Recollect early wartime pictures of clearly nubile young women holding milk bottles of live-giving penicillin to their chests.
Then recall war-end pictures of grave middle-aged men in white coats and pen protectors staring into instrument panels on the massive multi-storey stainless steel factory tanks making industrial penicillin.
A moral universe restored !
Wartime penicillin is a great study for feminist historians seeking to see how de-stabilizing natural penicillin and biology could be to 1930s-1940s era chemistry and gender relations ....
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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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