Life Changing Moment

Anecdote

Although I haven’t experienced many acts of kindness, I have heard about many of them. Therefore there is one story in particular which I have found truly interesting, and this story was a story of young Scottish farm boy, which significantly changed his life and made him one of the most notable Scottish biologist and pharmacologist of the century.

In his laboratory in 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered some bacteria-repelling mold in an uncovered culture of staphylococci. He identified the mold as penicillium notatu and published his findings in 1929, naming the substance Penicillin, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.

The story of Alexander Fleming began on one rainy and fogy evening at the turn of the 19th century. One evening a British Member of Parliament was hurrying through rain and fog in the Scottish countryside to deliver an important speech when his carriage ran off the road. With its wheels caught axle-deep in mud, the carriage simply could not be moved, even when the politician, though dressed in typically aristocratic attire, left the carriage to lend a hand, but he still couldn’t free the carriage.

Fortunately, a young Scottish farm boy happened to pass with a team of horses and volunteered to help, the British politician. With a great deal of effort, the carriage was finally pulled free and returned to the road. When the boy steadfastly refused to accept compensation for his help (or for his soiled clothes), the Englishman asked him about his plans for the future. The Scottish farm boy replied "I want to be a doctor". So impressed was the gentleman that he promptly offered to help him and, thanks to the Englishman’s generosity, the young boy attended university.

Therefore more than fifty years later, Winston Churchill (who was an English Prime Minister at that time) became dangerously ill with pneumonia (which was an infection which lead to death at...