Clodagh Finn: A Mayo nurse’s role in the discovery of penicillin

She was a great woman, too, and thanks to her homeplace, Kilfian, in north Mayo, more people know about this formidable woman whose moral and financial support allowed her husband to discover the antibiotic that revolutionised medicine.

That a woman born into a small Irish community had trained as a nurse, and gone on to own a private nursing home in London in the early years of the last century, is noteworthy in itself.

Sarah, or Sareen as she was known, and her twin sister, Elizabeth, ran a practice on Baker St that had such a good reputation that patients said they would go nowhere else for nursing care.

Both sisters qualified as nurses in Dublin in 1907. After spending time in Australia, they moved to London.

They both married Fleming brothers, too: Sarah married Alexander in 1915 and her sister married his brother, John, a few years later.

But just as the Fleming brothers were very different, the McElroy twins were chalk and cheese: Sarah was outgoing, gregarious and energetic, Elizabeth was quiet and reserved.

If the sisters were opposites, so, too, were Sarah and her new husband.

“In many ways,” writes Kevin Brown in the biography Penicillin Man, “for Alec and Sally [as Sarah was also known], as indeed for John and Elizabeth, it was the differences in their personalities that brought them together.

“Whereas Alec was quiet, Sally was vivacious and lively, with a love of conversation and argument, which made her a convivial and popular hostess.”

When they married on December 23, 1915, there was no time for a honeymoon: Fleming was on leave from wartime France. Shortly after the ceremony at the Catholic Church of Saint Charles Burroneo, Ogle St, in London, he returned to his post with the Royal Army Medical Corps.

He witnessed the deaths of many soldiers from wounds, but, more often, from the deadly infections that set in afterwards.

He argued in an article that the antiseptic treatment often did more harm than good. Fleming’s views were not accepted until he discovered lysozyme, an enzyme with antibacterial properties, in 1922.

The story of how it grew in a Petri dish he had forgotten in his famously disorganised laboratory — laying the foundation for his ground-breaking discovery — is well-known.

The contribution made by Sarah, however, is much less known. Indeed, it might not be remembered at all had it not been for the people of Kilfian, who have done so much to flesh out the details of her forgotten life.

Kilfian local Seán Gilvarry says that Fleming is celebrated the world over, but there was nothing to acknowledge the woman who sold her nursing home so that her husband could continue his research.

McElroy was the motivator, the unseen force behind a discovery that changed healthcare for ever, yet, when the Kilfian Development Association began researching her, not everyone in her local parish knew what she had done.

That changed in 2001, with the unveiling by the couple’s only son, the late Dr Robert Fleming, of a monument honouring both Flemings. He said he recalled visits to Leigherntain House with his parents as a young child, and the farm, the river, fishing, and the family Irish Red Setter.

The house where Sarah and her twin lived with 10 siblings is no longer extant, but the monument standing near the church alerts attention to the woman who was born to Maria Flynn and her farmer husband, Bernard McElroy, around 1881.

I say “around 1881”, because there is evidence that Sarah shaved a few years off her age when she married the younger Alec.

It is far more interesting to pick through the relatively scant details to get a sense of a woman who took extraordinary measures to support her husband’s research at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, London.

After the war, the couple rented a flat in Chelsea, where Sarah, to quote Kevin Brown, curator at the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum, proved to be a “very capable and thrifty housewife”.

She was also an excellent cook, he adds, providing this fascinating vignette: “At the dinner parties she arranged, sometimes thinking nothing of walking home to Chelsea from a West End theatre matinée to cook dinner for her guests, she would often throw out provocative statements to begin a discussion.”

When the couple’s only son was born, on March 17, 1924, they spent more time at the cottage they bought in Suffolk.

It was a busy place at weekends, filled with visitors, or bustling with the regular parties the couple held for the local children.

When the Second World War began, the couple’s country home was requisitioned, while their city flat was hit during heavy bombardment of the city.

Alexander Fleming, with characteristic understatement, said: “When I saw the entire window frame moving towards me, I decided to get out of bed.”

They went to stay with friends and Sareen volunteered at the Shamrock Club, a canteen in the West End for Irish soldiers. If the war took its toll, she remained optimistic. “It will be tough, it will be long, but we will win,” she said.

She must have taken immense satisfaction in seeing how the widespread use of penicillin saved so many lives as the war went on.

When it was over, the couple moved back into their flat in London and spent more time in Suffolk. As Alexander Fleming’s international reputation grew, Sarah’s health began to decline.

Shortly before she died, of Parkinson’s disease, in October 1949, Fleming told a neighbour that he was pained that his discovery could not save her.

It saved many others, though, including the life of a young boy in Ballina in 1943. His GP, Dr Aubrey de Vere Bourke, father of former president Mary Robinson, had just heard of the wonder drug. His five-year-old patient had bacterial endocarditis, but the penicillin that might cure him was not yet “buyable”.

Dr De Vere Bourke, however, begged the Richmond Hospital in Dublin to send him a supply. It arrived by courier, with special instructions on how to administer injections every four hours. The child’s fever subsided and he went on to flourish.

“We all felt that the product of Sir Alexander’s research had saved a life,” he wrote in a special brochure on the Fleming memorial published by the Kilfian Development Association.

And thanks to that association, we also know how crucial the woman born in its parish was to that research.