Martin Henry Dawson's lifework- Lobar Pneumonia,Rheumatic Fever,SBE : when hosts overreact

MARTIN HENRY DAWSON 1896-1945

When harmless tiny bacteria called S. pneumococcus living peacefully in your throat get blown the equivalent of 1000 miles deep into our lungs - they panic.

Who won't?

More fatally, so does our body's immune system.

Like a latter day 'Bomber Harris', the immune system 'area bombs' our lungs - too often the collateral damage is us.

S. pyrogenes bacteria is so used to surviving in us, its only home on Earth, that it begins to look like us - and when our immune system overreacts to a case of strep throat, it might start attacking our heart tissue instead of the long since defeated strep throat : the result is often- fatal acute Rheumatic fever.

Lucky you, you've survived a couple of attacks of Rheumatic fever - except for a scared

heart valve ---- a valve messed up by your own immune system.

Now you've neglected your teeth and gums a little and the gums tend to bleed when you do brush them.

This allows some harmless S. viridans (green strep - the bacteria that makes unbrushed teeth look ,well, sort of green - not actually the reason they are called green strep but a colorful coincidence !) to get into the blood stream and start whirling around your body much faster than the Space Shuttle does with us.

Naturally the green strep panic and start looking for a new safe home before giant white blood cells swallow them for dinner.

All these bacteria can't move - they are basically tiny blogs of jelly who can stick to particular types of human cells, if they have the right kind of adhesive on their surface for that kind of cell and they happen to bump into it and not the wrong sort of cell.

Its all a lot of hapstance.

Hardly your usual predators, right??

Usually, the green strep gets eaten before it makes that safe haven. But for people with scared heart valves, the scar tissue (produced by our immune system - remember ?) is

just the sort of thing that could be that safe haven.

If they make it into these scar areas' depths, while whirling past at space-travel-like speeds, they attach themselves to the scars.

The immune system reacts by creating more scar tissue, which inadvertently prevents white blood cells from getting in and at the green strep.

The green strep start re-creating dental plaque (and tartar) right on the heart valve - taking a biofilm meant for our mouth and teeth and replicating in not too dissimilar circumstances at the heart valve.

A normal biofilm colony eventually lets loose bits of itself in the liquid swirling over it to form mini colonies elsewhere - the green strep on the heart valve do the same.

We call those particular mini colonies 'embolus showers' and if and when they reach a heart/ lung or brain blood vessel with a restricted passage, they will block it and kill us.

Explaining and preventing or curing these three serious/common/fatal diseases was to be Martin Henry Dawson's lifework.

In a sense, he succeeded well beyond his expectations and changed our world , for the better, for ever.

All three dieases are the unexpected side effects of us and our fellow commensals scrambling to adjust to a micro change in our body's environment.

Just as global warming today is making all of the world's commensals scramble to adjust to a macro change in our environment.....

@arcadianrecord

Martin Henry Dawson - the Commensal Doctor

Martin Henry Dawson 1896-1945

S. Pyrogenes/GAS Strep/Hemolytic Strep - whatever you call it, this bacteria is usually regarded as the single deadliest pathogen we humans face over our lifetime.

This is because the list of fatal diseases it is implicated in runs into pages and can involve almost every part of the body,in any age group , in any part of the world.

Paradoxically, S. pyrogenes is only found in humans - it exists no where else - and usually lives peacefully - more or less - in our throats, as it has for millions of years.

It hoes a narrow row - but it hoes it deep and long - it can outwit anything our body or our mind's invention can put up to remove it, as it struggles to get by.

Martin Henry Dawson spent 20 years (all of his tragically short life as a scientific researcher) also hoeing a narrow row, deep and long.

He tried always to remain focussed on one area: the consequences for both of us, human and oral strep, of co-sharing one body so intimately all of our collective life.

A rarity in his day, he tried ,as a medical scientist, to see our body from its bacterial flora's point of view: to study how they wiggled and twirled -genetically- as they struggled to survive in our body's hostile environment.

Some bacteria is only 175 billionths of a metre "tall" - that means the body of an adult male is exactly as big to them as our Earth is to us - they aren't in any way aware they are 'invading' a body - they see us only as a vast hostile & lush world.

Early humans also didn't know they lived in a tiny part of a big sphere of rock that in turn only made up a tiny part of the entire universe - they saw no further than area immediately around them.

It is always worth recalling that we are actually 90% them and 10% us, if you count the number of bacterial cells on us, versus all the cells of our internal organs.

Without any of us, they would quickly die in hours - without them, we would die in a few months.

We must co-exist together, diners at a common table - commensals as a biologist or theologian would say.

Dawson never used that term as far as I know ( he died, after all, in 1945, before the word came into common use in medical or religious circles), but he lived his life as if it was the central core of his being as a scientist.....

@arcadianrecord

If History is written by the Victor, then the history of World War Two has never been written...

... because the victor can neither read or write.

But histories can be written that reflect the point of view of the victor and these are now being written,albeit a bit late - sometimes more than 75 years after the events they describe.

I can recommend Allan Tooze (WAGES OF DESTRUCTION) and Mark Mazower (HITLER'S EMPIRE) as a good places to start.

I think - and I hope -that my account of The Manhattan Pilot will be one of those victor - oriented histories.

@arcadianrecord

Dr Harry Haiselden, "The Black Stork" doctor

About a dozen years ago, I read Professor Martin S Pernick's book, "The Black Stork", which I consider the best single account of the eugenics movement that I have yet found.

This, despite the fact that the book is ostensibly only about a small forgotten footnote to the overall story of Eugenics, which covered a century in time and and had powerful support in all continents.

I read it, as I said, a dozen years ago - before I had 'always on' high speed internet and before Google.

Now when I read, I constantly go to my laptop and onto Google to expand on points of interest.

This week I started re-reading The Black Stork and went to Google after quickly - too quickly ! - looking through the book's pictures and not seeing a single portrait of the subject of the book - Dr Harry Haiselden.

Google seemed to have none of Haiselden either - though his story is on many websites on eugenics, ethics, the disabled, etc .

I thought how hard it was to write a biography of someone long dead, who you never knew, without a lot of good photographs .

It helps you feel that you can see into your subject's soul through their eyes, I suppose.

I was thinking mostly of my own subject, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, but also of Professor Pernick and his subject, Dr Haiselden.

I dashed off a quick email to Dr Pernick on this point and settled in to re-read the book.

It is foolish to dash anything off - and these days emails leave no chance to correct things between writing them and popping them in a mail slot a day later, as old fashioned paper letters allowed.

Of course, in a half hour I had remembered enough of Haiselden's story to realize that he had played himself in his famous film , The Black Stork, cast as Dr Dickey, ( a name from his mother's side of the family).

He was unnaturally attached to his mom and hated his dad .... and possibly hated having to carry his dad's name as well.

So we actually had a dozen photographs of Haiselden -- as poor quality movie frames - in the book and on Google - just not labelled as such.

Just now, glancing through the book's photos more slowly, I realized I had made a further mess of it .

The famous newspaper 'two head' photo of the mother (Anna Bollinger) of Haiselden's first 'victim', did not include her spouse as the other person in the picture, as I had assumed.

Instead, it was her doctor - Haiselden.

I had glanced through the centre photos in the book far too quickly, before settling in to read Pernick's sophisticated arguments.

But I think I made an interesting mistake.

Conventionally, such a 'two head photo' in such a story would be of the two parents, with the doctor in a separate shot - perhaps with his patient.

I am thinking of the pictures of Baby Patricia with her two parents, filling newspaper pages all over America, in August and September 1943 and again in 1944.

In the case of the Bollinger baby being 'encouraged' to die at birth by Dr Haiselden, mom and doctor seem to be the only two people worth photographing, in the eyes of The Chicago Daily Tribune editors.

Clearly we might think that in 1915, society regarded the fate of children severely handicapped at birth as a matter for the mother mostly - with neither her spouse, family or priest/minister to help her make her decision - that was for a scientist cum doctor.

But this editorial decision on the part of the Chicago Daily Tribune may have simply reflected their industry's efforts to cement daily newspaper reading among women, the major buyer of the goods advertised in daily papers.

"Women's Pages" and Sob Sister stories were very much part of this effort - and we might so view this unusual decision to leave the dad out of the photo, in this light.

My point is we just don't know, from a position ninety five years later - either or both position are tenable.

So, at the top of this blog entry is a cropped photo of the very good looking (but never married) , bundle of contradictions, Dr Haiselden.

Then below, the original full photo of him along with Anna Bollinger....

I'm off to eat crow and apologize to Dr Pernick !

@ArcadianRecord

"By stubborn,Stars we steer" : much depends on a comma

The famous American poet , William Carlos Williams ("The Red Wheelbarrel"), never actually said "much depends on a comma", but he might have, had he seen my haiku-like poem (above).

Due to the technical requirements of URLs and of blog tags, I can't actually put the correctly written-out poem in my Dawson project's URLs or in an Arcadian Recorder blog tag.

Instead it comes out, uncapitalized and minus the all important comma, as "by stubborn stars we steer".

The implied sense is "by stubborn stars" "we steer" .

Totally,totally, totally wrong.

It all begins to sound like Nova Scotia poet Kenneth Leslie's most famous poem ----- "By Stubborn Stars" .

"I shall sail by stubborn stars". He is saying,' shoals look out, I won't be re-directed and if I must drown as a result so be it'.

Poetry yes, but not, to my mind, poetry with the subtle restraint of haiku, where the reader's mind must fill in the gaps.

But my poem is not a 'in-your-face' haiku either :

"By being stubborn, Stars we will steer" - slapping you on the shoulder, shouting 'get it ? get it ?'

I think it is a fitting poem to sum up the spirit that drove Dawson and his tiny Manhattan Pilot project team, from 1940 to 1945 and onward to the final widespread acceptance of his pioneering vision.

(Though that complete acceptance did not come until after Dawson's tragically early death in April '45).

@ArcadianRecord

Black Day in June/July/August - the summer of '43

The Summer of 1943 was exactly* half way through 'The Good War' (if you were American); if you were European or part of the British Commonwealth, it was exactly 2/3 of the way through the not-so-good-war.

(And to the Chinese it was half way through a twenty year terrible war; to the Vietnamese, the beginnings of a 50 year endless war, etc etc - but I do digress....)

Take a moment and try and recall what you remember of that summer - either because you were there the first time - or from what you have read or watched on TV since then.

A bit of a blank ?

How about this : the military-led 'Zoot Suit' (anti-Latino) Riots in LA.

Strikes and riots over blacks being allowed to work in Mobile Alabama shipyards coupled with white riots against black soldiers stationed in Deep South or South Western Army camps.

The Detroit race riots in the Arsenal of Democracy/Arsehole of Democracy - with a death toll of 34 dead.

The embarassing Harlem riots (& resulting curfew) of August 1-5th in the city that was by far the best of bad bunch for civil liberties in 1940s America .

A riot that occurred exactly one week before the Baby Patricia media-puffed 'good news' story emerged from the same riot-damaged neighbourhoods.

The feel good emphasis on World War II as America's one good war has led most historians - popular or academic - to ignore the origins of the moral nadir of that most moral of all American wars .

Hiroshima 1945 was foretold in the way that mainstream America responded to the pressures Total War Mobilization efforts put on a society a few years earlier.

Like its opponents in Germany and Japan, America in the 1940s was organized around a culture determined not to let most of its citizens to participate fully in anything.

And like Hitler and Tojo, Mr WASP America wasn't prepared to change those rules , even at the cost of perhaps losing a Total War.

The clash came to a head in the summer of 1943 and it didn't really play out ( if in fact it yet has) until a child of miscegenation became the President of the United States early this year....

* If like many Americans, you date the start of WWII for your country from the September 1941 USS Greer incident - the first shots fired by Americans on the Axis forces.

@ArcadianRecord

This is the home of my NON-DEATHLESS prose

I originally published this in the ARCADIAN RECORDER on October 31 2009 but it got deleted when I transferred all of that blog's old entries to MO goes PO.

                      ***************************

Arcadian-Recorder-the-blog ( and my Twitter and Facebook offerings) represents just one side of my divided personality: call it my pamphleteer side.

I sit down in front of my laptop and quickly write out whatever grabs my mind at that moment.

Write it, post it and get over it - deathless prose it is not.

I have no intentions of collecting it, revising it and putting it out in a book-of-essays format : ugh !

Its on the net, its worldwide and its free --- which probably accurately describes its current literary market value.

But when I hope to write a novella length narrative that will still be readable, long after I am gone, I turn to a good old fashioned analog paper book that I publish myself.

Call it a mook or a heftroman if you wish (a hybrid magazine-book), to me it is simply an issue of the Arcadian Recorder journal that looks and feels like a small book.

But an environmentally 'green' book with no wasted dead trees allocated to useless padding.

With nice book paper and a nice cover stock paper - and bound so it stays open and easy to read.

And I want to illustrate it, and have the fun of printing it and binding it myself.

Call it my creative side coming to the fore.

No, novella doesn't mean it is fictional - and don't call it non-fictional either.

Italians will remind you that novella - or novel for that matter - is just what it sounds like - novel,novelty,news - which sounds pretty 'fact-oriented' to me.

Today, novella should just mean a prose work that is too long for a newspaper, magazine or journal, but is too short to stand alone in a conventional book publishing offering.

I would say anything that is from 17,500 to 35,000 words in total, (unpadded).

Conventional book publishers may need at least 190 pages to get bookstores and readers to warm to it --- that can be less than 35,000 words --- but it must still be padded out some how to that length in pages to get a fair hearing.

Dead trees falling needlessly.

Myself, and a lot of others, think that these short-read/low weight/low priced books (80 pages in an A-6 size) have a lot of legs in the new book economy.

And a handful of them can be bundled and themed into a big fat book ,if the conventional book publishers and book sellers think they can sell big numbers in a few months - the route that they regard as the only viable book business model today.

Instead, my books will be printed on my home computer and home laser printer and be available forever, but only on "demand", as customer cash-in-hand orders come in.

No more pulping tons of unsold/returned for full credit books - sorry - I just don't think its the green thing to do to a green-oriented book series.

My Chebucto Community Net website, marshall.chebucto.net , will have paypal options on it, for customers world wide.

I can mail them world wide at the low cost 50 gram letter post rate - and make money - not much money, but I will make some on each and every sale.

Their price, before their very reasonable mailing costs, will be competitive with other serious literary factual narratives : at about 10 cents per 300 words.

Frugally, I plan to sell the originals of their full color cover art painting (as well as the originals of the black & white paintings that go on the pages inside) on the same website and shipped out the same way.

@ArcadianRecord