Born in Cork, Ireland, Pulvertaft served in the First World War before undertaking a medical education at Trinity College, Cambridge, and St. Thomas's Hospital, London.
During his time abroad, he developed methods for local production of penicillin and treated Winston Churchill during his illness in Tunisia.
After returning from military service, he studied physiology at Trinity College, Cambridge and trained in medicine at St. Thomas's Hospital, London.
[1] During the Second World War, Pulvertaft served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel.
There, beginning in 1942, he conducted early studies on the effect of penicillin on war wounds, and developed methods to produce a crude form of the drug locally to supplement the small supplies received from Britain.
[2] In December 1943, Pulvertaft was summoned to Bizerta to attend to Winston Churchill during a severe bout of pneumonia;[3] he set up a makeshift laboratory in the prime minister's villa and monitored his blood results daily for a week.
[8] Pulvertaft became president of the Association of Clinical Pathologists in 1953 and was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1962.