one of the front’s pioneers, while the Canadian physician Norman Bethune gained renown by organising the first ever mobile blood transfusion service, to support the Republican Government. 5 The internationalisation of the War of Spain —as it was known in the foreign, left-wing environments which provided the International Brigades —was part of a Zeitgeist that bisected political ideologies following the Communist revolution. During the convulsive, critical and promising interwar period, Europe suffered effects from the deep economic crisis in the USA in 1929 at a time when the continent was still reeling from the Versailles treaty marking the end of the Great War .
While the Spanish Civil War produced technical and medical improvements embedded in a tragically restrictive environment for invention and experimentation, the public health system was dismantled. A culture of urgency revolving around solving problems related to the state of emergency was initiated, and indeed constituted, by the war itself. The circularity that characterises war regimes, however, included the permanent embodiment of an everyday tragedy: the loss of people and spaces, geographical and emotional, shared in time, and anxieties such as prolonged poverty and a lack of basic food and refuge. The war was self-nourishing, fed by every triumph and tragedy of lives lost.
Among the survivors, infections were—and would remain until the present time—one of the faces of war-generated poverty. Reducing the prevalence of infections was a measure of well-being, directly correlated with public health since the early days of hygiene and vaccination in the late nineteenth century. 6 Bacteriological doctrine and the possibility of producing specific vaccines and sera for every germ responsible for disease played a significant part in the way such infections were conceptualised, managed and encountered. 7 Smallpox , tuberculosis and poliomyelitis were among those most successfully prevented by vaccination after long research and preventive campaigns. Hygiene campaigns mobilised social and medical resources to provide preventive measures, with an extended conception of infections and pandemics as avoidable if proper measures were taken. Yet infections were often still difficult to avoid, stop or cure. By 1935 a new drug on the market was believed to have the ability to—as John Lesch has phrased it—keep some infectious disease ‘under control’. 8 This was Prontosil , a sulfa-drug produced by the chemical research industry: a red dye effective against a number of infections in mice, and which proved in human beings to kill the germ without damaging the host. A turning point in the industrialisation of medicine, the chemistry of dyestuffs was at the origins of the new chemotherapeutic agent, a transformative medicine marking the shift from natural products to industrially manufactured synthetics. The capabilities of chemistry during the first third of the twentieth century also included the chemical weapons successfully used during the Great War . This set of successful and tragic events constituted the basis upon which chemistry assumed its mantle as the twentieth-century agent of a new scientific and technological regime.
Reports of the amazing new antimicrobial penicillin travelled through time and space. 9 Like sulfa-drugs, the novelty of penicillin related to many domains of activity: research, industry and medicine. However, in each of those domains penicillin revealed its singularity. Here was a drug isolated from microorganisms, therefore a return to natural products, but rather than originating from plants, penicillin came from the very life forms it was intended to destroy. Living beings had become the landscape in which to discover new therapeutic agents.
Rumours of wondrous effects when applied to wounds were some of the earliest celebrated successes of penicillin. Reports spread swiftly through post-Civil War Spain. As the Second World War began, Franco’s army had already entered Madrid , where his entry of the capital would represent victory and mark the end of the war. News of this wonder drug spread through the war regime of circulation: along with reports on battles, losses and casualties travelled information of cures performed by the yellow powder of unpurified penicillin.
These overlapping influential temporalities must be taken into account when reconstructing the history of the medical and scientific object that penicillin became in all its forms and derivatives. While the Second World War was manufacturing new medical and technical objects, including atomic weapons, the Spanish population had no opportunity to recover from the devastation of the Civil War. Poverty, hunger, infections and the terror imposed by Franco contributed to the misery of life that historians Antonio Cazorla, Conxita Mir and Ángela Cenarro have revealed, in the process of rejuvenating historiographical approaches to post-war Spain through local histories with wide-ranging impact. 10 The Spanish government retained food ration cards through the post-Civil War period, right up until the early 1950s, and a thriving black market of basic foodstuffs developed under the repressive policies of the early dictatorship . Death rates due to undernourishment and infections, which had declined during the early 1930s, increased not only during the Civil War but throughout the first half of the 1940s: it was not until 1946 that infections lost their position as the primary cause of death in Spain. 11 During this decade, known as the Years of Hunger, the precariousness of urban life was compounded by insalubrious water. 12 Meanwhile the dictatorship covered up epidemics of polio and typhus , c...
