ABSTRACT
The unlikeliest rumours spread among the public, including ‘reliable’ reports that in many maternity wards newborn infants were being killed or that some sick person died immediately after the visit of a doctor, who was then, naturally, arrested and shot. Visits to clinics declined sharply, and the pharmacies were suddenly forsaken. At the institute where I worked, a young woman came and demanded an analysis of an empty vial of penicillin. Her child had pneumonia, and immediately after she was given the penicillin, according to the mother, he grew worse. Allergic reactions to antibiotics are common enough, but she attributed the reaction to the work of poison allegedly contained in the penicillin, declaring that she would not give him any more medicine. When I told her that she would thus condemn him to death, she replied: ‘Let him die from illness but not from poison that I give him with my own hands.’
