Penicillin flown to save Mrs Frank Oxford ,Amisk : 70 years ago this week

It is the first case I could find of penicillin being used to save a life in Canada : 70 years ago this week, Mrs Frank Oxford dying in a Hardisty hospital of childbirth fever was given penicillin specially flown all the way from the Banting Institute in Toronto.

The Americans a week earlier had specially flown penicillin ( in a bomber no less !) to save a dying girl and the Canadians authorities scurried to play me-too catchup.

A life and death story involving women and children that successfully and repeatedly made it to the front pages of North American newspapers that usually only told the life and death stories of men - men fighting overseas.

Let us see if the Edmonton Herald et al misses this anniversary of this historical story .....

Wartime Manhattan's Projects : big Little Boy versus the tiny ampoule that saved little Patty Malone

The Little Boy atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima was a very Big Bomb indeed : 5000 kilograms , 300 cm long, by 70 cm wide and 70 cm deep.

Long and thin : hence Little Boy.

 Big Science needed tens of thousands of workers to build it.

By contrast, the tiny ampoule of natural penicillin that saved the life of  little baby Patty Malone was only 5 grams in weight, .7cm by .7 cm by 3 cm in size.

It was thus 100 times shorter in length and width and thickness, though it too was long and thin in appearance.

 And since its density was also surprisingly similar to that of Little Boy, it appropriately weighed 5 grams : a million times less (100 x 100 x 100 = 1 million).

Small science indeed.

Particularly when we recall that natural penicillin is actually made in a fungus factory that weighs about 70 pico grams (pico : one trillionth of a gram !) .

That is about a billion trillion times less the weight of what it would require for humanity to  make the basic machinery and basic chemicals for chemists to synthesize penicillin.

The fungus only requires a bit of dirty water and a bit of decaying organic debris.

America's big bombers carried both the Little Boy bomb and the ampoules of penicillin : one went off to Hiroshima, the other also went all over the world  to save lives.

 However its first mercy run was from Brooklyn New York to Macon Georgia, to save Anne Shirley Carter.

A mighty big plane and a mighty long journey for such a small little ampoule but if any taxpayer complained, they were very careful not to do it publicly.

Could any two projects - anywhere - anytime - have been more different ?

"Patricia Malone","Anne Shirley Carter", "Marie Barker" : penicillin heroines, but only for two months and long long ago ...

Marie Barker, dying, refused penicillin 1943

For two months during a six year long war, North America (at least its parental and grandparental half) temporarily turned away from looking at the front page pictures of healthy young sons and grandsons in uniform in their local newspaper.

Instead, from mid August 1943 till mid October 1943, their eyes were caught by the unlikely front page pictures (unlikely for newspapers at peace as well as at war ) of very sick young females, ranging from ages of two to their early twenties.

Daughters and granddaughters very much like their own.

All were either being saved from death because they had pried a little penicillin from the hard-faced men in the medical-pharmaceutical establishment --- or were dying because they had failed to move these men.

For two months these young women - some just babies themselves and some new mothers with new babies - were featured almost daily in most of the North American dailies and weeklies, usually with a photo prominent in the story.

It is the female-ness of these pictures, particularly set against the then steady front page diet of butch men with guns, that intrigues me.

The photos feature sick young women surrounded by other women : men are a comparative rarity.

Mothers and nieces comfort daughter and aunt, as in the above photo of Marie Barker. A baby is comforted by a mother (Katherine M Malone), a female nurse, or a female baby doll - as in the case of Patricia Malone.

(Though we do  also see photos of her comforted by the doctor (Dante Colitti) and father (Lawrence J Malone) who pushed to get her life saving penicillin.)

Doctor Mom was sending a message : to Congress, to the feckless AMA , NAS and OSRD and above all to the patent-obsessed Pharmaceutical industry.

One pharmaceutical leader, John L Smith, was pushed and prodded by his wife Mae to remember that penicillin, discovered in 1928, could have saved their precious daughter Mary Louise ---- if only some people had got off their fannies and thought about the children.

He responded by pushing his small firm to go all out to produce penicillin in world-saving amounts and by the Spring of the next year , the penicillin famine was well on to its way to being solved.

Patty, Anne and Marie all faded out of the story - their part in forcing men to finally make penicillin - 15 years late - for children was all conveniently underplayed by the men who wrote most subsequent penicillin histories.

But a penicillin history from a woman who was in the front lines of penicillin from its North American beginnings and knew John L Smith well (Gladys Hobby), never let her readers forget that it was those pictures of dying daughters that finally moved the men from killing to life-saving.

If only for a few months ....

For female pioneers of wartime penicillin, 1910 was a very good year ...

Dorothy Crowfoot , Gladys Hobby and Nancy Atkinson were about the only women who played an independent role in the development of wartime penicillin.

Many, many, other women were involved in the production of penicillin : in fact biological (natural) penicillin production and testing was often seen as women's work par excellent : but none played an important independent scientific role that I am aware of, beyond these three women.

(I do however believe that Eleanor Chaffee, Patty Malone, Anne Shirley Carter, Marie Barker, Eleanor Roosevelt and above all Mae Smith played crucial roles in turning "penicillin the war weapon" into "the penicillin of hope.")

1910 : annus mirabilis 

Interestingly, all members of our tiny trio shared another thing in common : all three were born in the same year, 1910.....