Which pathologist first used penicillin successfully for medical treatment?

Cecil George Paine was the first pathologist to use penicillin successfully for medical treatment.

Paine worked at the Royal Infirmary in Sheffield and had been a student of Fleming. In 1930, he used Fleming’s crude penicillin preparation to treat ophthalmia, including gonococcal eye infections in one adult and three newborn infants. The first recorded successful treatment took place on 25 November 1930.

This achievement is often confused with Fleming’s own early clinical experiments. Fleming treated his research scholar Stuart Craddock for sinusitis in January 1929, but the treatment failed, probably because the infection involved Haemophilus influenzae, which was not susceptible to penicillin. Surgeon Arthur Dickson Wright also tested Fleming’s material, but no specific successful treatment is documented.

Paine’s work came before the Oxford team’s better-known development of purified, mass-producible penicillin. Those later advances made the drug practical on a large scale, but Paine established its early successful medical use.