The Draft (conscription) process tends to implicitly lay bare the utilitarian instrumentalism that form the true backbone of most civilizations - the values Christianity rose to oppose.
This is because how most ordinary people chose to interpret the results of draft board medicals.
They tend to regard only those people judged draft board 1As (as fit enough to fight for their country or to work in heavy war industries) are deemed worthy of full public praise and honour.
And ultimately, of being worthy of full food rations, decent housing and proper medical care --- if those three necessities of life run short, as they frequently do in war.
But those judged unfit are publicly mocked as '4Fs', the scorn of every teenage girl seeking a date and the sort of people whose life-threatening illness is left on the back burner of "Code Slow", because that illness is judged 'not a military priority'.
On Draft registration Day, October 16th 1940, Dr Martin Henry Dawson choose to oppose those instrumentalist values head on.
He choose that date to give very first ever injections of life-saving antibiotics.
But not to 1A youths.
Instead, to two young men judged to be the 4Fs of the 4Fs.
These two young patients were dying of invariably fatal SBE (the form of endocarditis that made Rheumatic Fever the leading killer of the young before penicillin).
SBE is a disease mostly of the poor and of minorities.
Treating it was often regarded as a form of Social Medicine --- and thus was highly suspect in the eyes of many isolationist members of the American medical fraternity.
That was because treating it - or going to the defence of Poland or Belgium - meant selflessly helping people outside their own religious, economic and ethnic community.
It meant walking the Christ-like walk on Monday instead of just doing the talk on Sunday.
In the Fall of 1940, conservative and isolationist members of the medical community seized upon the interventionalists' talk of getting the country ready for war.
They manipulated that talk of war preparation to urge the need to divert resources towards War Medicine for 1A youth (particularly in light of the upcoming Draft Registration process planned for October 16th).
And away from the left wing's emphasis on helping those sick among the poor and minorities (Social medicine) --- the likely majority of those judged 4F.
But what were the moral values that Americans would be dying to defend if they went to war against Hitler ?
Were they not the moral values that said all humans should be treated equally ?
The moral values that said human beings were not to be regarded as mere instruments for the larger collectivity - to be tossed aside like used condoms when they were no longer useful ?
Dawson certainly felt so - but it would be years later before even a bare majority of his fellow Americans would agree ...
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