Without unfits and misfits, what you end up with is a group or society that fits together only all too well and that produces nothing but 100% group think and 100% group agreement : led by alpha male bosses and seconded sotto voce by timid yes-men.
Which in turn leads to such well known dangers such as the lemming or bandwagon effect, herd behavior, mob or crowd rule , right down into mindless conformity , cults and dictatorships.
WWII's dying were unlikely to ever get penicillin in the quantities needed but for the efforts of The Seven (misfits), led by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.
Even more unlikely would we have ever got the world's best, safest lifesaver at prices too cheap to meter but for The Seven's sturdy principle of Penicillin-for-All , even in , particularly in ,a Total War supposedly fought to the death against the ultimate evil which had divided the world into a few people worthy and most people unworthy of life ....
Friday, July 4, 2014
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Misfits : despite Allies, Penicillin-for-All
Elites physically and mentally fit but morally unfit ....
Morally, WWII was a truly sordid war where in all the world's nations (with just a few sturdy exceptions) only fought the Axis if the Axis attacked them first.
Certainly that was the case of the two biggest neutrals or non-interventionalists, the USSR and the USA ,but it applies to all but the British Commonwealth as well.
And even in the Commonwealth , in places like Eire, Quebec, Afrikaner South Africa, Congress India et al, hundreds of millions were unwilling to fight the Axis.
So it would not at all be true to say that WWII was fought by national leadership elites (the fittest of their nations by definition) who saw before them a stark choice : life-saving penicillin for all ---- or penicillin only for those Aryan enough or rich enough to have a right to it.
Only a handful of misfits saw both sides in that war as being on the wrong side of that stark choice and who then fought all out - morally - to see that victory was re-defined as Penicillin-for-All.
Just four years after the war's end, the Allied world - led by Britain and America - cheered to the rafters a film (THE THIRD MAN) that defined the ultimate villainy as being the Allies denying lifesaving penicillin to dying former Axis patients from the city of Hitler's youth.
I think Martin Henry Dawson would have quite liked that.....
Plentiphobia : fear of being overwhelmed by plenitude
"Too much information".
Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.
Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.
They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.
But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.
The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.
This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.
Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.
A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.
Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.
Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.
Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.
Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.
Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.
While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....
Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.
Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.
They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.
But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.
The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.
This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.
Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.
A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.
Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.
Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.
Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.
Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.
Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.
While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
"Inside Agitators" : rebuking the Allies and Axis to bring us Penicillin-for-All
Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his wife Marjorie Granger Dawson, together with leading industrialist Floyd Odlum and doctors Thomas Hunter and Dante Colitti were - socially - 'insiders' of a sort in the Anglo-American establishment running the Allied side of WWII.
But all five were also physically handicapped in some significant way and so had an empathy for what others - establishment outsiders with physical and intellectual handicaps - were experiencing as the Allies took on aspects of the Nazis' harshly utilitarian approach to winning a Total War.
Physical and more importantly moral misfits to the civilized world's eugenic consensus , they agitated and acted up on behalf of those judged as unfit and unworthy by Allied and Axis alike.
But as 'insiders' their 'outsider' criticisms was distinctly harder to refute than if they had been social outsiders as well.
It would make a better story to paint them as total outsiders and totally selfless but the facts don't allow it - they were selfless insiders and that is good enough...
But all five were also physically handicapped in some significant way and so had an empathy for what others - establishment outsiders with physical and intellectual handicaps - were experiencing as the Allies took on aspects of the Nazis' harshly utilitarian approach to winning a Total War.
Physical and more importantly moral misfits to the civilized world's eugenic consensus , they agitated and acted up on behalf of those judged as unfit and unworthy by Allied and Axis alike.
But as 'insiders' their 'outsider' criticisms was distinctly harder to refute than if they had been social outsiders as well.
It would make a better story to paint them as total outsiders and totally selfless but the facts don't allow it - they were selfless insiders and that is good enough...
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
The MORAL miracle of WWII's Penicillin-for-All
In the context of WWII's values (on both sides) , the reality* of wartime Penicillin-for-All truly was a miracle - a moral miracle.
Correspondingly, it really is no surprise that this miracle could only have been conceived by a bunch of 'misfits' doing a moral end-run around the 'normal' elite of America and Britain.
For scientifically (sic) dividing the world into the healthy and fit versus the misfits and unfits was simply the normal way of thinking, in the era of modernity, for almost anyone with an education.
Luckily - and incidentally decisively refuting the idea of the worthlessness of the 'abnormal' - a few people outside the blessed circle of normalcy could see inside it and see its flaws.
They then laboured to successfully expose them.
With the acceptance of the reality of wartime Penicillin-for-All (marked above all by the critical and popular success of 1949's The Third Man and by the 1945 defeat of the anti-penicillin-for-all British Conservatives) our own era of post-modernity and its privileging of diversity and variety began ...
* The Atlantic Charter talked the same talk of Penicillin-for-All but that's all it was - just talk - the various Allies on various issues had absolutely no intentions of taking it seriously - during or even after the war.
That the moral concept of Penicillin-for All was put into practise during a total war in 1943-1944 truly is astounding - spelling the death knell of Modernity's values even before the revelations of Auschwitz in 1945-1946 ....
Correspondingly, it really is no surprise that this miracle could only have been conceived by a bunch of 'misfits' doing a moral end-run around the 'normal' elite of America and Britain.
For scientifically (sic) dividing the world into the healthy and fit versus the misfits and unfits was simply the normal way of thinking, in the era of modernity, for almost anyone with an education.
Luckily - and incidentally decisively refuting the idea of the worthlessness of the 'abnormal' - a few people outside the blessed circle of normalcy could see inside it and see its flaws.
They then laboured to successfully expose them.
With the acceptance of the reality of wartime Penicillin-for-All (marked above all by the critical and popular success of 1949's The Third Man and by the 1945 defeat of the anti-penicillin-for-all British Conservatives) our own era of post-modernity and its privileging of diversity and variety began ...
* The Atlantic Charter talked the same talk of Penicillin-for-All but that's all it was - just talk - the various Allies on various issues had absolutely no intentions of taking it seriously - during or even after the war.
That the moral concept of Penicillin-for All was put into practise during a total war in 1943-1944 truly is astounding - spelling the death knell of Modernity's values even before the revelations of Auschwitz in 1945-1946 ....
Misfits Acting Up : despite the Allies , Penicillin-for-All
What many call Eugenicide I call Plenticide.
That is because I think the same mass impulse among the educated of past years to cleanse the world of misfits (culminating in the mass murder of Slavs, Jews and Romas) also sought at the same time to rid it of all types of non-human "pests".
It was all part of the complex and unconscious reaction formed by a truly unfortunate coincidence thrown up in the late Victorian Era.
The 1870s' arrival of the machine cum chemical age seemed to negate the age-old need for human, plant and animal slaves - the sort of slaves the US Civil War had just been fought over.
Particularly as new strides in public health was greatly reducing death rates and thus visibly making the world an increasingly overcrowded place : lots of both 'first-rate' (masters) and 'second-rate' (slaves) people.
Yet in the same period, new advances in global transportation and communications also overwhelmed the affluent and educated with a vivid new sense of the plenitude of the world's cultures, languages, species, strains , habitats --- too too much way too too soon.
The machine world suddenly seemed to have far too many species and cultures - most of them seemingly inefficient as compared to the new Scientism Man.
Too many people at the same times the world seemingly could get by on a lot less - thanks to machines powered by the energy of fossil plants and animal 'slaves'.
Eugenics was thus born - at this exact time, in this exact place - as a result of this unconscious reaction among the affluent.
As was born the Gospel of Germs and the Gospel of Soap/Cleanliness, and new interest in Scientific Pest Control.
Immigration controls, culturalization campaigns against minorities and immigrants in schools, campaigns for greater purity in food and chemicals, synthetic replacements for everything natural - starting with food.
I could pile up the connected list of reactions for days at a time - but not today !
But note that they all started up right after the 1870s to blend together to produce what we now call the streamlined* age of Modernity.
*Streamlined = Eugenics = Plenticide = tidy up = clean up = purify, all basically meaning the same thing in this context ...
That is because I think the same mass impulse among the educated of past years to cleanse the world of misfits (culminating in the mass murder of Slavs, Jews and Romas) also sought at the same time to rid it of all types of non-human "pests".
It was all part of the complex and unconscious reaction formed by a truly unfortunate coincidence thrown up in the late Victorian Era.
The 1870s' arrival of the machine cum chemical age seemed to negate the age-old need for human, plant and animal slaves - the sort of slaves the US Civil War had just been fought over.
Particularly as new strides in public health was greatly reducing death rates and thus visibly making the world an increasingly overcrowded place : lots of both 'first-rate' (masters) and 'second-rate' (slaves) people.
Yet in the same period, new advances in global transportation and communications also overwhelmed the affluent and educated with a vivid new sense of the plenitude of the world's cultures, languages, species, strains , habitats --- too too much way too too soon.
The machine world suddenly seemed to have far too many species and cultures - most of them seemingly inefficient as compared to the new Scientism Man.
Too many people at the same times the world seemingly could get by on a lot less - thanks to machines powered by the energy of fossil plants and animal 'slaves'.
Eugenics was thus born - at this exact time, in this exact place - as a result of this unconscious reaction among the affluent.
As was born the Gospel of Germs and the Gospel of Soap/Cleanliness, and new interest in Scientific Pest Control.
Immigration controls, culturalization campaigns against minorities and immigrants in schools, campaigns for greater purity in food and chemicals, synthetic replacements for everything natural - starting with food.
I could pile up the connected list of reactions for days at a time - but not today !
But note that they all started up right after the 1870s to blend together to produce what we now call the streamlined* age of Modernity.
*Streamlined = Eugenics = Plenticide = tidy up = clean up = purify, all basically meaning the same thing in this context ...
Acting Up : sometimes you must , even if you can't
An provocative way to look at WWII is to say that its deep structure , beneath and beyond all its confusing surface variety of activities, could be boiled down to a Tyranny of the Fit against the Unfit.
'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.
In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.
And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.
But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.
And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.
We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.
But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?
I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....
'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.
In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.
And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.
But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.
And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.
We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.
But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?
I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....
Monday, June 30, 2014
Acting Up : even if you can't , sometimes you simply must
This story* is not a conventional adventure story --- where the hero and heroine are always handsome and physically fit.
Fit is important, because doing the right thing always seems to be both physically and emotionally arduous.
But in this story, the villains are villains precisely because they think of themselves as handsome and physically fit.
And based on that slender intellectual reed, they then go on to act like they regard anyone who isn't handsome and fit as having no right to be treated as a full member of the human family.
So our heroes and heroines this time out are not conventionally handsome or physically fit - far far far from it , in spades .
Rather they are pushed to become our reluctant heroes and heroines precisely because they have a lifetime of experience being seen 'weak' and 'damaged' or 'defective' and can feel deep inside just how damaging the labelling of half of humanity as defective could be.
The bad people in this story advocated and practise Plenticide but didn't see it as any sort of "cide' or murder.
They were merely weeding out and tidying up the very messy natural garden that the last owner of on planet earth ( God) had left behind.
Where in our current post-modern era we seek out variety and regret the loss of biological variety in the disappearing rain forest , this earlier era sought to reduce all the excess variety as clutter - for example , ultimately seeking to replace all natural food with a few synthetic pills !
When The Seven chose to Act Up way back then, they began the shift from that era of errors to our present day...
* : World War Two
Fit is important, because doing the right thing always seems to be both physically and emotionally arduous.
But in this story, the villains are villains precisely because they think of themselves as handsome and physically fit.
And based on that slender intellectual reed, they then go on to act like they regard anyone who isn't handsome and fit as having no right to be treated as a full member of the human family.
So our heroes and heroines this time out are not conventionally handsome or physically fit - far far far from it , in spades .
Rather they are pushed to become our reluctant heroes and heroines precisely because they have a lifetime of experience being seen 'weak' and 'damaged' or 'defective' and can feel deep inside just how damaging the labelling of half of humanity as defective could be.
The bad people in this story advocated and practise Plenticide but didn't see it as any sort of "cide' or murder.
They were merely weeding out and tidying up the very messy natural garden that the last owner of on planet earth ( God) had left behind.
Where in our current post-modern era we seek out variety and regret the loss of biological variety in the disappearing rain forest , this earlier era sought to reduce all the excess variety as clutter - for example , ultimately seeking to replace all natural food with a few synthetic pills !
When The Seven chose to Act Up way back then, they began the shift from that era of errors to our present day...
* : World War Two
Sunday, June 29, 2014
Why it took the efforts of seven "lives unworthy of full life" to finally bring penicillin to the rest of us ...
The selfless five of The Seven
Regard closely , if you will, the personal circumstances of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, his teacher wife Marjorie Dawson, doctors Dante Colitti and Thomas Hunter, industrialist Floyd Odlum.
For none of these five (out of the total of seven key - and handicapped - individuals who brought us all penicillin) actually needed penicillin in the early 1940s .
All would have had extra-privileged access to the scarce medication if they had needed it.
So their actions were purely of agape love for others, rather than as part of a patients' advocacy group.
So why were these few , a mere one out of five hundred million of all the people living on the planet in 1943 - so willing to "Act Up" to see that all those dying for lack of wartime penicillin should receive some of the new lifesaver ?
I am convinced that they responded personally - at a deep empathetic level - against the then fashionable eugenic arguments about why the lives of SBE patients were intrinsically unworthy of scarce lifesaving penicillin.
To be Modern was to be Eugenic
It was then fashionable in that besotted - modern - eugenic - age to argue that these 4Fs , born with intellectual and physical challenges and even those who acquired them later in life, were unworthy of the full lives granted to those who was 1A in mind and body.
(This intellectual net thus swept up almost all those (poor or minority) members of society who caught infectious diseases by claiming they had a defective gene that made them get these diseases.)
These "handicapped" or "crippled" members of society might be denied an education, or an fair access to jobs or marriage and children or medical care.
Ultimately some of these handicapped were even denied access to Life itself - murdered by an direct injection as in Nazi Germany or murdered by quiet but deliberate indirect neglect --- as in the rest of the world.
The then popular prejudice - at both the official and popular level against people who wore glasses ("four eyes") - a category that ultimately most of us fits into at some time in our lives - suggests some of the strength of this 'modern era' insanity seeking impossible physical perfection.
Or take "The Greatest Canadian Ever", Baptist minister and socialist politician Tommy Douglas.
He is regarded as the Father of Canadian Medicare - a lifetime spent promoting that cornerstone of Canada's present day egalitarian values : full medical care provided to all Canadians regardless of their social status.
But surprisingly, eighty years ago, this young University of Chicago PhD student in sociology (and at the height of the Great Depression in particularly badly hit Saskatchewan !) still chose an eugenic over a political or economic explanation to account for why so many were living on welfare in his home town of Weyburn.
His highly divisive eugenic values was probably entirely typical of his age group and class in the Canada of the 1930s, just as his later egalitarian values were equally in tune with the egalitarian Canada of the 1980s.
In the 1930s, Douglas seemed to regard almost any physical handicap in the children he visited as something not just genetic and eternal but as a marker of darker moral failings.
But when this net of "handicapped-ness as a symbol for useless and less than fully human" was cast so wide, most should have said to themselves, "they're coming after the SBEs today, but they'll be after all those with congenital or acquired chronic defects tomorrow."
But the world did not - but these five did.
Dawson and his wife had met as fellow wallflowers at a college dance in the dance-obsessed Twenties.
Dawson had been a champion basketball guard as a teen but being twice severely wounded during the war had left him missing the use of one Great Toe and with restricted movement in one arm and shoulder.
Marjorie had been born with a relatively common defect in one hip.
The severity of the condition varies greatly - in her case , despite the best operations money could buy in the Edwardian age - she was left with severe restrictions on her movements , sometimes requiring the use of a cane.
But she was intellectually smarter than others and emotionally livelier as well - but these bonuses didn't compensate for her physical failings in this physical perfection obsessed age.
Dawson had acquired, in late 1940, a severe and probably quickly terminal case of Myasthenia Gravis , then a horribly debilitating chronic disease.
Death usually came from respiratory 'crises' and so he often needed a wheelchair and oxygen assist to get about.
Floyd Odlum had been healthy all his life until his worries over the course of the war gave him an unusual severe case of chronic rheumatoid arthritis , so severe that for the rest of his life only his time in a warm pool ever gave him body and mind some relief.
He walked with crutches, mostly , from then on.
Thomas Hunter had severe polio at an early age - leaving him paralyzed from the waist down and requiring the use of crutches.
Despite this, he was not just a star pupil but also very active in student affairs - including coxing race-winning crews at Harvard and Cambridge.
Dante Colitti came from a poor Italian family living in the crowded Lower East Side - he got TB as a child that went into his spine , leaving him a hunchback and requiring braces and crutches.
He spent years in hospitals and came to admire doctors and their roles.
His hunchback, his Catholicism and his Italian origin held him back in that many-prejudiced age , but he persisted and became a surgeon , though he eventually found he was more useful and much more valued as an unusually skilled anesthetist.
Noteworthy is that none of these five had a normal vocational reason to be involved in penicillin and in treating a heart condition .
They all stepped out of their comfort zone to do good , I believe , because they knew personally what it was like to be handicapped and to feel society's eyes upon them.
And they could all feel in their own bones just how the poor SBEs felt when they were handed their death sentences by an uncaring and eugenic Allied medical establishment ....
Saturday, June 28, 2014
"Acting Up" : how we got wartime penicillin, despite the Allies ...
Wartime penicillin (discovered in 1928) actually had two miracles.
The first miracle was how the Allies managed to keep new of penicillin's wondrous lifesaving abilities from their own wartime public for so long.
The other miracle was that the Allies managed to produce at least some penicillin - despite their own best efforts - before the war's end.
Bruce Springsteen reminds us that blind faith in our leaders - be they political , military or medical - can get us all killed.
And this was as true during WWII as it still is today.
There are times when the only moral thing to do - the only patriotic thing to do - even during a Total War - is to Act Up.
And because seven cripples had the courage to Act Up over the immoral weaponization of wartime penicillin, the whole world got cheap abundant non-patented penicillin....
The first miracle was how the Allies managed to keep new of penicillin's wondrous lifesaving abilities from their own wartime public for so long.
The other miracle was that the Allies managed to produce at least some penicillin - despite their own best efforts - before the war's end.
Bruce Springsteen reminds us that blind faith in our leaders - be they political , military or medical - can get us all killed.
And this was as true during WWII as it still is today.
There are times when the only moral thing to do - the only patriotic thing to do - even during a Total War - is to Act Up.
And because seven cripples had the courage to Act Up over the immoral weaponization of wartime penicillin, the whole world got cheap abundant non-patented penicillin....
Manhattan's OTHER project : how seven lives 'unworthy of life' improved the lives of seven billion of us ...
WWII as a triumph of small science
Conventional accounts of the atomic Manhattan Project and of the development of wartime penicillin strongly emphasize that they were the first of what has come to be called Big Science --- something that is taken as the norm for today's science.
But in fact much of the science of the atomic bomb and atomic energy was actually done by very small teams working with very little money and home made equipment - it was the engineering aspects that were the truly massive part of that particular project.
With regards to wartime penicillin it was much the same : small science , not Big Science.
One must remember that wartime penicillin's powerful impact came not merely from its unique scientific characteristics --- ie that it was first (and to some extent, the last) broad spectrum but non-toxic bacterial killer.
Its biggest impact really came from the fact that wartime penicillin G was unexpectedly inexpensive and and unexpectedly widely available for such a potent lifesaver.
This is because a very cheap and abundant (because it was non-patented) lifesaver could save far more lives than any very expensive patent-limited lifesaver could ever do.
And then we all benefit.
Because by a sort of a global herd immunity when even the poorest people living in the most remote places on Earth are cured of killer strains of disease, we in wealthier places tend also to never see those diseases again.
This is because such diseases have been around seemingly for ever as endemic diseases --- all by surviving in geographic cum cultural pockets, among those considered too poor or too worthless to treat properly medically.
So the true miracle of wartime penicillin was more moral than scientific in nature.
Its miracle lay in the unexpected success of a small band of seven physically challenged individuals in convincing the American public that penicillin should be made available to all Americans who need it to survive.
Convincing them that their Allied leaders should not just producing a small amount of penicillin as secretively as possible, just so they could use it as a weapon of war to give D-Day's front line Allied commanders an advantage over their Nazi counterparts.
The Allies had - because of dysgenic fears - far too few infantrymen to really defeat the Nazis or the Japanese in a hard fight.
(And the few infantrymen they did have were more 4F than 1A, in comparison to the average military serviceman !)
The Allies instead hoped to quickly re-use most of their relatively small forces of infantry when they got moderately severely wounded - by employing advanced medical efforts - so their frontline rifleman could get a second and third crack at being killed in combat.
(As a member member of an reserve infantry unit, may I quickly say ---- "Oh joy !!")
If these medical efforts failed , it meant many more 'decent, middle class, white, Protestant men' would end up dying in the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) and this was seen as an eugenic mistake that the Allied cultural elite was not about to repeat from WWI.
If their scheme worked, they would keep the best of their breed safe from the trenches and still have a big advantage over the enemy.
Because , by contrast, they figured the average German infantry, when moderately severely wounded , was out for half a year - while the average Japanese under such circumstances simply died of their wounds.
Their thinking was that that much bigger Axis armies, with much of their troops in hospital beds, couldn't defeat assaults from much smaller Allied Corps , if the Corps had most of their troops in fighting trim.
Because the medically convincing details of the lifesaving results of penicillin were only known by the Allied medical establishment , the hard pressed Nazis and Japanese hadn't given the development of penicillin (which they had read about in the public scientific literature) much of a priority.
If these lifesaving successes could continue to be kept out of the medical and public media until D-Day , only the Allies would have abundant patented (secret) penicillin to return their wounded to combat much quickly than had traditionally been the case.
D-Day would spill the beans soon enough , but long before the Germans and Japanese chemists had broken the penicillin patent and gone into mass production, the war would be over.
The Seven Crips
The seven argued - by contrast - that the war to defeat Hitler was as much moral as military.
Germany was the moderately big schoolyard bully and Poland was the moderately small schoolyard victim.
Hitler had gotten away with his bullying because the rest of the world - which vastly out-numbered and out-gunned him, had not intervened against his bullying but instead talked up the virtues of non-intervention in European 'schoolyard squabbles'.
Not my words - rather the shameful words of endless newspaper editorials and 'statesmen' the world over in the early 1940s.
The seven said we must not just talk The Atlantic Charter talk (the Allied declaration that said all - even the smallest and weakest and most valueless - had an absolute right to life and security).
The seven said we must make sure our own Allied actions don't echo the Nazi's counterclaims.
(That the strongest are morally justified in denying the weakest and smallest the right of life and succour.)
But instead the Allies were actually and openly "Code Slowing" tens of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor and minority people.
People with the SBE version of endocarditis - SBE being the final - hitherto terminal - disease that made childhood Rheumatic Fever such a terror.
The SBEs were considered to be so useless that they couldn't even be recruited to work in the war industries , let alone be in the military.
So no wartime penicillin was to be wasted on them and they were to be left to die --- for two reasons.
The unimportant reason was that currently penicillin was still in limited supply and the SBE were below the lowest in priority, particularly as some cases of SBE did consume extremely large amounts of that limited penicillin.
The important reason was that SBE was regarded as the "Gold Standard" of intractable infections.
Any evidence that this new fangled 'penicillin' stuff could actually cure this famously most incurable of infectious diseases would tend to break the whole story of wartime penicillin wide open in the American news media.
And nothing (to paraphrase an old old adage of the pop music business) only 'breaks local' in America .
A big news story in America becomes a big news story worldwide - including in Japan and Germany, via friendly neutral diplomats in Washington.
The seven may have realized that while the Allied medical establishment won't easily bend on the issue of SBE and penicillin, it was also a hard position for the Allied elite to sustain publicly.
Letting young kids die needlessly merely on account of being judged 'life unworthy of life' would be a hard moral sell for the Allies warring against evil governments that basically did exactly the same thing.
Dr Dawson, the leader of the seven , decided to liberate ie 'steal' government controlled penicillin to successfully save five young women dying of SBE but his success was written out of the official report indicated penicillin test results.
And there it might of ended.
But for the fact that his successes and how this most unlikely of heroes was driven to steal to save lives had become the stuff of legend in New York's wartime-strengthened gossip grapevine among it tens of thousands of medical staffers.
A former patient of his, a fellow crip and fellow doctor named Dante Colitti , decided to emulate Dawson and saw to it that the fount of Yellow Journalism, Citizen Hearst's newspaper empire , covered his efforts from gavel to gavel.
The story - involving a terminally ill and terminally cute two year old toddler named Patty Malone - broke wide , broke stateside, broke worldwide.
Soon defeated in the court of public opinion by the formidable Doctor Mom, the Allies really opened the penicillin floodgates wide when Dawson's friend among Big Pharma , John L Smith of Pfizer , took up his cause and started producing it at levels a million times higher than Pfizer had done earlier.
Small science ?
Well the seven cripples had no government grants, had strong enemies rather than warm friends in high places and were - obviously - in poor physical vigour.
That they nevertheless brought the massed Allied governments - during a Total War - to their knees shows us all what sheer raw moral courage can do.
And that when we see those physically and mentally challenged as 'lives useless of life', they are anything but ....
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Oct 16 '40 : Dies Mirabilis , marking 75 years of Antibiotics and Draft registration
I might just do an Erik Larson and interweave Jack Kerouac and Martin Henry Dawson's experiences of that Dies Mirabilis, October 16th 1940, together in one book - and not separately as two books ...
Oct 16 '40 : for Jack Kerouac, a 1A's first ever Draft registration day was eventful ...
October 16th 1940 : Dies Mirabilis
As a husky football player from a poor family , John "Jack" Kerouac was not earning his usual drinking money that day by being part of the team of Columbia U football players hauling about tins of graphite or uranium for Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi's forerunner to the Manhattan Project .
Yes this gridiron hero drank.
Lord he drank , drank mostly to drown out memories of the painful prolonged death of his saintly slightly older brother Gerald, from Rheumatic Fever in 1926 when Jack was only four.
Rheumatic Fever - and not the rather more famous polio - was far-and-away the leading killer of school age children, but it tended to kill the poor mostly .
(And because New York book editors are themselves rarely poor, we don't hear much about this Sword of Damocles that hung over America's families for almost a hundred years.)
So with no tins of uranium to muck about, our future Poster Boy of the Beat Generation was instead enthusiastically obeying his legal requirement to be part of the historic registration process for America's first ever peacetime draft .
After registering * in the morning - he was certain to be classed 1A at any subsequent medical - job two for our future Beat that day was to go off in the afternoon to play his second ever football match for Columbia - and to promptly break a leg tibia bone.
Coach Furey didn't take the leg break seriously, told him to 'walk it better' - so Kerouac never went to Columbia university's own hospital , the Presbyterian, to have it checked out properly.
So - and rather ironically - he never got to meet Dr Martin Henry Dawson there that day , busy succouring some of NYC's 4Fs of the 4Fs ( sufferers from the endocarditis complications of childhood Rheumatic Fever) by giving them history's first ever antibiotics.
That broken leg - plus his string of arguments with his head coach Lou Little - doomed Kerouac's football scholarship to Columbia and he soon dropped out.
This 1A exemplar of American manhood went on instead to write novels and poetry , join the Merchant Marine and US Navy , drink lots more, travel, find world fame - and die young at age 47...
* Jack was only 18 in 1940, so it doesn't appear he even could be registered - the lower age limit for draft registration was 21 in 1940. But Kerouac's biographers insist he did register too - he certainly joined his slightly older classmates in enjoying this big moment on campus - but actually registering ? -- Who knows for sure !
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Oct 16 '40 and the 4Fs : Draft rejects them , Antibiotics succours them
I will have two books in my 'Agape Penicillin' series out in early 2015 -- they will be published simultaneously and hopefully reviewed together...
"Oct 16 '40 -- 75 years of Draft Registration : rejecting the 4Fs"
"Oct 16 '40 -- 75 Years of Antibiotics : succouring the 4Fs"
Aaron Alston - Antibiotics pioneer on '40 draft count but not on '40 census ?
In the Spring of 1941 *, the US Census discovered a major embarrassment : it counted far fewer young black men in April 1940 than did the draft registration process in October of that same year, only five months later.
Three percent of draft age men were missed by the census overall, but a whooping 13% of blacks - an even higher difference in the correct count in inner city places like Harlem New York.
This (fiscally important) undercounting of the poor and minorities has never really stopped and probably never will --- not if Republican congressmen have any say in the matter.
But it might mean a little bit of information on Aaron Alston may still be found found on the (sealed) US draft registration card made out for Alston October 16 1940 at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center , the same day he was becoming one of history's first antibiotics patients.
Because there is no Aaron Alston on the April 1940 census in the state of New York or in states nearby to New York City like Connecticut, New Jersey or Pennsylvania .
I have speculated he may have moved to New York from rural America seeking work between April and October that year but the possibility he was already in the New York City area near the hospital and simply uncounted in the census can't be discounted.
In the case of this truly historical event - perhaps that draft registration record might even be unsealed - who knows ?
* Daniel O. Price, "A Check on Under-Enumeration in the 1940 Census" American Sociological Review, Volume 12, Issue 1 (Feb., 1947), pp.44-49
Three percent of draft age men were missed by the census overall, but a whooping 13% of blacks - an even higher difference in the correct count in inner city places like Harlem New York.
This (fiscally important) undercounting of the poor and minorities has never really stopped and probably never will --- not if Republican congressmen have any say in the matter.
But it might mean a little bit of information on Aaron Alston may still be found found on the (sealed) US draft registration card made out for Alston October 16 1940 at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center , the same day he was becoming one of history's first antibiotics patients.
Because there is no Aaron Alston on the April 1940 census in the state of New York or in states nearby to New York City like Connecticut, New Jersey or Pennsylvania .
I have speculated he may have moved to New York from rural America seeking work between April and October that year but the possibility he was already in the New York City area near the hospital and simply uncounted in the census can't be discounted.
In the case of this truly historical event - perhaps that draft registration record might even be unsealed - who knows ?
* Daniel O. Price, "A Check on Under-Enumeration in the 1940 Census" American Sociological Review, Volume 12, Issue 1 (Feb., 1947), pp.44-49
Oct 16 '40 : marking 75 years of Antibiotics AND of Draft Registration !
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 ...
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 ...
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Draft Registration, October 16th 1940 : 75 years Young !
Due out in early 2015 is my book about the origins of America's 75 year old peacetime draft registration process.
It is another in my series of books on "Agape Penicillin".
If my book about the 'Dawning of Antibiotics' on October 16 1940 focuses on the 4Fs among America's youth, this book will focus instead on the 1As among her youth.
But I do not think it is odd or a coincidence that both events share the exact same 75th anniversary, right down to the day.
I believe that Dr Martin Henry Dawson began his antibiotics crusade on that crucial date, October 16th 1940 , as a deliberate and provocative counterpoise.
A counterpoise to 1940s America's undue emphasis on only valuing its children to the extent that they are fit enough to kill other children.
He felt all children - as well as all people - are worthy of the best possible health care simply because they are our fellow human beings.....
* Dawson had the freedom to experiment with penicllin that October day only because the very pro-war President of Columbia university had suspended classes to ensure a perfect registration drive.
After football scholarship undergrad Jack Kerouac dutifully registered that day, he went forth to play his second football game for the university.
He broke his leg and his career in football was over - its loss and literature and the Beats' gain ....
It is another in my series of books on "Agape Penicillin".
If my book about the 'Dawning of Antibiotics' on October 16 1940 focuses on the 4Fs among America's youth, this book will focus instead on the 1As among her youth.
But I do not think it is odd or a coincidence that both events share the exact same 75th anniversary, right down to the day.
I believe that Dr Martin Henry Dawson began his antibiotics crusade on that crucial date, October 16th 1940 , as a deliberate and provocative counterpoise.
A counterpoise to 1940s America's undue emphasis on only valuing its children to the extent that they are fit enough to kill other children.
He felt all children - as well as all people - are worthy of the best possible health care simply because they are our fellow human beings.....
* Dawson had the freedom to experiment with penicllin that October day only because the very pro-war President of Columbia university had suspended classes to ensure a perfect registration drive.
After football scholarship undergrad Jack Kerouac dutifully registered that day, he went forth to play his second football game for the university.
He broke his leg and his career in football was over - its loss and literature and the Beats' gain ....
"Antibiotics, October 16th 1940 : 75 Years Young !"
My first book on "Agape Penicillin" , due out early in 2015 , is all about the brave Scottish Presbyterian doctor (Dawson) who first gave us penicillin the antibiotic.
It is not at all about the Scottish Presbyterian doctor (Fleming) who discovered penicillin --- but then only used it indolently, for twelve wasted years , as an useless antiseptic.
I have entitled it '75 years young' rather than '75 years old' to emphasize that the real miracle of antibiotics has mostly been for in its effects on younger rather than older patients.
Because, just as in the earlier miracle with Lazarus , people who get life-saving antibiotics still die - the miracle simply consists in moving the goalposts further along , to a point closer to Life's natural ending.
Before 1940, few large upper class families - let alone poorer families - did not know the terror of a healthy five year old child being here today and in an premature grave a few days later.
Those of us of a certain generation know well the difference between an antiseptic and an antibiotic.
Antiseptics were when we scrapped our knee falling off our tricycle - it was part of a ritual involving a cookie, "a kiss to make it better" and some orange liquid from a little bottle.
The orange stuff hurt like hell, hindered healing and promoted scarring but it was all part of the ritual back then.
But antibiotics !
You'll alway remember that fast as the ambulance was , your old family doctor (who usually moved with slow dignity) was much faster.
His car came around the corner on two wheels and he took the steps three at a time - no word of greeting - simply hauled a big needle out of his black bag and plunged it into your baby sister.
You were too young to know exactly why the room was so still and tense - a neighbour had whispered 'meningitis' but that tension suddenly broke with the doctor's next and unexpected act.
He cuddled up to your mother , put an arm familiarly around her shoulders and said "Marge , where's that cuppa ?"
Marge !? Not even your father called her that.
She looked up startled and then happily bustled off , saying "oh , where my manners."
And your father - for the first and only time in your young life - starting crying - big sobs - but smiling to beat the band all the time.
Your little sister is now a grandmother as old as the doctor was then, with grandchildren of her own.
That's what an antibiotic is - and that is why it is so worth celebrating ...
It is not at all about the Scottish Presbyterian doctor (Fleming) who discovered penicillin --- but then only used it indolently, for twelve wasted years , as an useless antiseptic.
I have entitled it '75 years young' rather than '75 years old' to emphasize that the real miracle of antibiotics has mostly been for in its effects on younger rather than older patients.
Because, just as in the earlier miracle with Lazarus , people who get life-saving antibiotics still die - the miracle simply consists in moving the goalposts further along , to a point closer to Life's natural ending.
Before 1940, few large upper class families - let alone poorer families - did not know the terror of a healthy five year old child being here today and in an premature grave a few days later.
Those of us of a certain generation know well the difference between an antiseptic and an antibiotic.
Antiseptics were when we scrapped our knee falling off our tricycle - it was part of a ritual involving a cookie, "a kiss to make it better" and some orange liquid from a little bottle.
The orange stuff hurt like hell, hindered healing and promoted scarring but it was all part of the ritual back then.
But antibiotics !
You'll alway remember that fast as the ambulance was , your old family doctor (who usually moved with slow dignity) was much faster.
His car came around the corner on two wheels and he took the steps three at a time - no word of greeting - simply hauled a big needle out of his black bag and plunged it into your baby sister.
You were too young to know exactly why the room was so still and tense - a neighbour had whispered 'meningitis' but that tension suddenly broke with the doctor's next and unexpected act.
He cuddled up to your mother , put an arm familiarly around her shoulders and said "Marge , where's that cuppa ?"
Marge !? Not even your father called her that.
She looked up startled and then happily bustled off , saying "oh , where my manners."
And your father - for the first and only time in your young life - starting crying - big sobs - but smiling to beat the band all the time.
Your little sister is now a grandmother as old as the doctor was then, with grandchildren of her own.
That's what an antibiotic is - and that is why it is so worth celebrating ...
Sunday, June 8, 2014
I can confirm George M Conant of Middletown NJ was third antibiotic patient in history !
A page one story in the Middletown Times Herald * of June 2nd 1941 recounts the details of flour mill salesman George M Conant's long and very dramatic battle against subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE).
That battle unfortunately ended in death, in New York City's Columbia-Presbyterian "Medical Center" on May 31st 1941.
Small town newspaper journalists everywhere , all take a bow : because this is the very first report, ever , detailing the fate of an individual patient receiving our now routine "antibiotics".
The story says his trials began December 9th 1940 in the local (Horton) hospital and that in early January 1941 he was transferred to CUMC .
There Dr Martin Henry Dawson was making history , pioneering the use of penicillin as an antibiotic - working full out to try and save the lives of patients with 'invariable fatal' SBE .
Gladys Hobby's eyewitness book (Penicillin - Meeting the Challenge) on early penicillin records (on page 73) that Conant first got penicillin injections from Dawson on January 18 1941 , a course running until January 26th, a total of 36 ml over 16 day period.
Now this report of Conant's death came a month after Dawson delivered his famous May 5th 1941 report on his pioneering use of penicillin injections to treat three patients dying of SBE.
(Today , you can best think of SBE as the "deadly" part of grandmother's often repeated phrase "deadly Rheumatic Fever".)
So , at the time of his report in the New York Times, two out of his three SBE patients treated with his historic penicillin were still alive --- but he still displayed a welcome caution about exaggerating the value of these initial results.
Middletown's newspaper makes no mention of Dawson or penicillin but their dates match up closely to the dates found in Hobby's book about Dawson's third patient to receive penicillin-the-antibiotic , "Mr Conant" .
I don't doubt I will be able to locate Mr Conant's descendants.
(His wife Marabelle (Erickson) Conant was born about 1908 and here is a photo of her from 1942. She has probably passed on.
George also left three daughters : Delores Conant born about 1932 , Edith Conant born about 1933 and Gloria Conant born about 1937.
(These three women are in their late seventies and early eighties.)
I intend to invite them to the 75th anniversary celebrations of the dawn of the Age of Antibiotics October 16th 2015 in New York.
Hurray !
Another patient or team member now located, four located already and only two more to go...
* Middletown is a community in Orange County, in upper New York State - a long long way from the normal mile or two catchment area for the poorest patients in the Medical Center's public wards.
So I might have to cast my nets wider to locate Aaron Alston and Charles Aronson - I had assumed they had come from a mile or two around the Center's upper Manhattan location.
Time for a re-think.
Though I still do believe I am on the right track.
Gladys Hobby referred to George only as "Mr Conant" while the other two were mentioned by their first names and this hints to me that Conant might have been a middle class paying patient.
He might well then have come from a much further distance away - while the two other initial patients were of a local socio-economic status and came close by.
That battle unfortunately ended in death, in New York City's Columbia-Presbyterian "Medical Center" on May 31st 1941.
Small town newspaper journalists everywhere , all take a bow : because this is the very first report, ever , detailing the fate of an individual patient receiving our now routine "antibiotics".
The story says his trials began December 9th 1940 in the local (Horton) hospital and that in early January 1941 he was transferred to CUMC .
There Dr Martin Henry Dawson was making history , pioneering the use of penicillin as an antibiotic - working full out to try and save the lives of patients with 'invariable fatal' SBE .
Gladys Hobby's eyewitness book (Penicillin - Meeting the Challenge) on early penicillin records (on page 73) that Conant first got penicillin injections from Dawson on January 18 1941 , a course running until January 26th, a total of 36 ml over 16 day period.
Now this report of Conant's death came a month after Dawson delivered his famous May 5th 1941 report on his pioneering use of penicillin injections to treat three patients dying of SBE.
(Today , you can best think of SBE as the "deadly" part of grandmother's often repeated phrase "deadly Rheumatic Fever".)
So , at the time of his report in the New York Times, two out of his three SBE patients treated with his historic penicillin were still alive --- but he still displayed a welcome caution about exaggerating the value of these initial results.
Middletown's newspaper makes no mention of Dawson or penicillin but their dates match up closely to the dates found in Hobby's book about Dawson's third patient to receive penicillin-the-antibiotic , "Mr Conant" .
I don't doubt I will be able to locate Mr Conant's descendants.
(His wife Marabelle (Erickson) Conant was born about 1908 and here is a photo of her from 1942. She has probably passed on.
 |
| Marabelle (Erickson) Conant , Middletown NY |
George also left three daughters : Delores Conant born about 1932 , Edith Conant born about 1933 and Gloria Conant born about 1937.
(These three women are in their late seventies and early eighties.)
I intend to invite them to the 75th anniversary celebrations of the dawn of the Age of Antibiotics October 16th 2015 in New York.
Hurray !
Another patient or team member now located, four located already and only two more to go...
* Middletown is a community in Orange County, in upper New York State - a long long way from the normal mile or two catchment area for the poorest patients in the Medical Center's public wards.
So I might have to cast my nets wider to locate Aaron Alston and Charles Aronson - I had assumed they had come from a mile or two around the Center's upper Manhattan location.
Time for a re-think.
Though I still do believe I am on the right track.
Gladys Hobby referred to George only as "Mr Conant" while the other two were mentioned by their first names and this hints to me that Conant might have been a middle class paying patient.
He might well then have come from a much further distance away - while the two other initial patients were of a local socio-economic status and came close by.
Saturday, June 7, 2014
Aaron Alston , penicillin's first SBE patient but second to get the historical injection
The known published facts are few
And that his name was"Aaron Alston" and that he subsequently "died".
The available record of the amounts and dates that Aaron received Dawson's penicillin - as published by key Dawson team member Dr Gladys L Hobby in her 1985 book on penicillin , Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge , ceases near the end of January 1941.
And that is all the published accounts show.
But now for new research and reasoned suppositions...
We can say that 1940s medical statistics indicate that Alston was a more likely than not a young adult when he entered the hospital with SBE .It is clear from the census that the names Aaron and Alston is a combination found in a fair number of men in America in the first half century of the 29th century.
However , the censuses generally indicates they are usually negro and that their residences seem centred in the South - from rural Carolina into urban black centres like Washington and Baltimore.
But in the critical 1940 census , there is no Aaron Alston recorded in New York City or in nearby New Jersey and Connecticut.
Now the first SBE patients that Dawson dealt with in the public wards of his upper Manhattan Columbia University Presbyterian Hospital were simply there because they were poor and his hospital happened to be close to where their family lived or close to where they lived when they took ill.
They were not drawn there from great distances because Dawson was then a famous and successful expert in this nearly 100% invariably fatal disease.
Far from it , he hadn't in fact handled any SBE cases up to then as the lead doctor.
Alston almost certainly had to be residing within a three or four miles circle of the Presbyterian hospital, at most , at the time he took ill. But the census does not show this.
He may have moved to New York City after April 1940 and before September 1940 : because southern blacks were still coming north to the unofficial American black capital of Harlem , though there was rarely gold for them at the end of its tattered rainbow.
Harlem is well within the catchment area for the Presbyterian's public wards.
We seemed to have failed to find out anything more about Mr Alston.
But as it happens, the New York City individual death records up to 1948 have been hand indexed on computer by many volunteers and made available via Ancestry.com.
They show an Aaron Alston , born about 1911 , (that is about age 29 on date of his admission to the hospital in September-October 1940) has having died on Jan 25th 1941 in Manhattan.
I am not sure that the original death record will reveal more more - but perhaps a last address in New York and the name of next of kin and their home town , but I feel 100% certain this is our Mr Alston.
All we have really confirmed so far is that he was indeed a young man at time of his admission , as expected.
Why first patient but second to get the historic penicillin injection
Now while I am certain that Mr Alston was first SBE patient Dawson intended to treat with penicillin, I think he got it moments after Charles Aronson , the other SBE patient to get the historic penicillin injections on October 16th 1940.
Dawson's first major paper on penicillin and SBE was significantly the first penicillin paper not written by him with the help of the very reticent (as he himself was !) Dr Gladys Hobby, his lab chief.
Co-written instead with young Dr Thomas H Hunter, it positively gushes - for Dawson anyway - in giving forth the ages, initials of their name, gender, ethnicity, dates of treatment, medical condition etc of all the SBE patients that Dawson had treated.
This was a style that Dawson had never shown before in 20 years of writing many, many medical articles.
Some doctors ("clinicians") simply tend to write articles that minutely detail the very 'grain' of one (person's) case - while others ("researchers") prefer to report on the general conclusions drawn from treating one hundred similar cases.
(Both are valuable to doctors and scientists - but biographers won't be human if they didn't prefer the intimate details of the first type of articles !)
Dawson gets a chance in mid April 1944 to treat Charles Aronson a second time with penicillin for SBE .
This was because the little penicillin Charles had gotten in October 1940 had helped him survive his first bout of SBE.
He thus became that rare successful SBE case (about one in a hundred) that did so , back then.
Dawson indicates in 1945 , that Charles had first entered the Presbyterian three and a half years earlier - ie mid October 1940 , confirming the common assumption that he was a very late addition to Dawson's Penicillin SBE program.
(Dawson knew he had too little penicillin to even treat Alston adequately, but he kind-heartedly treated both.
He was hoping perhaps that any small sign of a clinical response from either one of them might move Big Pharma to step up to the plate and mass produce the stuff --- for Aaron, Charlie and everyone else.)
Literally : the last shall be first
But did Dawson really add Charlie at the last minute out of kind-heartedness alone ?
I believe the real reason was because Charlie was such a late addition to his ward's SBE patients.
When a new patient arrived with suspected SBE - a relatively slow killer, first a number of blood tests over a number of days must show the continued and not merely transitory presence of green strep in the blood stream to match all the other classic clinical signs of SBE,.
Then the ethical response is to immediately start treatment with the newest miracle drug , sulfa, and pray.
This is what happened to Aaron, who had been in the ward about a month when he first got his penicillin.
But because Charlie was such a late addition, there hadn't been time to start treatment with sulfa drugs .
So if Charles was treated with penicillin alone and did show a clinical improvement, Dawson's sulfa worshipping naysayers (and their lineup began around the block) could not say it was all due to their established sulfa , not his new penicillin.
(Remember that a lot of middle-aged doctors , the same age as Dawson , had first made their mark as early sulfa drug pioneers - any new miracle drug meant their acclaim was over. )
Behind the polite rancour of academic/scientific 'critiques' is often a lot of half-hidden ego and income concerns.
Dawson recalled, in his 1945 article , that the 1940 Charles was treated with penicillin on October 16 and 17th and then immediately (first) "started" on sulfa on October 22 and that he responded so well that he was released in December and was illness free for three plus years.
Ethically, Dawson would never have wasted half of his tiny amount of penicillin he intended for Aaron on Charles --- if he was already responding well to sulfa.
I think the reason it became so urgent to treat Aaron in mid-October (well in advance of the Dawson team's own original timetable for starting clinical trials) was because he had already been treated with sulfa and it had failed.
And maybe even made him extremely sick because allergies to sulfa are common and serious.
But treating Aaron alone risked having any penicillin success disputed by the pro-sulfa lobby and this would only forestall drug company involvement - hurting Aaron as well as all others.
Hence Charlie not only getting treatment but getting treated ahead of Aaron , if only by moments.
Ask anyone : nothing starts off a (soon to be citation classic) medical article quite like an opening sentence like this one ---
"The first patient ever treated with systemic penicillin had (then invariably fatal) SBE , but had not yet had time to start a sulfa treatment, however he responded so well to the penicillin that he has now been home fully recovered for over six months months."
In fact Dawson saw no clinical response at all between cases of endocarditis and penicillin for one and a half long years and he didn't save anyone with the disease purely on penicillin alone until two years later.
But Charles's recovery might have been helped by the morale uplifting affect of simply knowing that he was Patient One of a touted new Miracle drug .
I can only hope that my research efforts eventually help Aaron Alston's relatives to gain some comfort from his short life.
They will learn that he helped bring penicillin into this world and that while it didn't help him personally, it has directly and indirectly helped ten billion of us in the seventy five years since he first received it.....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)