All wealth created by Middle Class !?

Yesterday's lie: all wealth created by the rich ; today's lie: all created by the middle class.

The truth is, at least in today's ideological culture, it takes big people's wealth and decisions, the middle people's managing the carrying out of these decisions and the back breaking labour of the smallest people, all to create new wealth.

(And I say all this as a left-leaning Green.)

The fact is that successful wealth creation, like everything else truly successful on Earth, requires a 'coalition of all talents' to come about, has always been true.

But today, all but the very richest and the very poorest claim to be middle class and as such, to be 'creating' all the wealth.

But when everybody is middle, nobody is middle - for what we would actually have then would be a single "uni-class", rather than a three class system.

Part of today's problem is a great reluctance to define the middle more accurately than a bit of vague hand waving, a la Mr Trudeau and his Liberal candidates, as I recently witnessed myself at a Halifax all-candidates debate.

One way, I suggest, to nail down the elusive jello that is the definition of "the middle class" would be to take a nation's median income (the income that one half of all tax-reporters earns more than and the other half earns less than) and combine the bottom 16.7% of those earning more that that median with the top 16.7% of those earning less than the median.

We would, I believe, then have the middle class defined simply as the middle third of all family income earners --- not whether they went to university and held a white collar job.

This doesn't deny the fact that well to do young black men in fancy cars will still be stopped and hassled by policemen in a way that extremely poor old white women riding the bus never would be.

Or deal with the reality that few women will ever end up being invited onto the boards of the Big Banks, even if they are extremely rich.

But income and such seemingly non-income related issues are truly united.

For possessing high income is a very good place to see the financial advantages of being part or all of a country's majority race, ethnicity, religion, marital status and political ideology groupings.

Just as low income usually reveals the disadvantages of not being part of some or all of these popular 'tokens' for obtaining really good education, housing, health care, police protection and jobs.

"small" patients defined

Now you might understand that when I say that Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project was made up of "small" patients, I don't mean "small" as in terms of age or size, but rather as small in terms of income and social status : power basically.

As in being basically powerless because they lacked it all : wrong race and religion and education level and income level and physical fitness level.

In the "military preparedness" world of medical America in the Fall of 1940, to be working class and black or Jewish and to be a SBE patient was to be about as powerless and worthless as one could be.

Partly because of their lack of income and because they lacked the right skin tone and religious faith.

But mostly because SBE was seen an invariably fatal, re-occurring, expensively chronic illness. Even if one SBE hospital patient was cured of one bout of the disease, it kept coming back until the patient died.

But it was the faint hope clause of the very occasional cure that kept patients and their families to keep coming to the top research hospitals, filling expensive beds instead of dying quietly and cheaply at home.

Because no doctor really believed the hospital had anything to do with the cure, SBE cures were like terminal cancer cures, an Act of God even to the non-believer.

And while most SBEs died of a a stroke caused by an embolism in another part of the body than the heart, the infection also slowly but surely and permanently reduce the effectiveness of the already damaged heart valve.

So even if Dawson did cure the SBEs, even permanently, the valve damage wouldn't allow them to fight as infantry.

This is why many in the medical elite were for denying any penicillin to the SBEs, even though it was the only thing that could cure this fatal disease, reserving scarce penicillin instead to errant husbands and boyfriends who had picked up a non-fatal dose of the clap overseas.

But Dawson felt that in a total war, virtually all work was useful war work and even those with damaged valves can still do lots of useful work.

Besides, if only wartime penicillin was as mass produced as Dawson had long argued for, it could be given in advance, in small amounts, to prevent those with damaged valves from every getting a serious bout of SBE (which usually ended requiring more penicillin than even a lifetime of preventive shots).

Then the SBEs, a plurality who were draft age young men as it happens, could go from being the most worthless in society, the 4Fs of the 4Fs, to potentially becoming prime 1A cannon fodder.

(A mixed blessing for sure !)

One wonders what would have happened if penicillin had turned out to be a cure for Polio, a disease particularly of the white middle class suburbs, rather than a cure for SBE and Rheumatic Fever, diseases of the inner city poor , minorities and immigrants ?

I doubt then it would have been denied the Polio sufferers, war or no war and I think Dawson figured this to be so as well.

SBE was medical Universes away from Dawson's area of medical expertise, but he decided to cure the SBEs because he wanted to make a moral and scientific case for widening 1940's narrow concepts of just who could be inside the human portfolio.

The trend was to reduce the portfolio only down to only the financially, socially and physically fit, but Dawson wanted the portfolio to be widely diverse as possible.

Just as he thought the small in the biological world - like the penicillin-producing penicillium, had much to offer Humanity, if we only but let them.

These ideas were seen as absurd then but are commonplace today.

We changed obviously and totally.

And it all had to start somewhere, sometime, with someone ....

Dr Martin Henry Dawson and the MORAL INVENTION of 4F penicillin ---- during a 1A war (PART 1)

Thalidomide has had 9 lives...

Is it truly unfair that only Paul Gelmo initially invented Sulfa-the-(useless)-chemical, but is was Gerhard Domagk , 25 years later, who won the Nobel prize for Sulfa?


Not in the eyes of  99.9999999% of contemporary (and very grateful) observers.  Because what Domagk invented was something called Sulfa-the-lifesaving-miracle.

Though you'd never notice from our "initial discovery" obsessed journalists, many, many important things were invented several times over.

Thalidomide is a particularly spectacular example : it had already had several medical applications ( with good successes but also very severe side effects that were kept secret) before it was promoted to cure morning sickness.

We all know the results that that particular application caused.

But, believe it or not, it is still in use - for forms of leprosy in particular, - and still being investigated for its ability to inhibit some tumours: new uses still being invented for an old "initial invention" .

AZT and carbolic acid were both much later "re-invented" when they were dragged out of the medical gutter and first used for the uses we best know them for today.

We don't - but we should - most highly honor those people who first put a product to its highest use, rather than merely honoring those who first invent or discover it as a mere substance.

Those who only honor  those who initially discover or invent something are unconscious devote disciples of Auguste Comte and his dogma of Positivism.

That school of thought, if it can be called that, sometimes assumes that the mere act of discovering or inventing something will also instantly inform that inventor/discoverer as to its many self-evident uses and to its self-evident highest possible use.

Anyone else who later does put it to such uses, in this view, was merely taking advantage of information that is open to all that gaze up the substance---- and hence not worthy of any honor.

Put like that, Positivism use in this case does seem childishly ridiculous - as many unstated assumptions often are - when they are more closely examined.

Most re-inventions are of a technological nature : something long thought capable of merely reducing the pain of leprosy turns out to actually - and unexpectedly - reduce the advance of the disease. ( In this case, the drug in question is thalidomide.)

But probably the most famous medicine and science story of all time also saw a substance re-evaluated for a new use , but for moral reasons.

A doctor's moral anger drove him to break a whole bunch of rules and norms to stick the first ever needle of (dirty) penicillin in a dying patient's arm : and the patient lived.

There had never been any technological barriers to putting Alexander Fleming's penicillium juice in a needle and sticking it in a patient's arm to save their life.

Not even to sticking penicillin into someone's arm to save them from invariably fatal Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis (the dreaded SBE).

Doctors and Scientists' objections to natural (impure) systemic penicillin were only ones of an aesthetic nature

The objections had only been quasi-aesthetic : in a modern scientific age, was it worth the risk to the dignity of the medical profession, to be seen sticking something seen as mostly dirt into the human bloodstream, even if it was in a worthy attempt to save the life of someone otherwise facing immediate death?

Many doctors, faced with lots of patients dying of an invariably fatal disease, will indeed throw a kitchen sink of oddball medical treatments at them, in the hope one will stick. SBE saw many such attempts.

But from September 1928 till October 1940, no doctor in the world ever stuck penicillin in someone's arm, to see if it might save their life --- for any disease. Amazing but true.

Since 2004, I have lived and breathed and dreamt why this might be so - and why the unlikely doctor who finally did so , Martin Henry Dawson, chose to break that mental barrier.

It matters because it is only his Penicillin (Penicillin-the-natural-systemic) that the world has used since 1940 - not Alexander Fleming's Penicillin-the-synthetic-antispetic or Howard Florey's Penicillin-the-synthetic-systemic.

It is his penicillin - and his penicillin only - that we use, but it was those two who got the Nobel Prizes for penicillin.

Dawson probably backed his way into penicillin - driven by his anger over the way that the "4F" in society were so quickly abandoned at the first opportunity --- in this case, in preparing to fight a war using the best "1As" in society.

His special area of interest - Rheumatic Fever (RF) - was mostly a disease of the poor, so the well-off donors to the cause of RF were largely motivated by pure altruism.

But it had been recently replaced (by the Fall of 1940) by Polio as the number one child health "Cause" for America's well off .

Polio deaths were far ,far outnumbered by RF deaths, but polio was a disease of the well off mainly, and this was the first evidence of a now common organization : the patients (families) self-help group : mothers going to door to door to find a cure for a disease that might hit their own children.

We generally think this is a good thing, but it is also another example of a society of individuals increasingly looking out for Number One.

In 1940,mighty  America collectively looked out for itself as Number One and did not come to the aid of about a dozen of Europe's small weak nations : Czechs, Poles, Danes , Belgians etc etc.

Dawson who had gone to war to help the people of little Belgium in 1915, was in agony - too old to fight, but also too principled to just sit back.

When he arrived in the Fall of 1940 back at his employer (Columbia University Medical School), he found that the research and teaching efforts were to be dialled back in social medicine (medicine to help the poor) and put into war medicine (making the armed forces better fighters).

By sheer coincidence, his fellow researcher, German Jewish refuge (and potential internment camp alien) Dr Karl Meyer, wanted to revenge himself upon another biochemist who he felt had downplayed Meyer's successes. This biochemist was also a German Jewish refuge and potential alien in an internment camp), Ernst Chain.

Both men were not evil or naive : they simply knew the best way to be kept out of a miserable internment camp in the event of war, was to be judged very useful by their anti-semitic hosts. So they were holding nothing back to avoid an internment camp for themselves and their families.

Meyer thought he was a far better biochemist than Chain (very true !) and could more quickly and easily synthesize penicillin  than Chain (very untrue !)

Would his friend, Dawson the bacteriologist and clinician, help out by testing the resulting product ?

Dawson read up on what little there was on penicillin and noticed its unique combination of extreme non-toxicity and extreme diffusiveness could possibly be the best shot in a long time to cure SBE.

Now SBE was usually a matter for the heart specialists (an elite in every hospital) and Dawson's main job was in an arthritis out-patient clinic (at the low end of  any hospital's pecking order).

Moreover, some people had made SBE their primary lifelong research and clinical interest and Dawson had never - as far as I can tell - written or spoken on SBE.

To barge into their area of expertise would be a disaster.

I can only presume that Dawson first suggested his idea to SBE and heart experts and then to his contacts at the big Drug Companies.

Only when none responded positively and he had two dying SBE patients in front of him, did he act.

Because he felt that penicillin might save their lives, he pulled out all stops and broke all the rules and norms, to try and save their lives --- with this urgency additionally fueled by his anger at how the 4Fs of society were now being treated.

SBEs, in a month of the first ever peacetime Draft registration ( an entire nation trying to find all the 1As in society), were everyone's 4Fs of the 4Fs : about the most useless to the war effort young males imaginable.

Many medical staff felt they'd only consume precious medical attention for months and then invariably die anyway.

So, when Dawson stuck that first ever penicillin needle into an SBE's arm on that first ever peacetime Draft Registration Day, I feel sure his first finger was cocked in the air while the other four were wrapped around the needle.

"Down goes the needle - and 'up yours' !!!!! " .....