The story of how family members of one Nobel laureate twice saved the life of another was widely shared on the Internet: first, Fleming Sr. pulled young Churchill out of the quagmire, and then penicillin, discovered by his son, helped the British prime minister recover from pneumonia. We checked whether this really happened.

The story usually goes like this.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a Scottish farmer was returning home and passed by a marshy area. Suddenly he heard cries for help. The farmer rushed to help and saw a boy who was being sucked into its terrible abysses by the swamp slurry. The boy tried to climb out of the terrible mass of the swamp, but his every movement condemned him to quick death. The boy screamed in despair and fear. The farmer quickly cut down a thick branch, carefully approached and extended a saving branch to the drowning man. The boy got out to safety. He trembled, he could not stop crying for a long time, but the main thing was that he was saved!

“Let’s go to my house,” the farmer suggested to him. “You need to calm down, dry out and warm up.”
“No, no,” the boy shook his head, “my dad is waiting for me.” He's probably very worried.

Looking gratefully into the eyes of his savior, the boy ran away. In the morning, the farmer saw a rich carriage pulled by luxurious thoroughbred horses drive up to his house. A richly dressed gentleman came out of the carriage and asked:

“Were you the one who saved my son’s life yesterday?”
“Yes, I am,” answered the farmer.
- How much do I owe you?
- Don't offend me, sir. You don't owe me anything because I did what a normal person should have done.
- No, I can’t just leave it like that, because my son is very dear to me. Name any amount,” the visitor insisted.
“I don’t want to say anything more on this topic.” Goodbye,” the farmer turned to leave. And then his son jumped out onto the porch.
- Is this your son? - asked the rich guest.
“Yes,” the farmer answered proudly, patting the boy on the head.
- Let's do this. I will take your son with me to London and pay for his education. If he is as noble as his father, then neither you nor I will regret this decision.

Several years have passed. The farmer's son graduated from school, then from medical university, and soon his name became world famous as the name of the man who discovered penicillin. His name was Alexander Fleming.

Just before the war, the son of that same gentleman was admitted to one of the wealthy London clinics with a severe form of pneumonia. What do you think saved his life this time? Yes, penicillin, discovered by Alexander Fleming.

The name of the wealthy gentleman who educated Fleming was Randolph Churchill. And his son's name was Winston Churchill, who later became Prime Minister of England. Winston Churchill once said: “What you do will come back to you.”

This story also made it into print. publications with minor plot differences (in some versions, Churchill was rescued by young Fleming rather than his father). The earliest mentions of it can be found in 1943 - the same year when Churchill fell ill and recovered from pneumonia. For example, in the article “Fleming Saves Churchill,” which appeared in the monthly newsletter of the Indiana State Board of Health with a link to the Indianapolis Star newspaper.

Firstly, it’s easy to see that by the beginning of the 20th century (in 1901), one person involved in this story (Alexander Fleming) was 20 years old, and the other (Winston Churchill) was 27. So it’s difficult to call them boys. The father of the future British Prime Minister Randolph Churchill died in 1895, and the father of the future discoverer of penicillin, Hugh Fleming, died in 1888. Therefore, the plot of the story, if it had taken place, could only unfold in the second half of the 1880s, when Fleming Jr. reached school age. Actually, approximately the same time is mentioned in the note, a fragment of which we see above.

Secondly, young Alexander Fleming came from Scotland to London when he was 14, and for a long time did everything except medicine (polytechnic school, work in business, a clerk position, service in the Scottish regiment), and only then decided to take up medicine by entering medical school. Moreover, the sponsor of the studies was Alexander’s recently deceased uncle, who bequeathed £250 to his nephew, and not Winston Churchill’s father.

Further, there is no evidence of such actions on the part of the Churchills in the personal affairs and archives of the influential British family, as well as in all kinds of memoirs. And this is a family that was in the public eye long before Winston Churchill became prime minister, not to mention Britain's careful handling of financial matters.

The next inconsistency concerns the second part of the story. The fact is that when Churchill fell ill with pneumonia in 1943, he took a drug from the sulfonamide group, and not the antibiotic penicillin. It is believed that it was sulfapyridine (M&B 693), about which Churchill stated himself shortly after recovery:

“A wonderful M&B, which did not cause me any inconvenience, was used at the very beginning of the disease, and after a seven-day heat the enemy was driven back.”

True, the British Prime Minister immediately joked that M&B can also be deciphered as “Moran and Bedford” (the names of his doctors), but this is an obvious lyrical digression. One way or another, all authoritative sources say that the mention of penicillin in the publications of The Daily Telegraph and The Morning Post of December 21, 1943 was the result of an error. Penicillin had not yet become widespread at that time.

Well, Sir Alexander Fleming himself put an end to this story, who, having learned about the story of a miraculous double salvation spread by newspapers, in his letter to Andre Grazia called it “an amazing fable.” However, the inspiring text with the moral “What you do will come back to you” circulates around the world to this day.