The world's best loved, most important medication lay "hidden in plain sight" for 15 wasted years because of medicine's unconscious anthropocentric biases.
Only when Dr Martin Henry Dawson came upon slime-produced penicillin fresh from his explorations of "The Triumphs of the Weak" among oral commensal Strep bacteria, did a doctor see no problems of using impure natural products of a weak species (fungus) in the blood stream of that most superior species known as (Man).
The ideology of Modernity, all powerful from about the 1860s to the 1960s , basically denied the existence of overwhelming Acts of God and of Natural Catastrophes.
Nature and Reality was but a neutral Backdrop to a stage where Man - for good and for bad - was the only actor.
Injecting tiny amounts of weakened live or very dead (dangerous) germs into the human blood stream was perfectly acceptable because it merely stimulated that most marvelous work of Man : the human immune system.
Injecting (highly toxic) chemicals like arsenic-based Salvarsan into the human blood stream was also perfectly acceptable, because this medication that fought VD was totally man-made, a marvel of Man's intellect.
But injecting a non toxic, highly effective, highly selective anti bacterial like natural penicillin into the human blood stream to save lives was unacceptable, for 15 wasted years.
Why ?
I venture it was because all its marvels were the work of the smallest, weakest, "stupidest" beings on Earth - it was as odious to 1930s western culture as the idea of crediting negroes with intellects equal to that of whites.
Dawson's investigations of the "Survival of the Weakest" among the oral commensal Strep, how they 'twisted their shapes" constantly to evade the all powerful human immune system , made him see Life's "weakest' beings in a new light.
The rest is history, or rather, the rest is the dawning of the new Era of Post Modernity and Global Commensality.....
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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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