Dr Dawson as "the Donald McKay of Medicine"
It all happened in a blindingly fast five weeks leading up to October 16th 1940.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson went from reading vague hints about the clinical possibilities of natural penicillium juice to find its spores to inventing ways to quickly grow and concentrate the substance.
He then gave a needle of it to himself , for signs of human toxicity - and survived.
The very next day, October 16th 1940, Manhattan was the site of the world's first penicillin shots - as Dr Dawson injected his team's 'crude' natural penicillin into two 4F patients (a black and a Jew).
On the very day the rest of America began its 75 year old practise of registering all their 1A males.
And 25 years to the day when New York and North America first heard of the execution of nurse Edith Cavell in Belgium.
This news had galvanized Dawson to drop university and join a hospital unit to help poor bleeding Belgium.
Social medicine - the type that helps the 4Fs of this world - was being dropped that Fall to focus on War medicine for the 1As of the world .
Dawson saw this 'eugenic triage' as the civilized world doing exactly what the Axis already advocated - when they should be instead opposing it with every breath and every bone in their bodies.
The world's 4Fs were now his new poor bleeding Belgium.
If the Allied world won't move - then he would. And he did - changing our world for the better forever - until his dying breath four and a half years later.
Dawson was a man with a prominent broad jaw - he simply looked like the sort of person who when he got a bone between his teeth won't let go and would really run with it.
That was a sight an earlier Nova Scotia immigrant to New York , Donald McKay, (who had also set records for speedy results as the builder of the world's fastest ever clipper ships) would know full well.
For when his clippers had a full head of sail they too moved really really fast , with 'a bone in their teeth' as the old salts used to say :
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