Because Public Anniversaries tend to be marked in increments of 25 years after the event ( 25, 50, 75, 100 years later and so on) , big public events separated by a neat division of exactly 25 or 50 years apart tend to become quite linked in the public mind.
In Canada , because the two seminal events of nationality - Confederation in 1867 and the victory of the Canadian Corps at Vimy in 1917 - happened exactly 50 years apart , their celebrations always occur in the same year and are always mentally linked together as well.
Similarly , WWI (the war to end all wars) and WWII (its rematch) both began in the month of August exactly 25 years apart so these beginning anniversaries are always chronologically and mentally sadly linked together.
Like tens of thousands of young men and women world wide* , Dr Martin Henry Dawson symbolically started his military and medical career in high moral outrage on the morning of October 16 1915, when the newspaper story of nurse Edith Cavell's execution in Belgium first arrived on the world's breakfast tables.
On that date, he mentally stepped into the breech to help the weak and small of poor bleeding Belgium .
Exactly 25 years later, to the day, he did the same for the weak and small '4Fs of the 4Fs' in New York's charity wards whom he felt were being deliberately neglected under the excuse of the move towards war medicine and away from social medicine.
The injections of his hospital-made penicillin that he gave that day to a Negro and a Jew dying of (the then invariably fatal) subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) in a charity ward at Manhattan's Columbia University Medical Centre marked the beginnings of our current Age of Antibiotics.
On that exact same date, America conducted its first ever peacetime draft registration oriented to locating all of its 1A youth.
Those 1As were to benefit from the increased resources devoted to war medicine just as the 4Fs of the 4Fs were to suffer under the cuts to social medicine.
So I very much doubt the fact that Dawson birthed Penicillin-for-All (and our Age of Antibiotics) on the exact 25th anniversary of Cavell's murder in 'poor little Belgium' was in anyway purely coincidental.
So linked anniversaries indeed : October 16th 2015 will mark the 75 anniversaries of the Age of Antibiotics and America's draft registration process (which is also still going on) and of the 100th anniversary of Edith Cavell's execution becoming a conscience-awakening event around the world.
A busy day indeed ....
* Read Katie Pickles's great book "TRANSNATIONAL OUTRAGE" for a revealing look at just how fast and how hard the Cavell execution meme could hit in a pre-internet world that was nevertheless tightly connected by overseas telegraph cables and big city daily newspapers distributed everywhere by overnight trains.
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