Antibiotics' Patients Zero, part 2

In the end, finding out about the Patient Zero I knew the least about, Aaron Alston, turned out to be by far the easiest.

But first I had to make all sorts of naive mistakes.

I knew that if an acute case of Rheumatic Fever attacks a young child's heart, they can quickly die, without prompt and appropriate medical intervention.

But if they don't die, most of the attacked heart tissue will more or less heal - unless the area attacked is the very delicate and extremely vital heart valves.

You can literally hear damaged heart valves.

Many people have harmless heart murmurs but these particular stethoscope sounds tell a doctor that the valves are damaged and the entire heart is straining in overtime, to pump blood through these only partially closed/open doors.

So doctors will then strongly advise the parents to not tax this particular child's heart.

So no strenuous sports - later on, no vigorous dancing, no passionate sex acts, pregnancies are very dangerous, chasing after toddlers is too stressful, etc.

While my brother Bruce had childhood Rheumatic Fever and was left with a heart murmur and damaged valves, ironically enough he was the only athletic member of our extended family !

Though small, he was eager to try out for high school football and was a city level long distance running champion.

So you'd think I would have known better about Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) and young athletes.

In my defence, I had just assumed that the heart valves of Rheumatic Fever patients who go on to develop life-ending subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) were far more damaged than most RHD patients - so obviously far less capable of championship level athletics.

But this simply isn't so - SBE, like cancer, has a pronounced stochastic (for PhDs) or random (for ordinary folk) nature to it : sheer bad luck as well as bad valves plays a part.

Dawson treated patients who got SBE fifty or more years after their childhood heart valves were first damaged and some who got SBE only a year or two after first getting Rheumatic Fever.

But most patients get SBE ten or twenty years after their valves are first attacked.

Still, when I did find an Aaron Alston finishing in the top level in NYC wide races in 1930, ten years before my Aaron Alston first got SBE, I dismissed that it might be him.

I also got search results for A. Alston too : an A. Leroy Alston also winning athletic events.

I just felt I had got nowhere with Alston - the lack of his birthdate was so crippling.

As I described in an earlier blog, knowing first and last name, residence in greater NYC area in 1940, and birthdate, usually means that 140 million possible American patients is reduced down to one or two.

Without a birthdate, it goes up to at least a hundred possible names.

But in 2014, I suddenly realized I probably did have a death date on him as well.

For his brief medical history made it clear he was going to get all the penicillin Dr Dawson's team had (they were making themselves) but suddenly all the penicillin was switched to another patient.

Alston had obviously died, died in mid January 1941, and almost certainly while undergoing treatment in Dawson's hospital, ie in the borough of Manhattan.

Now a search for an index of NYC death certificates seemed easier.

Well, thanks to many tireless volunteers, it certainly was.

I din't really need a specific borough or specific day or month - a volunteer-run online death index for NYC in the first half of the twentith century, didn't show tons of deceased Aaron Alstons in all of 1941 in all boroughs - just him !

With his death certificate number in hand and because he had died before 1948, I a white stranger from Canada could order up the death certificate of someone who was probably a black man from Harlem.

When the certificate copy arrived, it wasn't as detailed as many death certificates I had seen - but his mother's maiden last name Glaze was one I had never seen - rare maybe enough to find her on on Google Search ?

I kept typing in Louise Glaze Harlem or variations thereof and presto one evening, a website came up of her nephew talking about her - i had found one of Aaron's living cousins !

I phoned him (Claude Jay of Harlem My Love) and first I astounded him and then he astounded me --- because he knew of Aaron as Leroy - or more formally as A. Leroy Alston.

He said he was a big athlete.

A person who used his middle name and not his first name - well who would have thought ?!

Well, my wife's huge family has many who do just that - and Dr Martin Henry Dawson was alway Henry - from birth.

Armed with this unexpected information, I soon found tons of material on Aaron Leroy Alston - some in his own voice.

And Claude made it clear Aaron had hundreds of living relatives all over the US.

I astounded Claude again - discovering Aaron Leroy wasn't widowed as his mom said on the death certificate - Claude thought he was always single.

Instead Leroy and Charlotte Lee had been married in the good times of 1930 but the couple were living back with their separate mothers in 1940 when Leroy was too sick to provide an income.

(Both families, once doing okay, were unbelievably poor in 1940 thanks to the Great Depression, racism and early deaths/severe illness of breadwinners.)

I gave all my information to Claude and tried not to research too much further.

I don't feel, as a white Canadian, that I should tell the story of a black man from Harlem - Claude is a relative, journalist, activist and author - he'll tell the full story well I am sure.

Now I turned my hand to another named SBE patient of Dawson - known only as Mr Conant.

(I came to assume that the highly unusual use of that word Mr meant he probably wasn't a young black or Jewish charity case but that he was a private patient, middle class,middle aged and white, from outside NYC)and treated in January 1941.

I searched for a middle aged dead Mr Conant, Manhattan, early 1941, in the NYC death index and up came George M Conant.

Google gave me him in spades - his small town daily describing his SBE illness and his treatment at Columbia Presbyterian at the right dates.

I found Dawson's death certificate and that of little Patty Malone as well - but no Charles Aronson.

That was because he had survived into 1949 at least and NYC death certificates after that date were hard to locate and even harder to gain a legal right to access...

Now read Antibiotics' Patients zero, part 3

Wartime Manhattan's Projects : big Little Boy versus the tiny ampoule that saved little Patty Malone

The Little Boy atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima was a very Big Bomb indeed : 5000 kilograms , 300 cm long, by 70 cm wide and 70 cm deep.

Long and thin : hence Little Boy.

 Big Science needed tens of thousands of workers to build it.

By contrast, the tiny ampoule of natural penicillin that saved the life of  little baby Patty Malone was only 5 grams in weight, .7cm by .7 cm by 3 cm in size.

It was thus 100 times shorter in length and width and thickness, though it too was long and thin in appearance.

 And since its density was also surprisingly similar to that of Little Boy, it appropriately weighed 5 grams : a million times less (100 x 100 x 100 = 1 million).

Small science indeed.

Particularly when we recall that natural penicillin is actually made in a fungus factory that weighs about 70 pico grams (pico : one trillionth of a gram !) .

That is about a billion trillion times less the weight of what it would require for humanity to  make the basic machinery and basic chemicals for chemists to synthesize penicillin.

The fungus only requires a bit of dirty water and a bit of decaying organic debris.

America's big bombers carried both the Little Boy bomb and the ampoules of penicillin : one went off to Hiroshima, the other also went all over the world  to save lives.

 However its first mercy run was from Brooklyn New York to Macon Georgia, to save Anne Shirley Carter.

A mighty big plane and a mighty long journey for such a small little ampoule but if any taxpayer complained, they were very careful not to do it publicly.

Could any two projects - anywhere - anytime - have been more different ?

Wartime Manhattan : from Mars ... or from Venus ?

If I might be permitted to gently chide the citizens of Manhattan, may I suggest that they had done very little, themselves, to balance the horrific wartime image of their city created by being tagged as the place that 'birthed' the atomic bomb and its potential destruction of the entire world.

To the 911 bombers, it is the best known image of the borough.

(And by the way, it is only men, like the bosses of the best known wartime Manhattan Project , who talk about 'birthing the bomb' and think of naming it 'Little Boy'.)

Woman know better.

They actually do birth children and know that a bomb isn't a baby.

But little Patty Malone was a baby - and it was only the fearless challenging spirit of the native born Manhattanite that saved her life ... when a heartless government refused to help.

So, People of Manhattan, take a bow.

True, it was only men that did all the heavy lifting in saving this particular child, but I am convinced that her story moved millions of Doctor Moms to demand that their men get off the sofa and start making penicillin for real, right away.

In particular, her story moved one Doctor Mom with the real power to move mountains of inertia : Mae Smith.

She was the wife of the boss of Brooklyn-based Pfizer,  John L Smith.

In the summer of 1943, his firm was best positioned (culturally) in the world to make the needed penicillin ---- all by its self.

But he was a very cautious and frugal man and he refused to do the right thing, rather than the financially safe and lucrative thing.

Until his wife reminded him, once again, that Dr Henry Dawson had always insisted that their eldest daughter would have remained alive, if only penicillin had been earnestly produced, not long after its discovery.

Learning of little Patty Malone plucked from death's door touched Smith's heart ; finally made Dawson's claim seem real to John L.

In a few short months, Pfizer was indeed producing enough penicillin for all those in the world dying of susceptible infections.

Abundant amounts of Pfizer Penicillin created an opportunity for America to practise influential penicillin diplomacy , replacing Pax Britannia with Pax Americana.

Britain and its Dominions had the most moral capital, from standing all alone against Hitler for years, and it had the moral first claim on penicillin.

But for want of a price of a single additional bomber squadron for Butcher Harris, the Conservative Party-dominated British government threw all that moral capital away, handed it over to the Americans on a platter, gratis.

That price, of just one bomber squadron among many, would have given Glaxo a Pfizer's sized plant, months before Pfizer.

By contrast, WWII is usually seen as the process that finally killed the hopes of the New Deal.

But I argue, that the New Deal's final act was actually its finest hour.

Britain's Ministry of Supply set the amount of penicillin it wanted produced during the war years to just be enough ( barely) for front line troops.

It forbade the bigger colonies like India to make their own penicillin (postwar export market considerations dominated official thinking.)

The supply amounts set by the gutless Dominions perfectly reflected Britain's niggardly attitude to the needs of their own civilians and the civilians of the occupied lands.

By contrast, in May 1943, one of the last big New Deal organizations created, the American WPB (War Production Board) , set the amounts of American penicillin it wanted produced so high that it could easily supply America ( military and civilian) and most of the world besides.

Thirties style "Social medicine" concerns had finally won out over the Forties "War medicine" niggardliness.

Henry Dawson's long, lonely defence of heightened social medicine in a time of war against an enemy who didn't believe in it even in peacetime had finally borne fruit : now America was preparing to combat the Nazis morally , as well as just militarily.

Venus Manhattan was in the driver's seat, along with Mars Manhattan ....

"Lawrence J Malone" "Katherine M Malone" "Patricia Malone" "Jean Malone" : whatever happened to 1943's "Penicillin Baby" ?

I often wonder what ever happened to the family of the once briefly world famous "Penicillin Baby", Patricia (Patty) (Pat) Malone, after their fleeting two months of sudden fame from mid August to mid October 1943.

I have had some luck tracing the family backwards, before that time period, but very little luck finding any of them after that date.

First, let me say what I have found after 1943.

The couple Lawrence J (probably John, after his father) Malone and Katherine M Malone had two daughters, Jean born in 1936 and Patricia born in 1941.

(We know this from the 1940 census and the age given for Patricia in late 1943 in all the news stories.)

We know their exact address in 1943 (83-11 34th Avenue) - which matches the same one in the 1940 census. (Today 8311 34th Avenue.)

Their 1943 photo appearances closely matches the ages and occupations given in the 1940 census, given us added comfort.

Now Jean and Patricia are (statistically) more likely than not to live to young adulthood, marry and have children, in the period 1940 to 1965.

In time, Lawrence and Katherine's older relatives would die, as would the couple themselves.

In communities smaller than New York, all this would certainly generate press announcements of engagements, marriages, births, graduations and deaths allowing us to track the family even after the girls married and took up different last names.

But I can find nothing at all on Google's various sources for such information.

All I can find is the Social Security death registration of the mother Katherine M Malone.

Her birth date (1913) and location at time of death, Jackson Heights Queens New York, match the 1940 census.

She was an unpaid homemaker back then.

But in 1960-1961 she became part of the paid workforce and got a Social Security number issued in New York City.

When she died, a few more parts of her life became part of the public domain : her exact birth date (March 27th 1913) and her month of death (March 1994) probably a little before March 27th 1994.

Now the early 1960s were a crucial date for the Social Security System .

After 1962, all deaths reported (not all are reported but doing so gains survivors the death benefits) were put on computer and made public.

Deaths before that (1936-1962) are not public. And after 1961, many people once not covered by Social Security were added in : many of them holding middle class jobs like certain quasi-self -employed professionals.

Lawrence as an insurance adjuster might not have ever fitted the Social Security requirements if he was truly self employed.

But more likely is the possibility he died fairly young or got too sick to work just before 1960-1961, which is why his wife started working and why he was never found on the death index.

(He'd be 103 or 104, if alive today --- so he is probably dead.)

Jean and Patty would be 24 and 19 by 1960 and one or both probably taking expensive post-secondary education, so this might be another reason for their mom to go to work at that time.

But no death notice for Lawrence or for Patty and Jean - at least under their unmarried names : but the girls, at 77 and 72 in 2013 , might still both be alive.

One more thing : if you type in Malone and their Jackson Heights address , 83-11 (8311) 34th Avenue into Google, you get a public database suggesting that two sets of Malones lived in that same small apartment building and used the same telephone number.

(1-718-424-2936)

(When subscribers quit or die, their number get re-assigned.)

One is Lawrence J Malone and Katherine M Malone --- the other is John M Malone aged 77 (in 2013 ? - this isn't clear but it does make John Malone the same age as Jean Malone.)

But as indicated in the last blog, the 1940 census calling her Jean isn't likely to be wrong -- her mother was the informant and the information is recorded in a particularly clear handwriting.

A nephew ? But Lawrence only had a sister . A more distant relative of his father ?

Dead end.

But we have found a little more about Lawrence and his daughters  from earlier times.

Lawrence was born and raised in mid Manhattan and his parents were New York born and raised as well.

Perhaps he also worked in Manhattan and only lived in Jackson Heights, then a new middle class residential suburb for the upwardly mobile.

Such as was Lawrence . Very few New Yorkers put the birth announcement of their new children in the august and expensive pages of the New York Times , but he did.

Both girls, un-named, were born in Park East, a private hospital in mid Manhattan.

Jean, July 3rd 1936 and Patricia,  July 25th 1941.

Both dates match our other information, as do the names of the parents as reported in Times.

Canny professionals often self-promote themselves subtly by these sort of announcements, if their industry ethics forbid direct advertising.

In 1930 , the census indicates that Lawrence's father John was unemployed doing odd labour jobs and his mother did outside housework but Lawrence had some college education and was a steno at a steamship line.

By 1940, he was an insurance adjuster and making a very good income for his age.

Lets look at the 1915 census to measure how far he had come.

In 1915 he was 6, born 1909 or 1910. His older sister Jennie was 8 and born around 1907.

His father John was a polisher and was born around 1876.

His mother Mary did housekeeping and was a year older than her husband (supposedly).

They lived at 505 West 49th Street in Manhattan.

They have two boarders, women both named Walsh : Margaret born in 1880 a laundress and Catherine born in 1882 unemployed.

Perhaps sisters of Mary (Walsh) Malone ?

By 1930, the family is smaller but still at the same address.

Jennie and Margaret were gone elsewhere. Lawrence's age seems correct but sadly John and Mary and Kath Walsh have ages out a few good years from the 1915 information.

Kath is now working as a cleaner of buildings.

May 1930 was not yet The Great Depression - not in New York and not anywhere  - so, except for Lawrence, the family hadn't really done well from the booming 1920s.

With their exact ages so far off in each census - and with very common Irish American names - it isn't really possible to determine when John and Mary died ; there are several good possibilities.

The same for the Walsh women.

A New York based genealogist specializing in Irish families might do more but I may have come to a dead end.

As always, I hope what information I have been able to find , combined with the new interest roused by my book's fascinating story, will enable others to find out more about Patricia Malone --- along with Charles Aronson, Aaron Alston, HH and Eleanor Chaffee Hahnel and all the others in Henry Dawson's penicillin story......

"Patricia Malone","Anne Shirley Carter", "Marie Barker" : penicillin heroines, but only for two months and long long ago ...

Marie Barker, dying, refused penicillin 1943

For two months during a six year long war, North America (at least its parental and grandparental half) temporarily turned away from looking at the front page pictures of healthy young sons and grandsons in uniform in their local newspaper.

Instead, from mid August 1943 till mid October 1943, their eyes were caught by the unlikely front page pictures (unlikely for newspapers at peace as well as at war ) of very sick young females, ranging from ages of two to their early twenties.

Daughters and granddaughters very much like their own.

All were either being saved from death because they had pried a little penicillin from the hard-faced men in the medical-pharmaceutical establishment --- or were dying because they had failed to move these men.

For two months these young women - some just babies themselves and some new mothers with new babies - were featured almost daily in most of the North American dailies and weeklies, usually with a photo prominent in the story.

It is the female-ness of these pictures, particularly set against the then steady front page diet of butch men with guns, that intrigues me.

The photos feature sick young women surrounded by other women : men are a comparative rarity.

Mothers and nieces comfort daughter and aunt, as in the above photo of Marie Barker. A baby is comforted by a mother (Katherine M Malone), a female nurse, or a female baby doll - as in the case of Patricia Malone.

(Though we do  also see photos of her comforted by the doctor (Dante Colitti) and father (Lawrence J Malone) who pushed to get her life saving penicillin.)

Doctor Mom was sending a message : to Congress, to the feckless AMA , NAS and OSRD and above all to the patent-obsessed Pharmaceutical industry.

One pharmaceutical leader, John L Smith, was pushed and prodded by his wife Mae to remember that penicillin, discovered in 1928, could have saved their precious daughter Mary Louise ---- if only some people had got off their fannies and thought about the children.

He responded by pushing his small firm to go all out to produce penicillin in world-saving amounts and by the Spring of the next year , the penicillin famine was well on to its way to being solved.

Patty, Anne and Marie all faded out of the story - their part in forcing men to finally make penicillin - 15 years late - for children was all conveniently underplayed by the men who wrote most subsequent penicillin histories.

But a penicillin history from a woman who was in the front lines of penicillin from its North American beginnings and knew John L Smith well (Gladys Hobby), never let her readers forget that it was those pictures of dying daughters that finally moved the men from killing to life-saving.

If only for a few months ....

Penicillin Baby Patricia Malone survives !

In earlier posts I had mentioned that "The Penicillin Baby", little two year old Patty Malone, whose fight against a fatal staph disease had gripped all of North America for six weeks between August 12th and September 22nd 1943, had finally died of her disease in mid September 1943.

But perhaps it isn't true.
This "claim" was based on a secondary report on her story, in an official history of the Pulitzer Prize, and from what I could find ( and not find) in newspapers from that time that are on Google when I looked.

(The newspaper and editor who had got the life-saving penicillin for her from a heartless American government had won a Pulitzer for their efforts.)

I usually search about every two months as new newspapers get digitalized and get put on the Net, while other newspapers disappear off the Net.

Today I found two stories - from tiny obscure rural newspapers  (actually a good sign - meaning it was wire copy and available to all) with a photo, both from AP.

They showed that Patty was released, fit and well, to her parents Lawrence J and Katherine M Malone on September 22nd after a six week stay at Lutheran hospital in New York.

I say fit and well because the text says so and the image of little Patricia in her cute new bonnet proves it - we also have earlier photos when she was very near death to show the distinct difference.

Emboldened by all this --- and the fact that I now had the mother's middle initial ---- I went back to the 1940 federal census in America to look real hard.

Ironically, I finally had to put less in , rather than more, and I found in 1940 a Lawrence and Katherine Malone at their exact 1943 address (apartment 1c) (83 -11 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Flushing, Queens, New York), the one mentioned  in many newspaper stories of the time.

(This mania for disclosing exact full names and exact full addresses was a style of many newspapers back then.)

Age and occupation matched their appearance in the 1943 photos.

(The census showed he had a few years of college, was an insurance adjuster and made a good salary of $3200 in 1940.)

They had a daughter, Jean, born in 1937. Katherine (M) Malone, the stay-at-home mother was the informant, so this had to be accurate - besides the handwritten information of the census taker was extremely neat and readable.

But a telephone number database showed a John M Malone, born about 1939 , living at the 1943 Malone address fairly recently.

If Lawrence's middle name was John, statistically more than moderately likely, then he might well name a son John.

His same telephone number was earlier held by Lawrence J Malone and Katherine M Malone living at that same address !

I tried a search in the US Social Security death registry ( a list of all people who worked for pay and so paid into the system and were alive and working after 1960, when the data started getting put into a computer database.)

I did find a Katherine M Malone whose birth ( March 27 1913)  matched the 1940 census information - she died in March 1994 in Jackson Heights.

Lawrence J Malone was born in New York 1910 and was also raised in New York , as was his wife. But the names and dates on record for New York were all for men born much later than that.

So perhaps he died before 1960.

Patricia Malone was born in 1941 (as she was two in late 1943) so if she lived to adulthood and never married she might be a Patricia A Malone, born April 14 1941, who died September 2 2009 in Brooklyn.

A search for a John M Malone on the death index found nothing - he might well still be alive, as could Jean and Patricia - the average birth date of many Americans dying today is some time in the 1920s, not in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

I will push on and search harder, but for now a nice photo of the bonneted baby Patricia, September 22nd 1943, obtained from a small town rural weekly in Texas.

Yes, a New York story, published even in the tiny town of Mexia Texas.

Because this was a Good News Story that every parent and grandparent in North America kept a moist eye on, particularly at the height of all the death and destruction of the Bad News War....

Was there a Parran-Hearst Telegram ? (You provide the penicillin, I'll provide the pictures)

"Operator, get me Washington, tell 'em I'm from Hearst..."

There is no firm evidence that Citizen Hearst ever sent that infamous telegram to the famous war artist Frederic Remington in Cuba.

We all know which telegram:  the one where Remington is sent out to illustrate the ongoing civil war in Cuba, but finds all is quiet and begs to go home.

Hearst supposedly telegraphs him to stay : "(If) you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."


Hearst proceeds to puff up the accidental explosion on board the battleship The Maine as an act of sneaky warfare by the Spanish, ("Remember Pearl Harbour" 50 years ahead of schedule) and the rest is history: Yellow Journalism's finest moment.

Or is it ?

For a start, that particular telegram was apparently never sent.

But did the aging Hearst later intervene with US Surgeon General Thomas Parran in August 1943, to get penicillin to a dying baby girl in Manhattan ?

Was this Yellow Journalism's finest moment ?

The Pulitzer Committee apparently felt so - and it is worth noting that Pulitzer and Hearst were the most bitter of bitter enemies.

Consider what we know (or think we know).

Supposedly the whole thing started with a phone call from the distraught father (Lawrence J Malone) of a dying two year old girl called Patricia Malone, made to the city desk editor of the Hearst media empire's flagship newspaper, the New York Journal-American.

Actually Malone quickly fades back into the wallpaper , as do the nominal doctors for the baby girl.

Because in fact, Malone was set up for the call by a crippled Italian-American surgical resident named Dante Colitti, then working at the tiny Lutheran Hospital in upper Manhattan, about a mile from pioneering penicillin doctor Henry Dawson's hospital, Columbia Presbyterian.

The little girl was dying of blood poisoning and normally a surgical staffer - a mere resident at that - has no place in treatment decisions for that sort of illness.

But Colitti was raised right, with a good moral education and he couldn't stand by and let her die, when he knew that not a mile away, Henry Dawson was dragging babies like her back from the grave with his Floor G penicillin.

And Colitti had no cause to love the New York medical establishment which supported the limiting of penicillin to curing VD cases among the unfaithful husbands and boyfriends of the combat corps.

In the 1930s, he had been rejected from attending any New York medical school, by an informal quota system designed to keep out Catholics and Italians.

 (And Jews and Blacks and Asians and Women. Colitti's parents were recent immigrants to America).

Colitti had a permanently bent spine as a result of childhood TB and had to use crutches so it was probably the excuse given him for his rejection.

But Colitti knew that Henry Dawson, just a mile north of him, was working with a doctor who used crutches thanks to polio and another doctor who was missing an arm.

The only real difference was that these were Protestant men, with native-born parents.

Colitti paid a private medical college in Massachusetts to get his MD degree but no New York hospital would recognize any degree not granted by one of the quota-oriented establishment schools.

It was a closed loop.

But WWII led to a desperate shortage of medical staff and even New York's medical establishment had to let people like Colitti in to do the lowest medical jobs, at least until the war was over.

But the highly morally minded Colitti felt that if they had displayed no charity towards a cripple, that did not mean he would follow suit.

Hence his setting up of the phone call to the Hearst paper : he knew exactly who would cause the most noise.

The Journal-American photo-journalists were then world famous for their large, vivid, gripping front page photographs and a dying baby story was just made for their skills.

The Hearst editor got no where ( says the AP press agency) with the OSRD's Dr Richards or with the NAS Committee on Chemical Therapeutics.

But somehow or other the newspaper knew of the ongoing conflict between those who felt we could best win the war ("Hearts & Minds") through well publicized Social Medicine versus those that felt that secretive and rationed War Medicine would save more scarce resources for "Guns & Bullets".

Because the newspaper ultimately got the penicillin it needed from that supply reserved for the US Public Health Services (at that time, it only had a tiny amount of penicillin and it was only normally used for treating cases of VD among merchant seamen.)

Released by drug company Squibb upon the direct order of Thomas Parran, US Surgeon General and head of the US Public Health Services (then a relatively small and powerless body compared to its status today.)

Parran versus Weed over the fate of wartime penicillin

Parran was the de facto head of the Social Medicine forces, while the NAS's Lewis Weed was the voice of War Medicine.

Did Hearst or his senior staff know of this ongoing debate and approach Parran directly, dismissing his concerns about tackling the all-powerful OSRD and NAS by reminding him he had no love for the NAS's Weed anyway , and that if he would only provide the penicillin vials, Hearst photographers would provide the poignant pictures.

Yellow Journalism and the Yellow Magic then proceeded to make beautiful music together : because the Patty Malone Story ultimately spelled the end to the Age of Modernity ...

Baby Patricia & Penicillin in Comic Book

In 1944, True Heroes Comic Books featured the inspiring story of Dr Dante Colitti  saving the life of two year old baby Patricia Malone, August 11th 1943, with some penicillin that he, the child's father and the Hearst media empire had wheedled out of a hard-nosed American medical establishment.

This was the event that made penicillin known world wide, virtually over night after 15 years of being ignored.

Colitti's hospital and Dr Dawson's hospital shared the same catchment area for patients, being only a mile apart.

 News of Dawson's cures, that Spring, of a number of women with the incurable disease of SBE  had spread like wildfire among the patients and staff of both hospitals , leading to Colitti trying the stuff on his dying young patient...