The world's best loved, most important medication lay "hidden in plain sight" for 15 wasted years because of medicine's unconscious anthropocentric biases.
Only when Dr Martin Henry Dawson came upon slime-produced penicillin fresh from his explorations of "The Triumphs of the Weak" among oral commensal Strep bacteria, did a doctor see no problems of using impure natural products of a weak species (fungus) in the blood stream of that most superior species known as (Man).
The ideology of Modernity, all powerful from about the 1860s to the 1960s , basically denied the existence of overwhelming Acts of God and of Natural Catastrophes.
Nature and Reality was but a neutral Backdrop to a stage where Man - for good and for bad - was the only actor.
Injecting tiny amounts of weakened live or very dead (dangerous) germs into the human blood stream was perfectly acceptable because it merely stimulated that most marvelous work of Man : the human immune system.
Injecting (highly toxic) chemicals like arsenic-based Salvarsan into the human blood stream was also perfectly acceptable, because this medication that fought VD was totally man-made, a marvel of Man's intellect.
But injecting a non toxic, highly effective, highly selective anti bacterial like natural penicillin into the human blood stream to save lives was unacceptable, for 15 wasted years.
Why ?
I venture it was because all its marvels were the work of the smallest, weakest, "stupidest" beings on Earth - it was as odious to 1930s western culture as the idea of crediting negroes with intellects equal to that of whites.
Dawson's investigations of the "Survival of the Weakest" among the oral commensal Strep, how they 'twisted their shapes" constantly to evade the all powerful human immune system , made him see Life's "weakest' beings in a new light.
The rest is history, or rather, the rest is the dawning of the new Era of Post Modernity and Global Commensality.....
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