Biology & medicine · 1929
On the Antibacterial Action of Cultures of a Penicillium, with Special Reference to their Use in the Isolation of B. influenzæ
British Journal of Experimental Pathology · June 1929
Alexander Fleming’s 1929 paper on penicillin, the antibacterial substance made by a mould in broth cultures.
Read the text The whole poster as a web page
- Print from
- A1
- License
- Public domain
- Source
- pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Retrieved
- 27 September 2026
- Language
- English
- Rights holder
- Alexander Fleming, 1929
Theme
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Print from A1: the smallest A size at which the body text is at least 8 pt.
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Edition
The paper as printed in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology, vol. X, no. 3 (June 1929), pp. 226-236, with the two plates of Figs. 1 to 4, from the scan in PubMed Central (PMC2048009, file brjexppathol00255-0037.pdf, 13 pages at 600 ppi). Its text layer was corrected word by word against the page images, with the help of a second, independent OCR (the Internet Archive microfilm scan sim_international-journal-of-experimental-pathology_1929-06_10_3). The title, author and affiliation are set in the header of the poster; running heads, page numbers and the signature mark are left out; words hyphenated at line ends are joined (post-nasal keeps its hyphen, as in the title of Table IV); the spaces before ; and : are not kept. Spellings of the print are kept, among them influenzæ beside influenzae, diphtheriæ beside diphtheriae, “Pfeiffers bacillus”, “It doses not”, “Des moissures du group”, and “(Fildes, 1921)” in the text for the reference dated 1920. The tables are set as tables: the dashes that mark no growth in Tables I and IV are set as minus signs; the ditto marks are set as “,,”; the sign that marks uncountable colonies in the table of the rate of killing is set as ∝, the glyph of the print; the two halves of Table IV, printed side by side (cases 1 to 13 and 14 to 25), are set as one table; Table III, printed sideways on p. 230, is set upright. Tables II and III follow the paragraph that introduces them. The four photographs are the plates of the scan, cropped to each figure with its engraved labels, in grayscale; their captions are set as printed (“Fig. 4—” without a full stop). The short rule before the acknowledgement is kept.
Rights
Published in 1929, before 1931: public domain in the United States. Alexander Fleming, its only author, died on 11 March 1955, before 1956: public domain in France since 1 January 2026.
The PubMed Central record of the article (OAI-PMH front matter of PMC2048009) names Alexander Fleming as its only author and carries no copyright statement or license. A scan of a public domain page adds no protected work.
