Forget the famous February 1941 story of a poor policeman dying from the scratch of a rose.
Its bull - bullfeathers.
Totally bogus - at least as a founding legend of penicillin.
You know the one, where our policeman dies, despite the desperate attempts to save his life with the 'first ever' needles of penicillin by an Australian born doctor named Florey.
Dig deeper and there is lots about that story to question - but that's for another day.
Today we are to celebrate , not to criticize.
The "first ever" use of an antibiotic by needle to save a human life actually happened months earlier and an ocean away and that needle was given by a Canadian-born doctor named Martin Henry Dawson.
Most importantly, that first ever patient, a 27 year old youth named Charles Aronson, walked away from his deathbed !
(Charlie was suffering from an invariably fatal disease called SBE, the final stage of Rheumatic Fever).
The amount of penicillin given to him was far far far too small to kill his biofilmic bacteria around his heart valves ---- but it might have affected his heart greatly nevertheless : his emotional heart.
It lifted his morale and that way enough for this boy with a cat-like nine lives when it came to Strep bacteria attacks.
When last contacted in early 1946, Charlie was still alive, still here !
Truro, Nova Scotia ( Dawson's hometown) take a bow .....your boy did us all proud....
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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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