Dying life unworthy of wartime penicillin was Life unworthy of Life

"all Life is worthy of Penicillin"

The infamous term "Life unworthy of Life", created by a German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche in the 1920s , is generally thought of as bring used exclusively by the Nazis.

Used by them during a Total War to justify killing everyone from working class Aryan babies with developmental issues to the entire Jewish population of Europe.

But the term had a much greater transnational appeal than that .

Prominent American psychiatrist Foster Kennedy thought , in 1941 and 1942, during that same Total War, that the USA would be justified in killing its little Aryan babies with developmental issues.

Shamefully, America's leading psychiatric journal actually agreed with him and only one psychiatrist disputed his thesis.

And the Allies' medical establishment, led by Dr Chester Keefer and his NAS committee, used this idea to justify denying SBE-curing penicillin to young people dying of SBE all over the Allied world,  because they felt that even a cured SBE patient was still useless to the Total War effort.

("Life judged unworthy of Penicillin.")

By contrast, Henry Dawson and a handful of other doctors worldwide supported, and fought for, the notion that "All Life is worthy of Penicillin" - even in , particularly in , a Total War supposedly  fought precisely against the evil idea that some Life was, ipso facto, unworthy of Life.....

even DENIERS can govern well in abundant times , but ...

... when the available per capita resources get small, look to the small to govern best.

Former and soon-to-be-former PMs Howard and Harper are in the news again this week , charged with leading a renewed "war on science" (so called) but I doth protest - again.

These two, and their ilk, love science : Production science.

The science of dig it up, tear it up and burn it up.

The science of greed. Their science is so bright, you gotta wear shades.

The science they do hate is the science of second-guessing, of naysayers, of the cautious and the skeptical.

Impact science.

Canadian-born sociologist Alan Schnailberg's  seminal 1980 division of science into these two branches should be the foundational mother's milk of every Green intellectual wannabe - but sadly ( Elizabeth ??!! ) it doesn't .

Impact science denies ( OMG, he used the D-word !) the world's resources are infinite and it denies that the world's capabilities to be a toxic garbage dump are infinite.

The DENIERS merely deny the denial ; deny there are any limits to Man's god-like powers over nature and reality.

They deny the claim that we will never ever be able to replicate our Earth-like experience at a mass-level on any planet but this one.

The DENIERS have had a good run of it - with a planet this rich and the past population of humans so small and so technologically simple, they couldn't miss.

But now we are hitting the wall and their political parties and intellectual leaders are running out of moral authority and intellectual gas.

With three varieties of DENIER parties offering to form your next government, what can any fully-visioned voter do - besides cry in despair ?

WWII was a conflict within nations and within INDIVIDUALS ... as well as between nations

War ,to give it a quick definition, is a violent conflict conducted between nations, not between individuals.

But the intensity of commitment with which individuals and groups within any nation fight in that nation's war can vary immensely --- perhaps never more so than during WWII.

(We are not considering the rare case when a citizen is in total non-compliance with their nation's war decisions, by becoming a complete conscientious objector or a traitor.)

The existing WWI paradigm ,within which all existing history on that war has been written to date , never denies that each nation had a somewhat divided mind between 1931-1945 on various war issues.

Still writers accepting of that paradigm tend to focus exclusively on the nation against nation conflict and - I claim ! - seriously distort what was really going on and what was truly fundamental in a 'long history' view.

These writings tend to limit the war's big moments to a military battle between the modern age's various ideologies : liberal capitalist democracies versus race (Japan, Germany,and Italy's fascism) and class based (communist Russia) dictatorships.

There is no denying that for the world's population living inside the modern age bubble seventy five years ago , it was the differences between the various strands of modern thought that so dominated their minds.

But what excuse have we historical-minded authors , living seventy years after that bubble began breaking, to be 'captured' by our protagonists' ways of thinking ?

Historians like to claim lots of time is necessary between historian and event to render the beginnings of an objective assessment of it.

Isn't seventy five years (and more) time enough to look anew at WWII ?

To see it no merely as a Modern war, but in fact the last Modern war, and the beginnings of the post-Modern world ?

If we look again at the three big Modern ideologies : liberal capitalist imperialism, fascist cum racial imperialism and communist imperialism, we could today try to see that what they had in common , as opposed to what divided them.

What they held in common was an exclusivist or imperialist worldview that divided all the world into those deserving and those undeserving of the basic rights of humanness.

Does it really matter now, except in the details, whether or not their 'undeserving' included blacks or Jews or well off peasants ?

A Leningrad communist harshly criticizing another young communist for sharing her ration with her dying grandmother, saying the grandmother can contribute nothing to the struggle against the Nazi siege, but that young girl could and she needed all that food to keep up her strength.

A Nazi plan to kill off all German mentally challenged children in taxpayer-supported institutions so that their hospitals and staff could be used instead to look after moderately wounded soldiers capable of returning to the front.

An Allied medical establishment ( take your pick : America, the UK , Canada or Australia ) callously saying SBE was not 'a war disease' and so wives dying from it must be denied life-saying penicillin, so erring husbands with VD can return to fight on the front-lines.

This modern age utilitarianism and instrumentalism run wild - can you really tell its practitioners apart,  without a label ?

But there was an individual-based counter-reaction against it.

People all over the world between 1931 and 1946 began to internally wrestle with the morality of a exclusivist versus inclusivist worldview.

Admittedly tiny in numbers at first when it came to open rebellion against the Modern worldview, this critique came to centre on the idea that wartime penicillin should be offered to all and any.

We do know it received widespread public support, from August 1943 onwards,  at a time when the polls said that most peoples' hearts were still hardened against treating the Jew or black as fully human .

SBE, a rheumatic heart disease, was primarily a poor person's disease : the people who got it tended to be the poor among the visible minorities and immigrants.

The world's daily press correctly sensed it first.

They sensed the widespread public support for the idea these young patients with SBE should be saved, war or no war ---- number one by making a lot lot lot more penicillin than had been produced during the 15 years to date.

By 1949, the once-radical change was complete and modern exclusivity was being replaced plank by plank by our current post-Modern inclusivity.

So, for example, the  idea that it was right that enemy children should die because members of the Allied population had cut their penicillin for illicit gain was now widely viewed by film-goers as the ultimate of all possible evils,  as indicated by the viewer love of  a film that still ranks in the top ten of all time : "The Third Man" .

If only Henry Dawson was still around in 1949, to see what change in the public morality that he had wrought ....

WWII: the battle for inclusive medicine over exclusive medicine

In 1940, Big Pharma only wants to sell its profitable-expensive (patented drugs) to those who could afford to pay for them directly : just as the AMA only wanted doctors to heal those who could afford to pay directly for its members profitably-expensive services.

Against this, some doctors like Henry Dawson believed that all life dined at a common table and that all life deserved a chance to live , all life deserved medical care, including penicillin.

He did not believe in dividing the world into "life worthy of wartime penicillin" and "life unworthy of wartime penicillin".


When the AMA and Big Pharma, working together at the OSRD and the NAS , thought and acted differently , he promoted among his fellow doctors the idea of hospital-made inclusive penicillin.

Inclusive Penicillin  was that hospital made by individual doctors , without thought of patents or personal gain, to save the lives of all those regarded by the government's medical establishment as being "life unworthy of wartime penicillin".

The movement consisted of just Dawson's team at first, then people he directly convinced to follow his ideals.

It then spread all around the world as more and more doctors , encouraged by an awakened and angered laity, urged them on.

All the dramatic new stories, on young mothers and young children snatched from certain death at the last minute by minute amounts of penicillin flown around the world by seconded heavy bombers, seemed to have had an unexpected secondary affect.

Suddenly many of the modern era's population rediscovered feelings of compassion and empathy they thought they had successfully exorcised under the rationalism and utilitarianism
of modern culture.

Their hearts softened at the sight of all those saved babies, children of strangers, and they looked at all their neighbours and all strangers in a new, kindlier light .

An post-modern light ...

"Never Show it , if you can Tell It"

I'm a story-teller, not a story-shower.

If I was in the Showing Business, I'd be making a movies, not writing a book.

Not that I haven't thought seriously of the potential of Henry Dawson's penicillin story as a 21st century version of an oratorio.

 But I realize most successful musical-dramatic works - due to their need for textual brevity - must rely upon the audience's existing knowledge to fill in the gaps in the storyline and mood.

So this book first, then someone else can develop its musical and dramatic potential.

I do eventual see a successful musical story, set entirely in the Dawson team's tiny, tight little world of lab - clinician's consulting office- hospital ward at Columbia Presbyterian, and  running between September 1940 and September 1944.

But as for my book itself, I actually feel more comfortable telling it, using as few (real) direct quotes as possible.

It is popular history slash biography ,not popular journalism , after all.

For some reason,  biography slash popular history gets very little attention in any standard account of narrative non-fiction and creative non-fiction.

That account tends to regard lots of direct quotes from interviews and elaborate scene-recreating, complete with pages of dialogue, as the very exemplars of the art.

I instead want a narrative voice located somewhere between today's Economist magazine and the early Time Magazine : a voice that must smoothly synthesize lots of material ,hidden just below the surface in years of research, and present it to the reader in nice small digestible chunks.

Academic history, in contrast to popular history, tends to cast a much smaller net in each book , and replaces creative non-fiction mantra of lots of direct quotes with a need for lots of citations .

But popular history must self-consciously come to a lot of tiny final decisions, one way or the other, based on quite serious research, but done in areas academic historians would prefer to leave as (amply discussed) open questions.

So is the only Charles Aronson in the 1940 American Census   Henry Dawson's first penicillin patient ?

I believe so, based on a large number of closely reasoned probabilities. But I haven't proven him to be so - and an academic account would discuss all my possibilities and then leave it open to further debate and change.

Done repeatedly, this appraisal of the scant evidence history tends to leave behind, so slows the pace that 99 % of even determined readers bail out , let alone when we consider the high fail-out count among merely averagely motivated casual readers.

Perhaps upon publication, my book will provoke a lot of people to offer up contrary evidence on the exact indenity of Charlie and on many other points.

Fair enough, thankfully an ebook can be quickly altered to correct and expand its various points.

But my book has been researched as far along as I can afford to do it - short of months spent in London, then months in New York and then months in Washington DC and then again in Adelaide.

So : it is what it is......

"Collar the Lot" : Churchill's callousness push-starts A-bomb and Penicillin development

I don't like Winston Churchill.

Granted he was a very complex man, much given to uttering extreme verbal outbursts on whatever position he held that moment, replaces a few hours or weeks later by an equally exaggerated outburst on the opposite view on that same issue.

So it is easy to find vivid quotes from him displaying both humanity and brutality towards the German Jews and Leftists who fled Hitler for Britain before 1939.

For brutal , see his comment 'collar the lot' as soon as he became PM in May 1940.

Until then, the UK had sensibly only interned ( interned gently) those it deemed as obviously pro-Nazi.

But as he threw pro Nazi Aryans and very anti Nazi Jews together in internment camps, those few (because judged potentially 'valuable' to the war effort) German Jews still free in the English-speaking democracies could see dire times ahead for them too.

If they didn't move from being potentially valuable to 'actually valuable' and soon, they and their families would be interned with all the rest.

Ironically, existing restrictions on their current activities actually helped many succeed in becoming valuable ( very,very,very valuable) to the Allied cause.

We already well know about all those Jewish physicists, denied the right to work on important war efforts like Radar, who  fell back upon the then scientific backwater of a possible engine of atomic energy.

Their energetic development (hello Simon, Szilard and others) led directly to the idea of a possible A-Bomb becoming not the last but the first priority of the war.

It is not often thought of in the same way, but the Penicillin project (often twinned with the A-Bomb as one of the two big discoveries of the war) was push-started by two German Jewish emigres also facing possible internment for themselves and their families in the Spring and Summer of 1940, after Churchill's churlish actions.

Ernst Chain had to push and pull Howard Florey into realizing their peacetime, long term, basic research on microbe on microbe warfare could have huge wartime implications.

He probably pushed and pulled a little too hard in claiming credit on a back up project - this one on the chemical nature of the activity of the (mildly anti-bacterial) connective cellwall-destroying enzyme Lysozyme.

This had the effect of rousing the anger of , and the fear within, of another German Jewish emigre in America who had additional fears as he was also an WWI veteran of the Central Powers.

Karl Meyer had worked with (Martin) Henry Dawson among many others,to do the initial work on the chemical nature of Lysozyme and on some other important connective tissue destroying enzymes.

He saw himself as the pioneer in this small but valuable new field in bio-chemistry.

Meyer heard of Chain's forthcoming exaggerated claims for his Lysozyme efforts via the American-born Jew Leslie A Epstein (later Falk).

Like Meyer and Chain in those days, Epstein was a left-winger in politics and in medicine.

He got along with both of these two fellow Jews.

He had been forced, by general government order,  to flee Oxford University and a Rhodes scholarship before his year and PhD was completed.

So he completed his work, begun under Chain in Oxford, with Meyer in New York, because he was the other recognized expert on the topic.

He there mentioned Chain's part in the recent successful demonstration (May 1940) that the twelve year old nigh-on useless penicillin actually could cure bacterial disease inside mice without harming them.

This meant it probably could do likewise inside humans - humans perhaps even with guns and helmets. There was a shooting war on , after all.

This work was to be published in late August 1940 in Lancet.

Chain was soon tasked to try and synthesize the natural active ingredient as fast as possible.

Meyer - I believe correctly - felt that Chain was a far better 'big ideas man' than a working bio-chemist and that Meyer could do the job far better than Chain or the fungi ever could .

He couldn't beat the fungi, as it turned out - no one could - no one ever has.

But Meyer's secret plan to repay Chain for stealing his Lysozyme credit AND secure his family from possible internment with Nazis by synthesizing penicillin was not without its own profound consequences.

Because he badly needed his friend Henry Dawson and his two skills , if his project was to succeed.

Dawson and his co-worker Gladys Hobby were expert micro-biologists.

They were highly skilled in growing large amount of microbes, like the penicillium.

Their skill was needed to provide the huge amounts of raw natural product Meyer had to destructively analyze, all to guide the process of synthesis of penicillin from pure chemical compounds.

Secondly, only Dawson the clinician had the licensed legal access to animal and human subjects to test the biological effectiveness of any new results at synthesis.

Then Dawson abruptly decided Meyer's penicillin might do a lot more than just be tested on human patients.

It might just cure patients otherwise doubly-fated to an inevitable death from the dreaded SBE.

 Doubly fated to needlessly die, because in the Fall of 1940, it seemed the medical establishment was using the upcoming war effort as an excuse to treat research upon them as the very lowest priority.

In addition, American Big Pharma had shown no interest in providing any raw starting material of a potential - natural - drug they considered far tougher to work with than the still tractable and still profitable - chemically-oriented - sulfa family of drugs.

And they had no interest in developing a consultant-style relationship with a virtually unknown emigre Jewish biochemist, even with a growing reputation for the quality of his work.

(Meyer did have some sort of relationship with German-controlled Schering but they didn't see the potential - at least for their firm at this time - in the area of fungal-based antibiotics.)

Dawson saw this growing indifference to the sad fate of the poor SBE youths as part and parcel of the growing general meanness of the Modern Age itself, as exemplified by humanity's attitudes to small nations under attack from their big bullying neighbours.

This indifference to the fate of smaller 'others' started in Manchuria in 1931, then extended to Ethiopia and Spain in the mid 1930s  and then Austria and Czechoslovakia at the end of the decade.

Now it was Poland, Finland, the three Balt states, Denmark, Norway and Belgium turn to be attacked and generally conquered by bully neighbours.

Still America's population and hence government remained firmly 'neutral' - as did the vast majority of the still sovereign nations of the world.

In hindsight, it is better to regard them all , us all , as being cold-hearted bystanders in the global schoolyard, watching indifferently as bullies beat up babies.

When Dawson decided to use Meyer's penicillin project to confront this indifference to the small of the world, starting with the specific case of the young people needlessly dying of SBE , he eventually set in motion a globe-wide reaction against Modernity's cult of callousness.

But let us never forget it was Winston Churchill's own particular callousness that first set it all in motion , back in May 1940 ....

WWII: Bullies and Bystanders vs Innocents and Intervenors

NYC-based Dr Henry Dawson in 1941 was clearly an intervenor with his 'inclusive' penicillin (and may I point out that adult intervenors (as I well know) were often bullied themselves as children).

 SBE patients , such as his patients Charlie and Miss H were clearly the innocents.

NYC-based Dr Foster Kennedy in 1941 was clearly a bully, particularly telling that he would use the excuse of the shortage of staff and resources during an upcoming war as an excuse to finally implement his long held plan to kill all the deformed children.

Shades of Adolf Hitler in an exactly similar setting.

His active verbal supporters at the very top of the world's largest and most influential mental health body, the American Psychiatric Association, were clearly the stone-hearted bystanders a bully needed to get away with his deeds.

In the wider world of WWII, one can easily spot the bullies, the innocents and stone hearted bystanders (aka Neutrals)  as individuals and as (almost) entire nations.

But sadly, no one nation stands out as a whole hearted intervenor.

That noble task is left to a few in all nations, to try and heal the hearts of the stone-hearted majority by rousing their consciences  to the sad and unfair fate of the small and the weak in face of bullies.

Bullies like Hitler, Stalin, Tojo and sometimes even people like Churchill and others on the Allied and Neutral side.....