Manhattan Natural : wartime Gotham's un-super heroes ...

At a time (WWII) when comic book superheroes , usually operating in a make-believe Manhattan, were saving the world every day and enthralling North American children and youth , lesser known but equally larger-than-life actual heroics were taking place in a real Manhattan.

But these valiants bringing natural penicillin lifesaving to the world against government blowback were hardly Superman or indeed any sort of superheroes .

If by the term 'superhero' we mean someone strong in body as well as mind.

They were un-super heroes if ever than phrase had meaning.

They were more like a badly aged Clark Kent , still mild and meek  but now weak and crippled .

They never numbered more than a handful :  misfits , unfits and just plain rebels.

They were aptly described by the official historian of their arch enemy  , Vannevar Bush's OSRD , as "4Fs, women and the Grace of God".

Henry and Marjorie Dawson, Floyd Odlum, Dante Colitti, Thomas Hunter, Charlie and Miss H --- they hardly had more than a handful of really good limbs between the seven of them.

'Unfits' the whole lot of them - the very 4Fs of the 4Fs - yet real life heroes despite all that .

Perhaps we could still make use of their story - as a sort of role model - by making a series of comic books or graphic novels about their wartime exploits ...

Draft Registration, October 16th 1940 : 75 years Young !

Due out in early 2015 is my book about the origins of America's 75 year old peacetime draft registration process.

It is another in my series of books on "Agape Penicillin".

If my book about the 'Dawning of Antibiotics' on October 16 1940 focuses on the 4Fs among America's youth, this book will focus instead on the 1As among her youth.

But I do not think it is odd or a coincidence that both events share the exact same 75th anniversary, right down to the day.

I believe that Dr Martin Henry Dawson began his antibiotics crusade on that crucial date, October 16th 1940 , as a deliberate and provocative counterpoise.

A counterpoise to 1940s America's undue emphasis on only valuing its children to the extent that they are fit enough to kill other children.

He felt all children - as well as all people - are worthy of the best possible health care simply because they are our fellow human beings.....

* Dawson had the freedom to experiment with penicllin that October day only because the very pro-war President of Columbia university had suspended classes to ensure a perfect registration drive.

After football scholarship undergrad Jack Kerouac dutifully registered that day, he went forth to play his second football game for the university.

He broke his leg and his career in football was over - its loss and literature and the Beats' gain ....

WWII : an EUGENIC war , on both sides - nay, all sides

A truly moral Nuremberg Trial would have considered the war conduct of the Allied and Neutrals, as well as that of the Axis...

Now it is well known that Germany spent its second world war preoccupied, not with winning the military war itself, but with eugenically killing all the 4Fs it could find and then tossing them in open pit graves or into furnaces.

(Cite here the Holocaust, Aktion T4 and the Hunger Plan.)

Eugenic Triages from all sides of WWII

Less well known is the fact that the Allies and the Neutrals were also preoccupied with matters eugenic in the midst of an all-out military war : in this case, a steely determination to avoid killing any of their 1As if they could at all help it.

Naval blockades, aerial bombings and denying the spreading of information about new life-saving medicines and pesticides were the ways the Allied hoped to avoid engaging their 1A young males in hand to hand combat with 1A males from Germany, Japan and Italy.

The British scientists and the military had been united as one with British politicians is disclaiming any need for British troops to invade Germany to fight German troops there.

Britain declared war on Germany at the beginning of  September 1939, but it was not until the sixth year of the war and during the last months of the
European part of that war, that British 1A males finally engaged in deadly combat with 1A German males on German soil.

(The whole war might have ended in months not years, if only the vastly larger manpower pool of the French and English empires had been conscripted into a ground army intent on invading western Germany while the bulk of her army was in the East , invading Poland.)

Instead, they said, naval blockades and aerial bombings and denying new lifesaving medicine would kill enough women, children and elderly in Occupied Europe and Germany to make the young male German 1As want to voluntarily surrender, far in advance of any British invasion with ground troops upon German soil.

Of course, the Neutrals did the best eugenic job of the lot in preserving their own 1As and not diluting them with any 4F gene pools.

They did so by (A) not joining the effort to defend the weak and the small and the innocent and by (b) not letting any of the weak/small/innocent into their countries as hapless refugees.

The dysgenic myth of WWI

It was claimed by avid eugenists during WWI (and by most educated people after the war ) that only the best had died in the Great War while back home the cripples and mentally deficient had breed like rabbits.

No evidence was put forth to support either of these claims - it seemed so common sensical.

In fact by the end of it,  the Great War had killed millions of men who either had been or would have been rejected as 4F material at the start of the war - a war this big cut a wide swath through all men with two legs, from 18 to 45 , in most combat nations.

And the evidence shows in fact that the physically and mentally challenged people around the world and through all the ages marry less frequently and have kids less frequently than the average population.

It is pretty hard to marry and raise a family without first having a steady well paying job  - as most of us who are physically and mentally fit already know first hand.

How much harder for those with mental or physical challenges ?

So, absorbing this false lesson , all the post WWI world's elites sought to avoid wars where their 'best' took on the 'best' from a nation of equal or greater demographic and military power.

This didn't mean no more war - it just meant that post WWI nations tended to attack nations smaller than themselves or to invade countries bigger than themselves that they thought were divided internally or were inept as warriors.

So Germany and Japan invaded Russia and China under reason one, while Japan attacked America under reason two.

And in any and all cases, nations tried to first win wars by killing or terrifying or starving/freezing the civilians of an opposing nation of a size similar to their own, rather than in engaging in direct combat with that nation's armed forces.

But because eugenics was invented in the victorious Allies's nations and only later taken up by the Axis and Neutrals, anything vaguely universally eugenic about the whole war was strictly excluded from consideration at Nuremberg - only crimes unique to the Axis were considered crimes against humanity.

Trust me on this one, every school child one hundred years from now will know WWII to be an eugenic war from push to finish - and on all sides ....

4F ... or Fifth Column ?

It sometimes seems to me that the weak and the small were the real main enemy - not those nice clean and orderly (if slightly pushy) Germans - to wartime America.

A nation many times the size of Germany or Japan, with twice as many people and a far richer economy, and separated by thousands of kms of cold deep water from its closest credible enemy, is always going to find internal enemies (Reds under Beds) far more convincing a threat than any distant external foe anyway.....

Hating the handicapped isn't a crime in the Canada of Henry Dawson's birth

When an Ontario mom living a few doors away wrote a letter urging a couple euthanize their autistic grandchild, the general public was outraged.

 But not the police ---- or the academics in this area of the law.

Apparently hating the handicapped is not a hate crime in Canada : but hating Jews, Blacks , Orientals, Catholics or Gays definitely is.

Despite this mile-wide gap in current law, it won't hurt to remind Canadians that Hitler started off by killing the handicapped and only moved onto killing Jews and Gypsies later.

Which is why Henry Dawson was so focused on protecting handicapped individuals, deemed "4Fs of the 4Fs",  from the baneful neglect of Allied governments seemingly intent on matching the Nazis' policies in a muted "me too", step by step ......

War medicine was from Mars, Social medicine from Venus ?

The very word "war" medicine seems to stir something vaguely Mars-like, deep within the soul of the chickenhawk doctor or scientist.

Successfully conceiving ,in an academic lab at the University of  Chicago, a way to reduce combat deaths from shock seems to transport one almost up to the frontline evacuation hospitals, directly under hostile fire.

Being there, doing it, roughing it , all sweaty and virile-like : medical science with the smell of the locker room and the men's shower stall about it.

By contrast, what can any doctor - any real doctor - actually do about those dying of subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) ?

These hopeless cases shouldn't even be occupying an acute hospital bed - particularly in wartime.

They should be handled by women - nurses - in a secondary hospice or in a palliative care situation at home.

And arthritis 'care' - not really medicine is it ? Helping impoverished old ladies too frail to bend over properly to get dressed and to do their toiletry.

Again - women's work. A job for personal care assistants and social work case workers. Social medicine.

But (Martin) Henry Dawson persevered , hung on in there , all through the war, treating those chronically ill with arthritis and the very 4Fs of the 4Fs, those dying of SBE .

Perhaps because he was that rarity : an American medical researcher in 1940 who already had a stirling war record in the front lines (in the medical corp, infantry and artillery), with a medal for valour and two serious war wounds to back him up.

The Military Cross winner from Venus, as it were ......

Atheistic Nature's inordinate fondness for beetles...

The genetically-minded Moderns of the 1930s felt they were facing a grave demographic crisis : why where there so few Ubermensch and so many undermensch: why so few Cedars and so much hyssop ?

In other words, why on earth were there so many beetles, defectives and useless mouths ?

Not believing in a Supreme Being,  at least not believing in any Being Superior to themselves, they had to blame the Iron Laws of Nature and Evolution for this un-natural natural fondness for things weak and foolish.

If in ancient times , the Cedars of Lebanon were the biggest, tallest living beings known, the hyssop growing through the cracks in Beth Nielsen Chapman's concrete were 'the lowest of the low', the plant kingdom's equivalent of being the 4Fs of the 4Fs.

Seemingly the useless hyssop's only purpose for being put on this earth was to form a home for an equally purposeless mold.

But then, of course, when Fleming found that mold stopped bacteria cold and Dawson stuck it into a patient's arm to save a life, the lowly hyssop was revealed to have had a supreme purpose after all ....

Majority of Americans remain silent as Woodrow Wilson's legacy is brutally destroyed : 1938-1941

Thank God Almighty that Adolf Hitler declared war on America, because without it, would America have ever gone to war against the greatest evil the world has ever known ?

The fact remains that between September 1938 and December 1941, the majority of Americans had stood silent as the legacy of their own president Woodrow Wilson was brutally dismembered by the twin 'evil empires' of Hitler and Stalin.

Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Yugoslavia were all creations of Wilson's direct efforts at Versailles.

The larger spirit of Wilson's efforts : that small nations should be allowed to live without being swallowing up by their larger neighbour's brutal might  had , until 1938-1941, kept countries like Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Albania, Norway, Holland and Greece independent.

Now that too was all gone.

Still the majority of Americans kept silent and indifferent ; they wanted to keep out of the "conflict between the nations" of Europe.

Conflict between nations ???!!!

When I learn that a high school senior and football star has walloped the hell out of a primary toddler his girlfriend was supposed to be minding, I do not call it a "conflict between school students" though that is technically and legalistically correct.

I call it child abuse and deadly assault : the 5 year old didn't start this "conflict" , the 17 year old went to war on it.

So it was when Russia invaded Estonia or Germany invaded Denmark , without any cause besides sheer evil greed.

Morally the excuses most Americans gave then for not going to the defence of the weak against the strong would not stand up in a court today, if they were accused of just standing by while a 17 year old football star beat the crap out of a 5 year old child.

And in a higher - moral - court , they did not stand up then.

This was the sort of moral cesspool that Henry Dawson was swimming against when he defiantly decided to introduce the Age of Antibiotics by treating the "weakest of the weak", the "4Fs of the 4Fs" with his crude penicillin, on the very day America choose to celebrate its "1As of the 1As" : Draft Registration day, October 16th 1940...

Medical ethics - not medical techniques - are probably the leading way to decrease or increase deaths due to war

How doctors and nurses morally regard all of their fellow human beings, rather than how they medically treat their actual, relatively few, patients, is probably the number one determinate in whether wars are relatively bloodless or particularly bloody.

The entire culture takes many of its moral cues from the medical professionals and when they (as in WWII Germany and America )  sanction or even advocate neglecting or killing those judged lesser than others, this attitude bleeds across the whole country and into the actions of its troops --with horrendous consequences.

But when doctors and nurses publicly stress , particularly in wartime , that every life (even those weak and destined never to be able to contribute much directly to the war effort) is infinitely valuable and infinitely worth saving, they indirectly shorten wars and reduce bloodshed.

Because wars drag on and killing is unlimited when (a) participants feel that the other side is so worthless that it isn't wrong to kill them even after they surrender and (b) the other side is reluctant to negotiate a surrender, correctly believing they will then be all killed after they laid down their arms.

The Geneva Conventions do shorten wars and do reduce war deaths when all sides accept them and act upon them , observing the spirit of those conventions, and just not 'the letter of the law'.

In many ways, the Allies failed to observe the spirit of those conventions.

By way of pointed contrast, Henry Dawson felt it critically important that his nation be publicly seen as expending great efforts to save the lives of its most worthless citizens, even in the midst of an all-out world war.

Hence his accelerated offering of a little penicillin-of-hope for two young men dying of invariable fatal SBE infection, precisely on the morning of October 16th 1940.

He wasn't assuming it would actually save their lives, but it might* , and he was determined that they and their families would know that all efforts possible had been done to save them, despite being in a teaching hospital gearing up to focus on 1A war medicine instead.

(* Just as Dawson hadn't given up his place in a WWI  stretcher for the battlefield wounded to a man triaged as dying, in the belief that it would thereby save his life, only that it might and was worth a try.)

These two youths  can be regarded as representative of all those  about to be regarded as the 4Fs of the 4Fs, "mere useless mouths", as the first day of America's first peacetime draft registration process remorselessly triaged American citizens into those worthy and those unworthy.

Green Ward or railway siding ...

This relatively inexpensive simple act, Dawson felt, if extended  to all of America's weak and sickly, would reassure all of its citizens, all those of neutral and occupied nations, even all those of enemy combatant nations, that joining such a nation as an ally or surrendering to it, would not result in their own deaths.

Sometimes, as Medicins Sans Frontieres has shown time and and again ,the publicly perceived ethics of doctors have done far more to save lives than any surgical or chemotherapeutic procedure they could devise.

Doctors, whether in a terminal SBE "Green Ward" at Columbia Presbyterian or at a railway siding at Auschwitz, set an crucial example that all the rest of society observes and acts upon......

Like Germany, Howard Florey effortlessly won all the tactical battles, losing only the strategic war to Henry Dawson

Eugenics was on the side of the Big Battalions...

Howard Florey was a WWII chicken-hawk, so it little surprises that his chosen hobby-horse, Allied war medicine, was vigorously and publicly 'On the Side of the Big Battalions'.

That meant making a virtue of denying aid to dying 4Fs, to give it instead to healthy 1As.

 But as Hitler had earlier found out to his cost, this was not a position designed to win over the small battalions of the world's hearts and minds.

Dawson's Folly

Dr Dawson's 'folly' - by contrast - was to give up his own life, during a Total War against the Ultimate Evil, trying to save the lives of the 4Fs of the 4Fs, those 'useless mouths' young people with SBE.

His folly was near-universally damned by those in America's scientific and medical elite who knew of it.

Only those who the British call "the punters" : ie, the housewives, the customers and the voters all over the world, approved his idea.

They chose not to judge the Allied Cause by when it ventured into Nazi like behavior (denying aid to the weakest) but only in its better moments, as when it changed its mind and came to the aid of the SBEs' small battalions, aiding the least of these.

A small gesture perhaps, but in the end, more than enough ....

Aktion 47% : saving the 4Fs in a time of the 1As , putting them back to work and paying taxes : the OTHER Manhattan project

Romneycare DEATH PANELS for the 47%

In 1941, penicillin was lying about in the gutter, part of the medical world's unfit 47%.

Also in the 1941 medical gutter were the "4Fs of the 4Fs", those young men dying of invariable fatal SBE, seen as consuming precious medical resources at a time when many in the medical elite thought that the sole medical priority should be war medicine for the fit 1As.

Think of today's Mitt Romney as 1941's Dr Romney, if you aren't getting the picture yet.

But somebody - a nobody - in Manhattan had a different idea.

He thought both "unfits" (penicillin and the SBEs) could be redeemed, pulled out of that illusionary gutter, and put back to work combatting the Nazi evil.

For the Nazi evil included not just tanks and subs but also Aktion 4T : a scheme to kill all Germans ( and later everybody) who were judged not productive enough to bother having around .

Romneycare "death panels"

 It is hard to tell just how many people would have ultimately have ended up dead in Romneycare styled "death panels",  if the demands of the war for all forms of labour hadn't intervened.

 Who knows , perhaps as many as 47%.

The nobody's plan was a sort of Aktion 4F.

It was to be a rebuttal to the Nazi Aktion T-4 .

And a rebuttal as well as to his own 1A eugenically obsessed colleagues, like Dr Foster Kennedy who suggested killing the unfit young in that same year, 1941, to a wide round of applause.

Think of it as "the other wartime Manhattan Project" : saving the 4Fs of the 4Fs at the very height of an all out obsession with 1As.

Think of it, perhaps, as the most profound rebuttal to everything Hitler stood for : it said, even in war, we Allies care ( or should care) about the least of the these, as well as the wise and the mighty.

So that nobody - Dr Martin Henry Dawson - put penicillin to work and soon his medical notes happily recorded that many of his SBE  patients had indeed gotten up from their deathbeds and had gone back to work , paying taxes.

Hitler preferred killing people with such diseases outright ( see Martin Bader for an example) while the American medical elite in the 1940s and the American political elite in the 2010s, prefers to let them die quietly offstage, by neglect. The outcome is broadly the same.

Morally, it is only a short slippery slide from a fundraiser in Boca Raton to the death camps at Auschwitz....

1A strong chemical purity versus dirty weak 4F 'fungus water'

Why was NATURAL (impure but totally safe*) penicillin unacceptable as a frontline live-saving medicine throughout most of the war?

Why was it treated like a 4F or a 'useless mouth' - or like a Roma or  Jew ?

Why the obsession with 'All White'  Penicillin, (the so called A1 or Aryan Penicillin) ; why the obsession with it having to be 100% pure and 100% artificially made by Man, before it was safe enough to inject into the average WASP's veins?

Why the American Red Cross obsession that no black blood be mixed with white blood before a blood transfusion was acceptable ?

Were our great great grandparents nuts or Nazis or both or what ?

Why did these High Modernists think the way they did - and why do we Partial Post Modernists find them so hard to understand or to stomach ?

And when it all begin to change from them to us, anyway ?

* Nobody ever died of impure penicillin - the rare penicillin allergy deaths only began when patients began receiving massive doses of pure penicillin----- before being tested first for a possible allergy reaction.

"4Fs and WOMEN and the GRACE of GOD"

The Official History of Vannevar Bush's famous wartime science agency the OSRD, home to World War Two's 'elitist science' , is called "ORGANIZING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR WAR" and was written by Dr Irvin Stewart.

In discussing penicillin and the medical section of the OSRD, Stewart claims that "Laboratories cannot be run by 4-Fs or Women or by the Grace of God alone." (Page 107).

Well, I know a great book or movie title when I see one and so I took up Irvin Stewart's intended insult to 4Fs and Women (and God) with relish.

Two 4F doctors called Dawson and Hunter together with three women scientists called Hobby,Chaffee and Olmstead could run a lab very well indeed ------and did more than anyone else to bring us NATURAL penicillin in time for the D-Day beaches and all those wounded young soldiers.

And the Grace of God no doubt came in handy a lot....