Bacitracin; its topical use in aural and pharyngeal infections

RECENT advances in the treatment of infectious diseases, made possible by the discovery of bacteriostatic agents, have inspired medical investigators to study an ever increasing number of chemotherapeutic and antibiotic substances. Many different compounds have been isolated and tested in the laboratory and used clinically, but only a few of them have proved to be of definite value. The great majority have been unsatisfactory either because of their excessive toxicity or because of their failure to act specifically on the organism for which an inhibiting substance was being sought. It is our purpose in this paper to report additional studies with a relatively new antibiotic agent, bacitracin. Bacitracin was first reported by Johnson, Anker and Meleney, 1 in 1945. It had been produced by a strain of Bacillus subtilis recovered from a mixture of organisms contaminating the debrided tissue removed from a compound tibial fracture. After having investigated the properties