If the only earthly job for native penicillin, ancient beyond time, was to succour the humble and to comfort the weak and afflicted, it could have crossed the human consciousness at any time throughout human history.
But if native - natural - humbly made - penicillin's main purpose here was really to smite the arrogant, its arrival in 1940, at the very height of a war to the finish between the world's most 'modern', most 'progressive' civilizations, it couldn't have come at a more appropriate time.
For it's defeat of modern synthetic penicillin confounded the whole notion of 'biological evolutionary progress' so decisively that the Era of Progress came to an abrupt end in 1945 ---- and our current post-Modern, post-Progress era began .
That Dr Henry Dawson fully intended to use penicillin to succour the humble and save the lives of young people dying from SBE endocarditis caused by Rheumatic Fever there can be no doubt.
Still one can ask, why then did he jump the gun in that effort, and start the process three months early (on October 16th 1940) with clearly inadequate amounts of very crude 'native' penicillin, if saving lives was his only aim ?
Could it just be that his history-making injections to two '4Fs of the 4Fs', on a day otherwise devoted to honouring the worth of America's 1As and dismissing the worth of her 4Fs, was designed as much to smite the arrogant, as it was to succour the humble ?
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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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