Joe Everybody, a modern day man with average knowledge (high school and Wikipedia) in biology, medicine and chemistry, wakes up in an medieval city. He sees a lot of sick people and remembers about antibiotics and how penicillin was discovered.
Is it possible for him to rediscover and produce any antibiotics with the common technology in these times?
Checking Wikipedia, it seems that creating penicillin from the right kind of fungus/mold should be possible for your joe everybody, provided he had slightly above average knowledge about the mechanism, and was willing to first convince a few alchemists, and second spend a lot of time doing the research which fungus, where to get and how to grow it, and finally how to produce it in sufficient quantities.
Of course, before that, he would need to make sure he lives long enough in an environment that is not naturally friendly towards strangers, let alone strangers that come up with very strange ideas strongly resembling witchcraft.
One more hint: It would definitely have to be a Joe Everybody. A Jane Everybody would most likely be burned at the stake for only speaking about the idea.
Looking at the history of penicillin, the time traveller in question would need to be familiar with identifying their bacterial cultures. A lot of those bacteria are hard to identify, especially because optics and lens production in Europe did not take off for a while, with the first microscope appearing in 1595.
Unless this person is really interested in molds in the modern world, he wouldn't know:
That aside, if the time traveller remembers how penicillin was discovered, and remembers the two points above, the time traveller (with some experimentation) could make a miracle drug called "penicillin." The next thing to remember is cowpox, a very survivable disease, immunizes people to smallpox, a very deadly disease.
no.. not really.
it's incredibly hard to make useful quantities. In 1941 it took months for a team to create enough to treat a half dozen people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Alexander
Purifying large quantities and avoiding contamination is also a nightmare.
vaccines, or at least one particular vaccine is another matter: our Joe Everyman with only basic knowledge of the history of vaccines could fashion a usable smallpox vaccine from cowpox. All he'd need would be the puss from cowpox sores.
Judging by some recent reports Medieval medicine was not necessarily as ineffectual as we often assume - a modern time traveller would probably be more medically influential through basic general knowledge about the existence of germs, basic hygiene, circulation and so on. Just ensuring people have clean water and wash their hands and surgical tools would save a vast number of lives. Indeed, one of the biggest low-hanging fruit of modern medicine is simply ensuring doctors wash their hands between patients. The ability to make a specific antibiotic would probably be beyond a layman but the knowledge that antibiotics can exist and that one could be derived from blue bread-mould would give future natural philosophers a great advantage in their development.
Edited to add that a highly accessible and world-changing technology would be vaccination - Jenner's approach for Smallpox was fairly simple and for people who live in the modern era it is hard to imagine what a devastating disease that was for most of history.
Unless you have a huge leg-up from the start, this is next to impossible.
If you arrived in 1346 England naked, with no identity, goods, money, status, and (presumably) little to no knowledge of how medieval society worked, you stand pretty much no chance of succeeding. I assume you at least speak (magically?) Middle English to talk to the commoners, and enough Middle French to at least attempt to negotiate with the nobles. Oh, and that you are at least partially immune to the common diseases of the 1300s, or you'd die of dysentery within 2 weeks tops.
The only chance you have, which is still so slim as to count as cruel and unusual torture is this:
There is absolutely no point in trying to achieve the same thing via secular channels. The Church, and specifically the monks, are the only people who understand the vague concept of practical science, and have the patience and curiosity to try your idea. Everybody else will dismiss you as a dimwit or a witch. Being considered a witch would not be a death sentence as one would think: the commoners were relatively ok with USEFUL witchcraft. The problem is, your brand of witchery does not conform to the common folk-medicine practice, and requires too much trial and error that the people will not accept. Besides, the commoners do not have the means to help you expand your production, and the nobles will dismiss you as an annoying charlatan. If you managed to reach the king (Edward III at that time) it would greatly increase your chances of success, since Eddy 3 was a very reasonable and practical man, if, arguably, cruel and merciless at times. But your only chance of getting an audience with the king is through the Church, because nobody else is going to vouch for you.
It depends on how much your man knows. Penicillium (the mold from which penicillin is created) is common, but it would very hard for a typical person to identify. It would also be very difficult to test without modern cell cultures. Just slapping random mold on injuries would be more likely to cause infection than to cure it. Unless your man knows one important fact -- that Penicillium is used for creating blue cheese. If he knew that, he would likely be able to get some from cheese manufacturers. Creating oral or injectable penecilin requires advanced chemistry, but using it to create a poultice would be easily done by medieval healers.
Yes, easily ... And even a lot more. Have a look here. There are some recipes and remedies on the internet.
Also I remember someone saying you can get penicillin from some bread molds.
He/she could also distill alcohol and use it as a disinfectant. 60% alcohol is very easy to distill and it will give you hospital grade disinfectant.
Maybe you can get your character to see a documentary on penicillin or something randomly before being teleported in time. Or maybe he watched a zombie apocalypse movie last night and people were baking penicillin in the movie.
Ah, and something awesome. Maybe your character accidentally kills a nobleman who is allergic to penicillin. Just to give a bit of twists to the story.
Frame challange: it doesn't matter because pencilin is not effective aganst the bubonic plague so you can creat metric tons of it and it will have no effect. There is literally no way to produce an effective amount.
To assess the curative value of different drugs in bubonic plague infection, white mice were infected in the laboratory with living Pasteurella pestis, and the treatment with the drug to be tested was begun either 48 or 72 hours after infection, it taking 48-72 hours for the development in mice of septicaemia—the decisive factor in plague infection. Sulfathiazole, sulfapyridine, sulfamerazine, sulfamethazine, sulfadiazine, antiplague serum, penicillin, streptomycin, aureomycin, chloramphenicol, and oxytetracycline were tested. Sulfapyridine and penicillin gave no protection, but the remainder had a curative effect in 50% or more of the animals. The antibiotics, in particular, with the exception of penicillin, protected 90%-100%.
Frame challenge:
Until quite recently, it was assumed that the plague was bought by rats. Rats hitched rides on the ships. Rats arrived at ports. The Black Death spread up the streets to the capital cities, presumably by rats hitch-hiking on carriages. If Camus' description of the outbreak in Oran is realistic (and he was in Oran when the Black Death struck before he wrote 'La Peste') then rats were the first victims. The spreaders of plague were people, and second-hand clothing bearing the fleas from the people.
Second-hand clothing was how the place got to Eyam, a village in Derbyshire. The death rate there from the 1665 outbreak was pretty appalling with 273 recorded deaths from plague from a population that may have been 350 or 800 depending on which source you believe. Eyam is famous for the remarkably intelligent and thorough way it isolated itself from its neighbours, yet traded with them by leaving money for goods on 'plague stones', having outdoor church services, and many other measure that no-where else adopted. If your protagonist wants to appear naked in Eyam in 1665, the story could tell itself.
However, let's do the Middle Ages. If your protagonist speaks schoolboy French with the usual English [pronounciation ('Roy' for 'Roi' etc) then they won't be that far from medieval French. They could stress the need for isolation and quarantine. They should not take in sheets or clothes coming from the plague-ridden capital city, even if they are cheap. And the people are as suspect as the rats. They probably cannot produce an anti-plague serum (though Camus allowed his doctor friend in 'La Peste' to do so based on modern theories), but they could fight the plague in other ways. I have heard it said that proper disposal of human sewage, and the use of cabbage as a food did more than the rest of medicine to save lives for most of history. Preach isolation, good diet, outdoor church services, hygiene, and the practices of Eyam.
You would not suggest attempting to remove an appendix in the Middle Ages. The first successful appendectomy was in 1886, forty years before the discovery of penicillin (1928).
They probably already knew
It's highly likely that medieval people already knew how to make antibiotics. They didn't necessarily know it was penicillin they were making, but the history of treating wounds and infections with molds containing antibiotic substances stretches back to civilisations as old as ancient Egypt.
It's a similar case with aspirin. Although it was 'discovered' in 1899 when acetylsalicylic acid was first synthesised, people have been treating fevers with willow-bark tea containing salicylic acid since antiquity.
Considering present-day hunter-gatherer's intimate knowledge of the medicinal plants in their environment I'd guess you'd have to go back a very long way before treatments are actually a new idea.
So what can we do?
That being said, local knowledge levels will vary. What you can do is spread knowledge of these existing treatments to people who don't have it.
The other thing you can help with is refinement. One of the issues with these existing treatments is that their methods of application are limited. As previous answers have mentioned, it shouldn't be that hard to produce more concentrated penicillin and you can use that to treat non-topical infections.
Of course, the inability to adequately enforce proper courses of treatment will probably mean the advent of antibiotic-resistant diseases a hell of a lot earlier. Not certain it's such a wise long-term decision...
It happened before - in the wild: https://online.kidsdiscover.com/quickread/angels-glow-the-bacterium-that-saved-civil-war-soldiers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorhabdus_luminescens
Basically, some locations, some earth, contains fungi that have anti-biotic effects in the wild. It may prevent wounds from going gangreous and save lifes.
