June 9, 1999
Anne Miller, 90, First Patient Who Was Saved by Penicillin
By WOLFGANG SAXON
nne Sheafe Miller, who made
medical history as the first patient
ever saved by penicillin, died on May
27 in Salisbury, Conn. She was 90.
In March 1942, Mrs. Miller was
near death at New Haven Hospital
suffering from a streptococcal infection, a common cause of death then.
She had been hospitalized for a
month, often delirious with her temperature spiking to nearly 107, while
doctors tried everything available,
including sulfa drugs, blood transfusions and surgery. All failed.
As she slipped in and out of consciousness, her desperate doctors obtained a tiny amount of what was
still an obscure, experimental drug
and injected her with it. Her hospital
chart, now at the Smithsonian Institution, registered a sharp overnight
drop in temperature, and by the next
day she was no longer delirious and
soon was eating full meals, one of her
doctors reported.
Mrs. Miller's life was saved, and so
eventually were the lives of all those
previously felled by infections of bacteria like streptococci, staphylococci
and pneumococci. Penicillin also
saved the lives of an untold number
of servicemen and civilians wounded
in World War II; in earlier wars,
people died by the thousands from
bacterial infections resulting from
their injuries.
Although Sir Alexander Fleming,
the Scottish biologist, was the first to
recognize the therapeutic potential
of penicillin through a chance discovery at St. Mary's Hospital in London
in 1928, nearly a dozen years passed
before scientists fully appreciated its
significance and were able to
produce it for experimental use in
humans.
Largely forgotten, it came to the
fore only when researchers picked
up on it again at Oxford University at
the outbreak of World War II.
Before Mrs. Miller's doctors succeeded in saving her life, only a few
experiments had been conducted
with penicillin in mice and people,
with results mixed and largely disheartening.
The small quantity of penicillin
rushed to New Haven came from a
laboratory in New Jersey, and news
of Mrs. Miller's full, seemingly miraculous recovery helped inspire the
American pharmaceutical industry
to begin full production of penicillin.
A native New Yorker, Mrs. Miller
graduated in 1931 from Columbia
Presbyterian School of Nursing, now
part of Columbia University. The
next year, she married Ogden D.
Miller, a Yale University administrator. The family moved to Washington, Conn., in 1945, when
Miller became headmaster of the
Gunnery School, where he served
until he retired in 1969. He died nine
years later, and Mrs. Miller remained in Washington until 1996,
when she moved to a retirement
community in Salisbury.
She is survived by three sons, Ogden D. Jr., of Vienna, Va., David P., of
Darlington, Md., and Dwight D., of
Watertown, Mass.; a brother, Theodore H. Sheafe of Tigard, Ore.; a
sister, Mary S. Jewett of Lyme,
Conn.; six grandchildren, and seven
great-grandchildren.
