Whatever strength the movement for Social Medicine (medical care for the small and the weak, even when they can't pay much) might ever had have had in the Anglo Saxon democracies, pretty well died with the Fall of France in June 1940.
By September 1940, medical isolationists, who had earlier so disagreed with medical interventionists over whether it was morally essential to go to the aid of small and weak nations under attack by big aggressors, had come around to at least agreeing that their own nations might be next.
The isolationist doctors even saw this this crisis as the perfect wedge to separate their interventionist colleagues's concerns for weak and small nations from their concern over weak and small patients.
"We simply can't afford to expand Social Medicine for 4Fs in a time of Total War, not when we need ever more resources devoted to maintaining our frontline A1 troops from sickness and injuries."
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was one such colleague isolationists might well have had in mind --- a decorated war hero who wanted medical America to both intervene to protect the small and the weak at home as well as abroad.
Partially for the 4Fs' own sake ----- and partially to show the neutral world the much touted moral gap between the Nazis and the Allies actually had real meaning.
The medical isolationists wanted - by contrast - to abandon the weak and small of America as readily has they had already abandoned the weak and the small of Europe and Asia.
They visualized an eugenically sleek streamlined moderne medicine, as being co-currently promoted at the New York World's Fair, has having no room for the chronically sick poor and minorities : ugly protrusions on their sleek 'average citizen'..
And poor minority patients with invariably fatal SBE, like Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , fitted that bill to a T.
When Dawson choose, on October 16th 1940, to buck his colleagues' consensus with the first ever injections of penicillin in history for this pair he ushered in our Era of Antibiotics .
It, in turn, has done more for achieving the goals of Social Medicine than anything else besides the raising of real wages for the poor and minorities.
An unexpected result from the moral ferment thrown up by the World's Fair streamlined new World of Tomorrow....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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