“The sudden death of Mrs. Wilma L. Murray, aged 43 years, wife of Dr. Alvin W. Murray, pastor of the Methodist Church, of El Dorado, which occurred here early today, saddens the hearts of the entire community. Although Mrs. Murray had lived here only two years and four months, her endearing nature, and charming personality had won for her a multitude of friends.
"Mrs.
Murray, apparently in good health, was suddenly stricken with severe abdominal
pains Sunday, necessitating a major operation which was performed Monday. Her condition after the operation was
reported as good, but a heart ailment developed, causing her death."
--Obituary
of my grandmother from El Dorado Times, Wednesday, February
10, 1943.
Seventy years ago, at 12:20 a.m., on
February 10, 1943, my mother’s mother, Wilma Lucile (Dorth) Murray, died at
Allen Memorial Hospital, in El Dorado, Kans.
She was 43 years old. Like my
father’s mother, she had been a schoolteacher as a young woman, from age 19 to
25. She married my grandfather in 1926,
and gave birth to two children, my mother, Ruth, and her younger sister,
Pat. The family of four had moved to El
Dorado in October 1940, when my grandfather, Alvin Murray, became pastor of the
El Dorado Methodist Church there. When
my grandmother died, my mother, Ruth Esther Murray, was a junior at El Dorado
High School and about to turn 16.
According to my mother, my grandmother was never in robust health and
she died from a massive infection from fecal contamination following her
abdominal surgery. I’m sorry that I never got to meet her.
On Friday, Feburary 12, my mother’s
mother was buried in Winfield, Kans., the town where my father was attending
Southwestern College as a sophomore. The
man who helped lead the graveside services for my grandmother, Dr. LeRoy Allen,
was also one of my father’s professors and had written my father a letter of
recommendation for the navy three months earlier. However, my mother and father did not meet
until three and a half years later.
My grandmother died about three years
before antibiotics became widely available.
My mother always said that she might have lived, if she’d had that
infection a few years later. Alexander
Fleming had discovered penicillin in 1928.
However, it was not until 1940 that it was purified into a form that
could be easily used in therapy. Still,
there was no way to mass produce the drug.
Five weeks after my grandmother died, on “March 14, 1942, the first
patient was treated for streptococcal septicemia with US-made penicillin
produced by Merck & Co. Half of the
total supply produced at the time was used on that one patient.” The U.S. War Production Board made the mass
production of penicillin a high priority and the U.S. produced 2.3 million doses of penicillin in time for
D-Day (June 1944). It had a dramatic
effort on the survival of wounded soldiers.
Infected wounds caused almost no battle deaths in the months after
D-Day, while they had caused 15% of battle deaths in World War I. Through most of the war, the drug was
reserved exclusively for military use.
While civilian doctors were aware of the amazing curative power of the
drug, they could not get access to it.
In March 1945, penicillin finally become widely available to the general
public. In December 1945, Alexander
Fleming, Ernst B. Chain, and Howard Florey received the Nobel Prize in Medicine
for the discovery of penicillin.
(Sources: Milton Wainwright, Miracle Cure: The Story of Penicillin and
the Golden Age of Antibiotics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 14, 65,
67-68, 74; “penicillin” in Wikipedia; John Parascandola, "The Introduction
of Antibiotics into Therapeutics," in Judith W. Leavitt and Ronald L.
Numbers, eds., Sickness and Health in
America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 106-7.)
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