Manhattan Indie PEN : penicillin misfits, unfits & rebels fermenting a revolution and renewing hope to a world tired, huddled and wretched

Today, words and phrases like "all-natural", "green" , "locally grown" and "no added chemicals" are such advertising cliches that it hard to believe there was a time , up to the end of WWII, when such phrases were totally anathema.

Back in that era , advertising cliches were more likely to invoke being chemically pure and to see being 100% synthetic , plastic and man-made as virtues to seek out.

But after Hiroshima , Auschwitz , Napalm and other WWII 'man-made wonders', these concepts very gradually fell out of vogue.

Pure Sulfa or Salvarsan drugs were far more toxic than impure crude penicillin : so what was the fuss REALLY about then ?

Before 1945, an entire generation of doctors world wide (except for perhaps a half dozen of them) were more willing to put pure but toxic sulfa or salvarsan drugs into their patients than put impure but non toxic penicillin into them.

I will go further:  an entire generation of doctors were willing to seen letting their patients DIE, rather than be seen by other doctors as putting an impure substance into those dying patients.

an obsession with Purity - before even the patients' life 

In The Age of Modernity, before 1945,  an obsession with purity had its hands tight around the throat of medical morality ....