Henry Dawson probably surprised himself as much as he surprised the rest of his battalion, maybe even surprised his hometown community, when he revealed a talent for 'heat of the crisis' gifted improvisation and leadership during the events that led to him winning a Military Cross and Citation for Bravery.
That same talent came to the fore perhaps only two more times in his life - during his work on HGT and again in his efforts with penicillin - both times with high stakes outcomes.
He never was an emergency ward doctor or wartime clearing station doctor but he may have had the talent to excel at it.
He most clearly showed this talent in the hectic five weeks leading up to giving that needle of penicillin to Charlie Aronson, seventy years ago, on October 16th 1940.
Neither Fleming or Florey could have done this work - it simply wasn't in their character. Both were all too aware of the constant need to maintain the public image of dignity and certitude for medical scientists.
Both men also lacked that personal empathy for patients as people that led Dawson to forget his professional dignity as he literally ran about with a needle of penicillin - STAT - in his efforts to save lives....
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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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