Which eye infection did Cecil George Paine successfully treat with penicillin in babies?

Cecil George Paine successfully treated ophthalmia neonatorum in babies with penicillin in 1930.

Ophthalmia neonatorum is a serious eye infection occurring during the first weeks of life, historically often caused by Neisseria gonorrhoeae acquired during childbirth. Paine, a pathologist at Sheffield’s Royal Infirmary, used a crude fungal penicillin extract in babies affected by the condition. His report predated the Oxford team’s later work turning penicillin into a practical systemic medicine.

The infection is sometimes confused with trachoma, another eye disease, but the terms are not interchangeable. Uveitis affects internal eye tissues, while keratitis involves the cornea; neither is the infection associated with Paine’s pioneering treatment. The phrase “ophthalmia neonatorum” specifically identifies neonatal conjunctival infection.

Paine’s work was an early demonstration that Fleming’s mould product could help patients, although it attracted little attention at the time. A decade later, Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, Norman Heatley and their Oxford colleagues developed methods to produce, purify, test and preserve enough penicillin for wider clinical use.