A Whirlwind in Occupied Holland
Penicillin was transformed from a laboratory curiosity to the first massproduced antibacterial chemotherapeutic agent during the Second World War. Popular accounts of this process, particularly those that appeared immediately after the war, have tended to cast events as a continuous series of related breakthroughs. However, there were several independent attempts in Europe to produce penicillin during World War II, but none except the Anglo-American effort proved successful. Despite attention focusing on that successful venture, those other wartime efforts reveal something of the human capacity for resourcefulness in straightened circumstances and during a period of censorship.
Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth
The story of penicillin has become the story of Alexander Fleming: world opinion has conferred upon him sole credit for what is arguably the single most important medical discovery ever made. Gwyn Macfalane's sensitive analysis of this much-mytholigized area of medical history makes a persuasive case for a major reappraisal of Fleming's role. Macfarlane, the widely acclaimed author of Howard Florey (OUP, 1985), discusses Fleming's background and personality, this impressive rise in the medical profession, the crucial discoveries of 1928, and the public recognition and adulation of the 1940s. His account is as compelling a study of human behavior as it is a careful examination of scientific discovery.
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of