This was a time-consuming process that subjected the patient to agonizing pain because of the scrubbing procedure required before the application of the chemical dyes. At MGH, burns were treated with a new technique pioneered by Cope himself and refined by Bradford Cannon: soft gauze covered with petroleum jelly and boric acid ointment. Patients were kept on a closed ward and meticulous sterile technique was used in all patient care activities. A month later, at BCH, 40 of the initial 132 survivors had died, mostly from complications from their burns; at MGH, none of the 39 initial survivors died from their burns (7 died from other causes). As a result, the use of tannic acid as a treatment for burns was phased out as the standard. At MGH, intravenous sulfadiazine (a new drug which had only been approved for use in the US in August, 1941) was given to all patients as part of their initial treatment. At BCH, 76 patients received sulfonamides for an average of 11 days. Thirteen survivors of the fire were also among the first humans to be treated with the new antibiotic, penicillin. In early December Merck and Company rushed a 32-liter supply of the drug, in the form of culture liquid in which the "Penicillium" mold had been grown, from Rahway, New Jersey to Boston. These patients received 5,000 IU (roughly 2.99 mg) every 4 hours, a relatively tiny dose by today's standards, but at the time antibiotic resistance was rare and most strains of "Staphylococcus aureus" were penicillin-sensitive. The drug was crucial in preventing infections in skin grafts. According to the British Medical Journal:  Though bacteriological studies showed that most of the burns were infected, the second-degree burns healed without clinical evidence of infection and with minimal scarring. The deep burns remained unusually free of invasive infection. As a result of the success of penicillin in preventing infections, the US government decided to support the production and the distribution of penicillin to the armed forces. Erich Lindemann, an MGH psychiatrist, studied the families and relatives of the dead and published what has become a classic paper, "Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief", read at the Centenary Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in May 1944, and published in September of the same year. At the same time Lindemann was laying the foundation for the study of grief and dysfunctional grieving, Alexandra Adler conducted psychiatric observations and questionnaires over eleven months with more than 500 survivors of the fire, publishing some of the earliest research on post-traumatic stress disorder.