If you are Jewish and your family was from Greater NYC , in particular from the Bronx between the 1910s and the 1960s , I could really really use your help
The patient initially intended to receive history's first ever penicillin shot was Aaron Leroy Alston from St Nicholas Ave in Harlem.
But when Charles Aronson arrived at NYC's CUMC hospital with the same disease (SBE - a form of endocarditis) just before the historical first injection began, he was added in at the last moment.
So both young men shared in that historic 'first in the world' penicillin shot , on October 16th 1940.
When Alston died and Aronson went home cured of SBE, a third man - a private (full paying) patient named George Milton Conant from Middletown in upstate New York - got the penicillin intended for Alston.
I have located the families of Alston and Conant , so now only Aronson's relatives remain to be found .
(We know nothing at all of the fourth and fifth patient in this historic series of penicillin cases.
An eyewitness to their treatment, bacteriologist Dr Gladys Hobby (part of the small four person team involved in making and using this early hospital-made medication) wrote a book on early penicillin thirty years later.
She evidently found nothing in her memory or in hospital records worth recounting of these two SBE patients in her book (Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge).
We know only that they were almost certainly males, that they was suffering from SBE endocarditis and that they probably died sometime in 1941 -- probably at CUMC.)
Here is what we know for certain about Charles Aronson - followed by what we can surmise about him.
He was born in 1913 and soon demonstrated that he was both (A) extraordinarily susceptible to death-dealing diseases caused by strep bacteria and (B) very capable of repeatedly fighting them off.
Dr Dawson, his penicillin doctor, does not detail all of Charles' very complicated medical record but shows enough to prove my claim.
For at least six times he snatched himself out of death's jaws.
In 1921, at age eight, he has full blown acute Rheumatic Fever.
His immune system over-reacted to strep throat by damaging his heart valves and temporarily giving him arthritis and attacking his nerve and brain cells , so called chorea, a fairly severe neurological condition thought to eventually resolve itself.
In 1926, age 13, Aronson gets severe sleeping sickness (a la Oliver Sacks and L-dopa) - a disease now believed to also be an auto-immune over-reaction to strep throat.
Again it did not kill him but leaves him with a severe post-sleeping sickness Parkinson's syndrome which he also survives.
In 1940 he gets his first bout of SBE endocarditis , a disease of mouth strep bacteria settling in and destroying damaged heart valves caused by Rheumatic Fever.
It then was usually considered to kill 99 out every 100 patients. But - once again - with a little penicillin and a lot of sulfa drugs he survives !
In 1944 he gets SBE again , survives it with much more of Dr Dawson's penicillin only to get a severe life-threatening stroke that leaves him paralyzed.
Again he survives and is alive two years later (in a chronic care hospital).
He doesn't appear on the indexed NYC death registry up to its close-off in 1948 and I can find no further trace of him.
Because Dawson had not been involved in endocarditis research before Alston and Aronson, he couldn't have been the type of doctor to attract patients from far and near.
Instead he was just a relatively newly promoted middle level doctor now allowed to look after one (male) public ward without too much heavy hand from his superiors.
Its non-paying patients usually were relatively poor and as a result tended to come from a catchment area just a few miles around CUMC --- so their equally poor relatives could visit them easily and still sleep at home at night.
In 1940 that catchment area meant (A) then mostly black Harlem (Alston) and (B) then mostly Jewish Bronx (Aronson).
Or so it seems to me.
Dr Dawson's notes on him shows a detailed knowledge of Aronson's post-hospital care in 1940-1941 and again in 1944 and again in 1944-1945 , which suggests he was living close enough to Dawson at CUMC for the doctor to easily keep tabs on him.
This led me to seek any Charles Aronson born in 1913 and living in the greater NYC cum tri-state area in 1940 - conveniently also a federal census year.
You try this yourself, in archives.com etc.
I found just one - living on Vyse Avenue, Bronx - just a few miles from CUMC.
Father Alex (Alexander) , mother Olga - Jewish , in their fifties, from the former Russian Empire . She is a homemaker and he is a machine operator in a ladies cloak factory.
Charles has a brother Samuel who is born about 1919 and a sister Lillian born about 1914. Both work in a ladies belt factory.
Charles has been an office clerk and now is a teletype operator in a newspaper plant - he is working full time , getting more hours annually than the rest of the family.
We can consistently trace this family backwards through federal and state censuses till the turn of the century -they lived in Bronx for at least a half century.
But so far, a total dead end after 1940 for all five members.
A hint that a Samuel Aronson from the Bronx might have become a wartime merchant seaman - another hint that a Lillian Aronson from the Bronx never married .
Hints from the social security index that Alexander dies in 1971, Samuel in 1976 and Lillian in 1980 --- all in NYC .
The NYC death index shows an Alexander Aronson dying in Manhattan (at a Manhattan hospital ?) June 10 1947 aged 65 - birth 1887 - which also fits well.
I'd like to find someone who says that 'combining that unique medical history with that birth date and name --- my family knew of just such a Charles Aronson !'
And I'd like it soon - because next October 2015 is the 75th anniversary of history's first ever penicillin shots - and it would be extra nice if Aronson's relatives also joined Alston's relatives in receiving the accolades from around the world....
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