My mother was a physiotherapist who recounts topping the state in Biology for her Leaving Certificate in the late 1950's. She was accepted into Sydney University on a scholarship at 16 but was too young to begin physiotherapy, so she did a year of Arts first. She did very well in Zoology too. She was offered a place in medicine and says she was told it would take 14 years. Having no desire to commit to that, she chose physiotherapy instead.
Sometime in the early 1980s she came up with a treatment method that I still use to this day. When one of those annoying splits appeared at the corner of my mouth - not a regular thing but regular enough to know they take ages to heal, one time she told me to apply Canesten to it.
It was literally gone overnight.
Before the fungal contribution was routinely recognised, these splits commonly lingered. Managed with barrier ointments alone, they would persist for what felt like weeks, often cycling through cracking, partial healing and reopening with normal mouth movement. Without addressing the yeast involvement and inflammation, stable closure was difficult to achieve, so resolution would stretch into ten days or longer.
Mum told me it was the cortisone in it that gave it the boost. It turns out she was right on both counts. Angular cheilitis, the clinical name for those commissure fissures, is primarily a Candida infection, often with a bacterial co-infection. The antifungal targets the causes directly (anti-fungal and potential bacteria), while the corticosteroid resolves the inflammation. Used together, the result is fast and effective.
The product she was using must have been Canesten HC she just called it Canesten, but this definitely had the combination of clotrimazole and hydrocortisone. It has since been re-branded under the name Canesten Plus.
What makes this notable is the context. The Candida–angular cheilitis association existed in specialist dermatology literature from the 1960s and 70s, but it was not common knowledge in general practice or allied health at the time. Most people in that era would have reached for Vaseline or pawpaw ointment and waited and hoped.
My mother, in early-1980s, correctly identified (likely through trial and error) that angular cheilitis was a fungal process and applied it to a condition that was not widely codified as a standard indication for decades. This was not just happenstance, it was genuinely impressive clinical reasoning and something I have learnt from her not only in practice but by osmosis. "A pretty smart lady."