Which New York hospital treated the first U.S. penicillin patients in 1940?

The first U.S. penicillin patients in 1940 were treated at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.

On 15 October 1940, Aaron Alston and Charles Aronson received penicillin there for bacterial endocarditis. The treatment followed work by Martin Henry Dawson, Gladys Hobby and Karl Meyer at Columbia University, who had replicated and extended the Oxford team’s penicillin research.

Presbyterian Hospital was the setting for this early American clinical use, not Johns Hopkins, Mount Sinai or Bellevue. The Columbia researchers had obtained a Penicillium culture connected with Alexander Fleming’s work and produced a small amount of the drug for testing.

Penicillin was still an experimental substance. Manufacturing methods were primitive, supplies were extremely scarce and treatment often required careful recovery and reuse of the drug. The early New York cases helped demonstrate that penicillin could be used against serious human infection, while later production advances made much broader treatment possible.