Was there a Parran-Hearst Telegram ? (You provide the penicillin, I'll provide the pictures)

"Operator, get me Washington, tell 'em I'm from Hearst..."

There is no firm evidence that Citizen Hearst ever sent that infamous telegram to the famous war artist Frederic Remington in Cuba.

We all know which telegram:  the one where Remington is sent out to illustrate the ongoing civil war in Cuba, but finds all is quiet and begs to go home.

Hearst supposedly telegraphs him to stay : "(If) you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."


Hearst proceeds to puff up the accidental explosion on board the battleship The Maine as an act of sneaky warfare by the Spanish, ("Remember Pearl Harbour" 50 years ahead of schedule) and the rest is history: Yellow Journalism's finest moment.

Or is it ?

For a start, that particular telegram was apparently never sent.

But did the aging Hearst later intervene with US Surgeon General Thomas Parran in August 1943, to get penicillin to a dying baby girl in Manhattan ?

Was this Yellow Journalism's finest moment ?

The Pulitzer Committee apparently felt so - and it is worth noting that Pulitzer and Hearst were the most bitter of bitter enemies.

Consider what we know (or think we know).

Supposedly the whole thing started with a phone call from the distraught father (Lawrence J Malone) of a dying two year old girl called Patricia Malone, made to the city desk editor of the Hearst media empire's flagship newspaper, the New York Journal-American.

Actually Malone quickly fades back into the wallpaper , as do the nominal doctors for the baby girl.

Because in fact, Malone was set up for the call by a crippled Italian-American surgical resident named Dante Colitti, then working at the tiny Lutheran Hospital in upper Manhattan, about a mile from pioneering penicillin doctor Henry Dawson's hospital, Columbia Presbyterian.

The little girl was dying of blood poisoning and normally a surgical staffer - a mere resident at that - has no place in treatment decisions for that sort of illness.

But Colitti was raised right, with a good moral education and he couldn't stand by and let her die, when he knew that not a mile away, Henry Dawson was dragging babies like her back from the grave with his Floor G penicillin.

And Colitti had no cause to love the New York medical establishment which supported the limiting of penicillin to curing VD cases among the unfaithful husbands and boyfriends of the combat corps.

In the 1930s, he had been rejected from attending any New York medical school, by an informal quota system designed to keep out Catholics and Italians.

 (And Jews and Blacks and Asians and Women. Colitti's parents were recent immigrants to America).

Colitti had a permanently bent spine as a result of childhood TB and had to use crutches so it was probably the excuse given him for his rejection.

But Colitti knew that Henry Dawson, just a mile north of him, was working with a doctor who used crutches thanks to polio and another doctor who was missing an arm.

The only real difference was that these were Protestant men, with native-born parents.

Colitti paid a private medical college in Massachusetts to get his MD degree but no New York hospital would recognize any degree not granted by one of the quota-oriented establishment schools.

It was a closed loop.

But WWII led to a desperate shortage of medical staff and even New York's medical establishment had to let people like Colitti in to do the lowest medical jobs, at least until the war was over.

But the highly morally minded Colitti felt that if they had displayed no charity towards a cripple, that did not mean he would follow suit.

Hence his setting up of the phone call to the Hearst paper : he knew exactly who would cause the most noise.

The Journal-American photo-journalists were then world famous for their large, vivid, gripping front page photographs and a dying baby story was just made for their skills.

The Hearst editor got no where ( says the AP press agency) with the OSRD's Dr Richards or with the NAS Committee on Chemical Therapeutics.

But somehow or other the newspaper knew of the ongoing conflict between those who felt we could best win the war ("Hearts & Minds") through well publicized Social Medicine versus those that felt that secretive and rationed War Medicine would save more scarce resources for "Guns & Bullets".

Because the newspaper ultimately got the penicillin it needed from that supply reserved for the US Public Health Services (at that time, it only had a tiny amount of penicillin and it was only normally used for treating cases of VD among merchant seamen.)

Released by drug company Squibb upon the direct order of Thomas Parran, US Surgeon General and head of the US Public Health Services (then a relatively small and powerless body compared to its status today.)

Parran versus Weed over the fate of wartime penicillin

Parran was the de facto head of the Social Medicine forces, while the NAS's Lewis Weed was the voice of War Medicine.

Did Hearst or his senior staff know of this ongoing debate and approach Parran directly, dismissing his concerns about tackling the all-powerful OSRD and NAS by reminding him he had no love for the NAS's Weed anyway , and that if he would only provide the penicillin vials, Hearst photographers would provide the poignant pictures.

Yellow Journalism and the Yellow Magic then proceeded to make beautiful music together : because the Patty Malone Story ultimately spelled the end to the Age of Modernity ...

The Allied battle for the world's 'hearts and minds' : NS-born Henry Dawson's patient-penicillin vs OSRD war-penicillin

Army is - wrongly - blamed for her SBE death

The idea that successful American governments need first to win over the 'hearts and minds' of people, before they rush to impose their objectives by legal and military fiat is an old, old , old one.

Presidents John Adams used the phrase "hearts and mind" in this sense early in the 19th century, long before Presidents FDR, Kennedy and Johnson made it famous in the 20th century - and before recent presidents George W Bush and Obama dragged it out of the archives to use in this century.

(And to share the blame around, their wartime Ally Britain also used the phrase during its 1950s war in Malaysia.)

When American finally joined The Coalition of the Willing  (December 1941), many of the world's nations still remained strictly neutral in the battle against Nazi evil , or were, at best,  nominal friends but in reality merely laying back on the oars.

The world's largest, richest, most militarily-advanced economies in the world (America and the British Commonwealth) had a real job on their hands trying to convince the neutrals (all much smaller and weaker than these two superpowers) that their interests would not be subsumed before the interests of these global colossus.

Unhelpfully, America and Britain's scientific and medical elite - centred in the American National Academy of Science (NAS) and the British Medical Research Council (MRC)  made the job much harder.

Reactionaries of all stripes (from Germany to America) had been determined to roll back the1930s move to Social Medicine (the claim that more poor people got sick than rich people because they were too poor to pay for adequate housing, food or routine medical care).

However, the dire effects of the Great Depression had put wind behind Social Medicine's sails and confounded the reactionaries.

Now - Thank God ! - war, or even just the possibility of war, gave the reactionaries new hope.

 Hitler killed off his first "useless feeder" the same week that he declared war on the Poles and soon his Aktion T4 program was killing Germany's weakest and smallest members by the tens of thousands.

In America, people like Dr Lewis Weed (a mid-level medical researcher) dropped his unsuccessful research to become a war-medicine advocate at the NAS and its action-oriented NRC (National Research Council).

War medicine wins opening rounds against social medicine

He locked horns with Dr Thomas Parran, the American Surgeon General from 1936 to 1948, who was a strong (and powerfully-positioned) advocate of social medicine.

A war medicine proponent advocates that any nation at war - even the richest, least attacked nation at war - needs to divert resources normally assigned to civilian medicine towards making bullets instead.

 In addition, much more money would have to be spent providing for the high medical requirements of an activity (war) whose stated aim is maiming and killing people on muddy fields miles away from the nearest hospital.

Limited research dollars would have to focus on war-related  medical needs ( such as finding new ways to keep factory workers and bomber pilots alert for long hours) and put before finding  new ways to keep elderly retirees alive) .

War medicine is, in a very real sense, 'eugenics in uniform' : the best citizens (those that are tested and rated physically and mentally to be A1) end up in the military and get top notch medical care at no cost.

Those citizens who fail these tests and end up as 4F, are second rate eugenically and get second rate medical care during the war.

Proudly promote this concept to the outside world - and America's still relatively free press during WWII did just that - and it comes across quite differently in those neutral nations still sitting on the fence with regards to whole-heartedly backing the Allied cause.

As individuals, the elites in these neutral nations could see themselves as A1s  --- but as nationalistically minded citizens they could only see their nations as 4Fs in America's eyes : mere inconvenient dirt beneath their advancing wheels.

When the Patty Malone vs Marie Barker debate broke in the United States media (basically, scarce penicillin for dying civilians : yes or no ?) , it broke even bigger overseas, as worried American and British diplomats noted.

Heartless or caring : the public image of the Allied cause had reached past the unimportant front pages and onto the most important page of any newspaper or magazine --- the women's page : home to Doctor Mom.

It suddenly mattered what the mothers and parents and grandparents from neutral nations thought of America and Britain's harsh dictates on penicillin.

Put your small neutral nation, say Eire or Turkey, in the place of the unfortunate Marie Barker and then ask yourself, how would you feel to just be Marie Barker-like 'incidental collateral damage' , on the pathway to the ultimate Allied Victory ?

And the Home Front within the Allied nations was just as caustic about their own governments' inactions : 'penicillin the miracle cure' had been around for 15 years and still no one in charge had bothered making enough of it for all ?

Don't the bosses know "there's a war on" ???!!!

And let us set this debate (occurring between the late Summer of 1943 and the early Spring of 1944) in its full context.

The western Allies still hadn't invaded Europe and left the heavy lifting of killing German soldiers to the beleaguered Russians.

Instead they were busy bombing Europe into rubble : busily killing civilians from both Axis and neutral nations alike.

The Germans and Allies had co-operated on censoring the results of the fire-bombing of Hamburg of July 1943, (right before the story of little Patty Malone broke) but on-site reports from neutral Swedish journalists had laid the whole horrific affair out on the newspaper pages of the world.

It had led to considerable unease - in neutral country and allied country alike.

Hadn't FDR himself raged that the bombing of civilians was a crime against all humanity and now weren't the Americans and British far out-doing the earlier Nazi efforts to bomb enemy and neutral civilians ?

Allied fire bombing of  innocent babies in occupied Europe - denying life-saving penicillin to innocent young moms in America so that their unfaithful husbands in Italy could be get a quicker ( via penicillin) cure for the Clap - it all didn't seem morally right.

Perhaps surprisingly, the American Army revealed far greater political and cultural savvy on this matter than American doctors and scientists were capable of.

The Army was sick and tired of being blamed for hogging all the penicillin and refusing to give any to the nation's dying babies.

'For Christ's Sake', they could rightfully protest, 'we can't get anywhere enough penicillin for our own dying boys, and we hadn't even heard of this stuff penicillin till a few months ago --- you ask the drug companies and the doctors what they were doing with the stuff for the last 15 years !'

Somewhere in the American Army Air Force some bright mind (s) decided to solve both PR problems (the fire bombing uproar and the penicillin uproar) at one stroke.

(And before you ask, no .)

No academic historian has yet brought us the true story behind this highly imaginative response: I see a great PhD thesis for some bright light.)

Soon, American Army "heavy" bombers were pulled off their bombing practises and were sent out on a still risky flight (because at top speed and at night) "pounding" across country with a tiny 8 grams of penicillin (instead of the normal 8000 pounds of TNT) to deliver to a dying ten pound patient.

Upon arrival, Klieg lights lit the tarmac as an ambulance, along a police escort with blazing lights and piercing sirens, raced to the hospital and the waiting doctor and patients.

Need I add to this purple-prosed drama that, thoughtfully, the local press had been notified well ahead of time ?

Quickly Army bombers were even on far more perilous missions of mercy, dangerously new cross-ocean flights, from places like San Francisco  all the way to Brisbane Australia or from New York to Havana, --- to save dying children.

In 1943, Martin Henry Dawson was dying ,but not quite dead yet, not by a long shot...

Life-saving penicillin had moved 180 degrees from being censored and rationed to being the subject of  radio, newsreel and pamphlet propaganda as an example - the example - of the better things ahead if only all joined in to hasten the Allied Cause.

Neutrals could reassure themselves that just like with dying babies and Martin Henry Dawson's useless-mouthed SBE patients, the Allies would do right by all, as they were doing so now for the least of these.

The Allied battle for the world's hearts and minds, had been won (unexpectedly) by the proponents of social medicine - thanks largely to the example of Martin Henry Dawson.

And decades before Joni Mitchell and Woodstock, the American Army Air Force itself turned its shotgun bombers into butterflies, above a wondering nation and world....

Pity poor, poor pitiful Florey, surrounded by leftie subordinates

 Howard Florey got some very useful advice the day he arrived in America to protect Oxford University's Chromella Brand Penicillin from what he imagined were attacks on his left flank from Henry Dawson and his cohorts in deepest Brooklyn.

"Whatever you do, stay away from taking sides between the advocates of continuing social medicine (people like the US Surgeon General Thomas Parran) and those using the war as an excuse to roll back New Deal medical gains for the poor ( people like AMA godfather Morris Fishbein and the NAS's Lewis Weed.)"

(Dr Weed, upon whom the Hippocratic Oath lay lightly, saw medicines like penicillin and projects like germ warfare as highly useful weapons in a total war - and to test them the poor and the weak would be unwittingly conscripted into the war effort.)

This useful advice from Dr Gregg at the Rockefeller Foundation was wasted on Florey, the son of a hard-nosed industrialist and someone who loathed Blacks, Italians, Jews and trade unionists. (Just for a start.)

In fact, most of the problems that Florey had had with his subordinate Ernst Chain and his co-workers  Epstein and Duthie ,had come from of their left-wing social medicine-oriented politics.

Florey rather more preferred men like John Randal Baker, author of the controversial book RACE, if he had a choice as to who he wanted in his Institution.

Leslie Epstein (later Leslie Falk), from the Parran side of the debate, exacted his revenge on Florey by telling all on Florey's secret penicillin work to fellow Jew, Karl Meyer, working with Henry Dawson.

He thus setting into motion the wartime across ocean race to see whether Man or Nature would provide the lifesaving penicillin for the Allied wounded on the beaches of the upcoming Second Front.

And Thomas Parran got his revenge on A N Richards and C S Keffer from the Weed side of the debate, by releasing the penicillin to Baby Patricia which blow the lid off the whole secret effort to keep penicillin hidden until a chemical synthesis had been worked out.

After the war Parran and Falk joined up in Pittsburgh, still pushing a social medicine agency during a time in Cold War America the act of providing health care for all was regarded as the work of the Devil, in his human guise as Stalin.

America never did get decent medical care for its poorer citizens.

But hey, "We'll always have Penicillin. "

Won't we America ...?