Dr Henry Dawson goes 'off the reservation' --- and Thank God too !

About ten billion of us, in the seventy years since October 16th 1940, have had good reason to be undyingly grateful for their decision, but there can be little doubt that some of Henry Dawson's senior colleagues went to their graves regretting the day they let this particular Indian off the reservation.

For ten years they had delayed - no 'fast track' for our Henry - content to let him paddle about in the gentle hospital backwaters of studying avirulent bacteria and running a day clinic for people with arthritis.

But finally judging him as harmless as the obscure bacteria he choose to study, they made Dawson an associate attending physician - the equivalent in the biggest elite teaching hospitals of being granted tenure in a university.

They all knew there was still some risk.

No one ever died from mistakes made by physicians studying harmless bugs or dealing with the aches and pains of the elderly arthritic - but now Dawson was to be ultimately responsible for all the fast-paced decisions made on a busy acute care ward.

However the intellectually stubborn but personally very diffident Dr Dawson was not really expected to do anything out of character.

Unfortunately 'character', like so many things in life and pace Stephen Jay Gould, is something best studied as a totality.

Because his oldest acquaintances could have warned them that while indeed Henry Dawson was usually a quiet study, it was also equally true that about once every decade, he tended to quietly throw off the traces and just go for it.

'Sneaky' some said - and he was sneaky on these rare occasions, but sneaky in a cautious, lawyerly sort of way - doing nothing so obviously wrong that you could pin him down for it.

Take today as an example.

To better facilitate America's first ever peacetime draft registration, Columbia University and its allied teaching institutions, among them its flagship Presbyterian Hospital, had declared a day off for teaching and all non-essential medical procedures.

Very few of Dawson's senior bosses were even in the hospital this morning, let alone roaming the wards, performing their normal overseeing of the mid-level associate and assistant physicians, along with the bottom feeding residents and interns.

Later, he insisted to his seniors with the straightest of faces, that the only reason he initiated this undiscussed injection of an untested drug on this day was because it was a very rare day off from teaching and the arthritis clinic and so he could spend a little more time on 'his' ward.

Dawson's mask-like stolid face was always frustratingly hard to read but few of his colleagues doubted that inside, he was secretly grinning from ear to ear.

But in truth, Dawson had even told his three colleagues on this drug project why his sudden decision to break their agreed upon protocol to only inject the new drug four months hence when it undoubtedly would be synthetic, pure and abundant.

For to Henry, October 16th was a date so heavily freighted in personal emotion, he couldn't begin to break his austere Scottish Presbyterian reticence, even to open up to these three close friends and colleagues.

For on that date in 1915, the world's newspaper readers in the overseas world beyond Europe all learned about the execution by the Germans of yet another Belgian, Phillippe Baucq - one of hundreds of hundreds since the dastardly Germans invaded the neutrality of poor bleeding little Belgium.

It was the Germans' betrayal of their own signed agreement not to invade neutral Belgium that had led the British Empire into war against Germany and her allies.

That and the horrors - endless murders, rapes, burnings and sackings - that Germany had dealt tiny Belgium but hadn't dared to do on the much larger French nation it also invaded.

A bully and a coward.

Now Baucq had been executed --- and along with him a gentle middle aged British nurse.

In the context of its time, Edith Cavell's execution is best understood then as the final straw in a long litany for many in the world - particularly throughout the English speaking world.

Hard recruiting statistics confirm that tens of thousands around the world decided moments after they first opened their newspapers that October morning to join up to fight the Germans - many (like Henry) joining the medical corp in open emulation of Miss Cavell.

October 16th 1940 thus marked the twenty fifth anniversary of Dr Dawson's medical career, the day a promising law student threw it all in to become a buck private and medical orderly in a frontline military hospital.

He signed up to help the helpless - originally the poor bleeding little Belgians.

And all through his medical career, he had sought to help the small, helpless and overlooked - in between the wars this was the chronically ill poor, always a very low priority on the big elite teaching hospitals.

The largely right wing American medical community had been generally opposed to America going to war to help the bleeding poor little nations of Europe.

That had been painful enough for Henry Dawson.

But now these chicken hawk hypocrites had suddenly discovered new virtues in the cause of "War Medicine".

This was medicine designed to keeping American's frontline fighting men healthy and 1A, just in case American ever had to go to war to defend itself.

In reality, the conservative medical elites were just barefacedly using the need to divert resources towards war medicine preparation as an excuse to kill the left wing medical community's ongoing efforts to promote "Social Medicine".

These were claims that morally all medical efforts should be directed at everyone, even to the poor and sick (Life's 4Fs), even if they couldn't pay for all of it.

Think of it as what Obamacare should have been, but arriving seventy five years earlier.

October 16th back in 1915 was a date devoted to defending Life's 4Fs - in this case the poor Belgians.

But this October 16th in 1940 was to be a day devoted to registering and honoring all of Life's 1As ---- and towards throwing aside Life's 4Fs.

(Let us not forget that the Nazis only began their killing of the unfit on the very day they declared war in September 1939 - being neither the first nor the last nation to use 'the war' as a feeble excuse to kick the poor and the weak to the curb.)

That registration would even include Dawson's two injection-receiving patients, living under a sentence of almost certain death from invariably fatal SBE endocarditis caused by Rheumatic Fever.

Despite this , the government figured they might just recover - that one chance in one hundred faint hope clause - and hence become suitable cannon fodder.

Dawson knew from his WWI military hospital experience that no army would ever willingly accept a recruit who had had SBE.

These were Life's 4Fs of the 4Fs and extensive care for them, in an atmosphere of preparing for war, was discounted by most of the medical world - they'd be too weak to do useful war factory work even if they did survive.

More likely these SBEs would just consume enormous amounts of scarce medical care and then die anyway --- best then a policy of benign neglect and let Nature take her course.

This was America's variant on the Aktion T4.

Which is why that Dawson so deliberately picked these two 4Fs of the 4Fs - two poor, working class youths, one Black, one Jewish, to usher in the Age of Antibiotics - the two he choose to give history's very first penicillin injections to.

And why he so deliberately choose a day devoted to honoring the 1A to honor the 4F as well.

For twelve long years, doctors around the world had agreed not to inject live-saving but fungi-made yellow slime into human veins, at least not until it was man-made, patented, pure, synthetic.

Now Dawson had let the genie out of the bottle and there was no putting it back - to this very day, penicillin antibiotics are still Dawson's fungi-made sort, not man-made.

With two quiet small injections, mere 'noises off' in a day of high drama centred around America's first ever peacetime draft registration, Dawson fired a moral shot across the bow of a world hellbent on attending to the whims of the mighty and ignoring the cries of the weak.

His shot is still echoing ...

Nazis manning 88mm gun might be eugenic but its shells were not - democratically wounding 1A soldier and 4F civilian alike

Deadly group A strep bacteria (GAS) will tolerantly and democratically carry off all sorts of injured and wounded individuals : Aryan, Jewish, 4F ,1A , fit, unfit , warrior or civilian.

It knows and accepts no hierarchy of worthiness but like any incoming artillery shell it kills and maims in perfect equal opportunity randomness.

Remember all this when the true wartime story of penicillin-for-all is made into a typical Hollywood fantasy.

Under Hollywood's blinkered gaze, wartime penicillin would have to have been manufactured by 1A handsome , virile/virulent , WASP military doctors with chiseled chins.

Their moral conflict driving the plot would be this : should they interrupt their vital violent combat work , just to rescue some weedy swarthy 4F civilians on the Home front who are once again revealed as too inept to resist fatal bacterial infections like GAS on their own ?

In reality , it was of course totally all the other way around.

In fact it was weedy 4F stay-at-home unfits who created the wartime penicillin that saved the lives of hunky virile 1As dying helplessly from bacteria-infected wounds from random 88mm shell fragments.

A plot so subversive of the established American literary cultural and political order that Jesus and the Gospel authors could probably write it in their sleep.

But equally so it is a plot that would be far beyond what the most supposedly 'radical' graphic novelist or Indie film director could ever write.

They - to date - have only unconsciously reproduced the traditional authoritarian rejections of democratic debate over values.

They have only unconsciously continued to hype the ageless American monomyth of regenerative violence that by-passes democratic debate ,compromise and tolerance , albeit a monomyth now cloaked in the hippest of counterculture colours...

Action 4F hooks up with Action T4 : Allied and Axis eugenic ethics 'mate like minks' during WWII ...

Action T4

It seemed clear to the Nazis (and to most Allies) that if the people they viewed as "unfit" weren't going to be useful on the combat front that didn't mean they should be left off scot-free.

They too must help the war efforts in some tangible way.

Perhaps by receiving less food, heat and medicine --- since they couldn't do useful war work or even simply breed more healthy future warriors.

The Nazis quickly parted company with many (but by no means all) Germans , Allied and Neutrals by deciding the unfit could really best help the war  by being murdered --- to free up yet more food and more hospital attention for other "fitter" Aryans.

Action T4 - the secret - official - mass murders of all the unfit ended after a couple of years , under strong if muted protests from the general German public.

(It carried on - unofficially - throughout the war and beyond - as a secretive and unorganized effort supported by wink, wink silence from superiors.)

But this public protest only arose in strength with rumours that the Nazi eugenicists planned to start killing the elderly and the wounded soldiers of non-poor German families --- as well as those of the poorest German families.

This social animus against those unable to fight in combat seems to be universal and eternal.

Action 4F

And almost always, the strongest public anger does not spill over against those who are "fit but not at the front" (those in society with valuable special skills working in "deferred" jobs).

This is because they are society's bosses and able to make life miserable for any who dare to complain publicly.

"So you think your husky young Foreman should be at the Pacific Front do you ?"

 "Well then how about you spending some time in the heat of Guadalcanal , Mr drill press operator !"

This implied threat from the powerful had hidden teeth - most men with deferred valuable skills knew that if enough women or blacks were trained to do their jobs, their deferment would end and they would be called up.

This, and not the general prejudice against women and blacks , was the real (if semi-secret) reason why white male worker protests against hiring women and blacks were so frequent and so violent.

So public anger had to be directed instead against the weakest , poorest and least popular members of society --- those 4Fs who came from poor and or minority groups.

They could be safely attacked without any risk that they, their families or their communities could successfully counterattack.

Most girls , just for instance , made it very clear that they won't be seen dating or flirting with those unfortunate teenager college boys with 4F cards.

Seventy five years later this very public rebuke to vulnerable teenage identities clearly still stings in the memoirs of these now elderly men.

Conscious anger mixed with much unconscious guilt in the minds of Allied society's most powerful who were not at the front in WWII (and who had also frequently evaded serving in combat in WWI as well.)

This is shown by the astonishing eagerness with which the Allied elites made the poorest and the weakest in Allied society (its metaphorical 4Fs) the unwitting subjects in endless dangerous medical experiments - as assayed in Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files .

Or the eagerness with which they denied the poorest lifesaving medicines as a form of brutal eugenic triage.

I hope I am not seen as excusing the Nazis' actions but merely stating a historical consensus that the Nazis got even more brutal against the unfit as the objective and subjective conditions of the war worsened for them .

By objective I mean the evidence that in war years of bad European food harvests, they determined not to lose this war (unlike the first war) on the German home front - and so made others suffer more so that Germans continued to eat well.

(Ordinary Germans ate better in WWII than they had during the 1930s' Depression period - because of a government plan that enabled German soldiers to sent home food they bought openly and freely from other Europeans .

 The Nazis secretly made it work financially for them by in effect creating hugely unfair currency exchange rates.)

By subjective, I mean when it seemed clear to the Nazis in the Fall of 1941 that they might not secure new living space in western USSR , they began killing all of Europe's Jews - not just some of the Jews in parts of  Eastern Europe - as a new war objective they could easily reach, to justify all the German war dead.

I mention all this because we mustn't let the Allies off too lightly in these brutal eugenic sweepstakes.

They afterall invented most of the original eugenic dogma the Nazis picked up and ran with.

And the historical evidence indicates that the Allied eugenic actions got more brutal as the war worsened against them.

If the war had continued to worsen badly against them who can say if their 4F Action horrors might not have rivalled those of the Action 4T ?

Certainly, on the military front, the Allied record displays a despicable eagerness to see that the hapless 4Fs of the occupied lands and of the Axis suffered (by Allied bombings) before the 1As of the Allies did (by directly engaging the German troops on Western European soil).

But that squalid history is a post for another day ....

Oct 16 '40 : marking 75 years of Antibiotics AND of Draft Registration !

The Draft (conscription) process tends to implicitly lay bare the utilitarian instrumentalism that form the true backbone of most civilizations - the values Christianity rose to oppose.

This is because how most ordinary people chose to interpret the results of draft board medicals.

They tend to regard only those people judged draft board 1As (as fit enough to fight for their country or to work in heavy war industries) are deemed worthy of full public praise and honour.

And ultimately, of being worthy of full food rations,  decent housing and proper medical care --- if those three necessities of life run short, as they frequently do in war.

But those judged unfit are publicly mocked as '4Fs', the scorn of every teenage girl seeking a date and the sort of people whose life-threatening illness is left on the back burner of "Code Slow",  because that illness is  judged 'not a military priority'.

On Draft registration Day,  October 16th 1940, Dr Martin Henry Dawson choose to oppose those instrumentalist values head on.

He choose that date to give very first ever injections of life-saving antibiotics.

But not to 1A youths.

Instead, to two young men judged to be the 4Fs of the 4Fs.

These two young patients  were dying of invariably fatal SBE (the form of endocarditis that made Rheumatic Fever the leading killer of the young before penicillin).

SBE is a disease mostly of the poor and of minorities.

Treating it was often regarded as a form of Social Medicine --- and thus was highly suspect in the eyes of many isolationist members of the American medical fraternity.

That was because treating it - or going to the defence of Poland or Belgium -  meant selflessly helping people outside their own religious, economic and ethnic community.

It meant walking the Christ-like walk on Monday instead of just doing the talk on Sunday.

In the Fall of 1940, conservative and isolationist members of the medical community seized upon the interventionalists' talk of getting the country ready for war.

They manipulated that talk of war preparation to urge the need to divert resources towards War Medicine for 1A youth (particularly in light of the upcoming Draft Registration process planned for October 16th).

And away from the left wing's emphasis on helping those sick among the poor and minorities (Social medicine) --- the likely majority of those judged 4F.

But what were the moral values that Americans would be dying to defend if they went to war against Hitler ?

Were they not the moral values that said all humans should be treated equally ?

The moral values that said human beings were not to be regarded as mere instruments for the larger collectivity - to be tossed aside like used condoms when they were no longer useful ?

Dawson certainly felt so - but it would be years later before even a bare majority of his fellow Americans would agree ...

the fit warring upon their opponents' "unfit" : WWII in a nutshell

Eugenically speaking, WWII was a Proxy War.

Opposing groups of the high tech 'fit' warred mostly upon their opponent's low tech 'unfit' population.

All in the hopes this would cause their opponents to surrender without much direct (dysgenic) combat between the opposing 'fits'.

So - for example - German civilians on German soil were bombed for six full years before British troops* finally fought a badly faded German Army on German soil,  in the dying moments of WWII.

The wealth needed for the fit to be able to undertake these high tech 'proxy fights' was disproportionally taken from the politically weak on each side.

In the case of Germany it was the Jew ,Slav and Western European in that order of severity.

Great Russia took all resources , below a very low minimum, from its entire population ,below a tiny elite.

In terms of severity : first, above all , the peoples of its westernmost dependencies --- the result of Great Russia's decision to limit the fighting to there.

They did not just go hungry and cold the most - they also died the most - by far.

Then, on the Great Russia home front -- those with low technical skills and the elderly and unwell.

For the Japanese elite, the peoples of the occupied lands (the Chinese always getting it worst) and then the Japanese working class : rural, urban and soldier.

The politically powerful German working class ate well right into 1945 while Jew and Slav slowly starved to death and even Frenchmen went around hungry all the time.

The equally politically powerful working class people of the UK always ate well during WWII - many ate much better than during the best years of the Depression, let alone the worst.

So the people of the British Commonwealth (sic) who ate worse (admittedly not all did and not all the time) were the native darkies of their colonies.

Being far wealthier, the British didn't need to steal as ruthlessly as the desperately inefficient food-producing Germans did.

But when things did get tough (Bengal and in parts of Africa) they proved to be as amoral as the Nazis in spirit,  if not in letter of application.

And when it came to starving Occupied Europe, the British were as unbending as the Germans --- if not more so - as the case of the Greek and Dutch famines can attest.

Lesser known is their deliberate starving of Channel Ports held by the Germans and occupied by tens of thousands of trapped French and Belgian civilians.

Not just food and fuel in short supply was diverted to the fit away from the unfit - so too was medicine and medical care.

The politically weak were subjected to dangerous medical experiments without genuine informed consent.

None of the young healthy doctors who performed these experiments upon them thought to do the experiments upon themselves as some of an earlier generation of doctors had done.

Nor did these healthy 1A doctors go into combat zones.

As I say, eugenically it was a Proxy War designed to ensure that win or lose, the fit survived.

My blog posts have laboured long on just who got and did not get penicillin - I needn't remind faithful readers of just how unfair to the politically weak the whole process was.

In terms of death and suffering those judged unfit died out of all proportion to their percentage of the world's population - the eugenicists won this battle.

But they lost the war -- because none of the fit got at the end of the war what they expected to get at the beginning of the war.

Instead the will of the fit was blunted over and over by the wild and the weak ....

* The number of British Commonwealth army troops who died combat deaths on German soil was a tiny tiny percentage of the total British Commonwealth military and civilian dead.

Wartime Penicillin intended to be secret and synthetic

It ended up public and 'public domain' natural, thanks to Henry Dawson and his supporters.

The British War Department and the American OSRD (run by Vannevar Bush) had expected to quickly, cheaply and, above all, secretively mass produce synthetic penicillin.

Enough artificial penicillin to supply the Allied front lines in the big pushback against Tojo and Hitler, while the enemy had to make do with the rapidly failing Sulfa drugs or try to produce tiny amounts of impure natural penicillin.

The whole project depended on keeping accounts of penicillin's miracle cures away from the Allied public.

That would only create a public sensation , as it had earlier for Sulfa's first miracle cures, which the Axis would soon learn about , thanks to newspaper articles in Neutral papers.

Once alerted, clever German and Japanese chemists would also soon synthesize penicillin and negate the temporary military advantage the Allies had gained via secrecy.

So : the potentially morally shabby story of wartime penicillin : medicine as a weapon.

But when the normally-stodgy Henry Dawson actually dared to steal government-sanctioned war penicillin to successfully save some young 4F kids banefully abandoned by their government as just 'useless mouths' , word spread rapidly in the gossip-driven circles of wartime medical New York.

A young doctor with his own burden of prejudice from the anglo protestant medical elite to rouse his ire, Dante Colitti,  got the newspaper chain that invented yellow journalism (Hearst) to come to the defence of the yellow magic and no sooner than you could say 'that darling little Patty Malone', the jig was up for the OSRD and War Department.....

In a world war obsessed by 1A nations, soldiers and scientists, Henry Dawson dared to defend the worthiness of 4Fs... and 4F science

During WWII (1931-1946) a whole series of countries cum bullies - among the Allies as well as among the Axis - almost totally consistently choose to only attack those nations or peoples they judged weaker than themselves.

Britain, for example, shamefully refused to attack Germany with   its potentially much larger Commonwealth army manpower and felt the war could be won by invading weaker Italy instead.

It also choose to starved the prostrate peoples of occupied Europe by blockade , rather than attack Germany directly with all that  Commonwealth army manpower, in hopes this also would win the war, along with success in Italy.

Only twice, both times in December of 1941, did bullies deliberately choose to attack someone they believed was stronger than they were : when Japan and then Germany declared war on America , a nation with by far the biggest economy in the world and also by far the hardest country to invade.

In partial explanation of all this bully behavior, it was the Age of Modernity, when the majority of powerful opinion was firmly convinced that Evolution was unidirectional and always consolidating into fewer (and ever bigger) entities.

Fewer ever bigger animals and plants, fewer ever bigger buildings, ships and dams ,fewer ever bigger corporations and cities , fewer ever bigger nations and empires.

Ever bigger and bigger, ever better and better : so that the destruction and absorption of the smaller and the weaker was simply inevitable.

So what we might now regard - in post hegemonic times - as the shameful behavior of virtually all the nations and people of the world, two billion standing around as bystanders at a holocaust or a schoolyard bullying session, they then regarded as sad but inevitable, "letting Nature take its course."

Henry Dawson didn't agree and he put his strong disagreement into actions.

Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson never said why he did what he did, why he went so far out on a limb to do what he did or why he willingly gave up his life to aid his efforts.

But concrete deeds walk, while abstract talk ... just talks.

By his deeds, we can see that Dawson clearly thought even the 4Fs of the 4Fs were worth saving at the height of Total War, particularly when his side was fighting, after all, opponents who thought they weren't worth saving.

By his deeds, we know he clearly thought tiny 4F science had its own virtues, even during a war when Science, like skyscrapers, was thought only to get better when it got bigger.

Seventy five years on, his solitary figure looks now like the sensible one, while his many  opponents - basically the vast majority of informed opinion - now look to be sadly hubris-ridden and totally lack in the imagination to see beyond the obvious.

Dawson didn't say 'small was beautiful' and 'big was bad', partly because he didn't say anything at all.

 But he definitely acted as if he had concluded that Evolution as progressing in all directions : as often decomposing into tiny viruses as it was consolidating into big dinosaurs.

This could be because any acute observer of Life on Earth, and Dawson was acutely open to everything, would be forced to conclude that reality had indeed given the planet a dynamic mix of stability niches (aiding the existence of large entities) and instability niches (aiding the existence of small entities).

So an eternal global commensality of big and little entities was inevitable.

If Dawson had lived and had been in good health he might have formally stated what he believed and the lessons we might learn from his successes.

But he didn't, so we must tease them out : from his deeds....

1940's ISOLATIONISTS abandoned Europe's 4Fs and America's 4Fs

1A =  53%

From 1938 till 1941, Europe's small and weak nations - its 4F states - were gobbled up one after another, while the majority of Americans sat on their hands and did frack-all.


Then in the Fall of 1940, these same Isolationists, using the excuse of preparing for an European war - a war that they were actually working all out to avoid - pushed for an abandonment of Social Medicine , in favour of War Medicine.

Translation of this hypocrisy ?

In Eugenics-speak, this meant abandoning efforts to provide medical care to both the well-to-do 1As and the poorer 4Fs, in favour of research on making the 1As into better fighters.

Rooseveltcare as unpopular then as Obamacare is today

Actually, the Isolationists had high hopes that America's 1As would never have to fight : this was all just an excuse to roll back the clock on providing care for the 47% in 1940s America.

Rooseveltcare was no more popular then among the well-to-do than Obamacare is today. (Or Romneycare was in Boston a few years ago - but that is another story altogether isn't Mitt ?)

It was this Isolationist hypocrisy that I believe pushed Martin Henry Dawson over the edge into his all out effort to rescue some American 4Fs (his equivalent of 1915's Belgians), with 4F natural - impure- penicillin,  as his rebuke to uncaring America.....