Howard Florey and Henry Dawson were both born in the mid 1890s and grew up in roughly similar upper/middle class circumstances in two small outposts of the Edwardian Era British Empire.
But both took wildly variant approaches to almost every major decision affecting people born in the Edwardian Era.
Most famously, these two Edwardian colonials differed wildly over the best way to quickly get penicillin into wide use during World War Two.
We abuse history if we read too much into the generalities of a particular era and not enough into the particularities of the individuals living in the era.
People, not eras, after all make the choices and do the actions.
If Florey was highly 'typical' of his Era, Dawson definitely was not 'typical' at all : however he still remained, someone from that Era -
a fact we must confront head on.....
Monday, September 27, 2010
Dawson,Florey: wildly different colonial Edwardians
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florey,
martin henry dawson,
penicillin
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- 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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