Pyocyanase

Pyocyanase was the first antibiotic drug to be used in hospitals. It is no longer used today.

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Rudolf Emmerich and Oscar Low, two German physicians who were the first to make an effective medication from microbes, conducted experiments in the 1890s, roughly 30 years after Louis Pasteur showed that many diseases were caused by bacteria. They proved that the germs that caused one disease may be the cure for another.

Emmerich and Low isolated germs from infected bandages that caused green infections in open wounds. The germ was a bacterium called Bacillus pycyoneus. They then mixed the isolate with other bacteria. They showed that Bacillus pycyoneus was able to destroy other strains of bacteria. The bacteria that it killed were those that caused cholera, typhoid, diphtheria, and anthrax.

From these experiments Emmerich and Low created a medication that they called pyocyanase. It was the first antibiotic to be used in hospitals. Unfortunately, its effectiveness was sporadic and did not work equally on all patients. As a result, the drug was eventually abandoned.