In 1948, the Food and Drug Administration approved an antibiotic medication based on the discovery—bacitracin, after “Bacillus” and “Tracey,” a misspelling of the patient’s name.

Bacitracin is a polypeptide antibiotic that is chemically unrelated to neomycin. It inhibits bacterial cell wall synthesis. It is produced by Bacillus subtilis (Gehrig & Warshaw, 2008). Bacitracin ...