Friday, March 13, 2015

Three of four pioneering SBE patients (first patients ever to be treated with penicillin injections) still alive at first published report

I know two* and believe possibly three of Martin Henry Dawson's first four SBE patients treated with the first ever injections of penicillin were still alive at the time of his May 5th 1941  paper on this project.
But none had shown a lasting benefit from receiving this new treatment for SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis - the then invariably fatal disease that made Rheumatic Fever a feared word for all parents).

That they received an indirect benefit is always possible and even likely - because we well know that a freshly uplifted mind assists the body to better fight off illnesses.

So Dawson was rightly low key in his public presentation, in regards to these four patients.

He only emphasized that repeated and varied penicillin injections did not harm them in any way.

This was a clear rebuke to the world's doctors for the 12 years of their collective neglecting to use penicillin injections to save countless millions of lives.

I see nothing in his published statement to indicate that all four patients had died at the time of his report - those historians who state that are simply wrong.

* Charles Aronson and George M Conant were certainly alive on May 5th. Aaron Leroy Alston had died January 25th 1941.

Amazingly, even the various doctors and nurses (cum eye witnesses) on the team could not recall anything of the fourth (almost certainly also male) patient, even a few short years later !

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