In September 1940, fearing the internment of German Jewish refugee scientists - even possibly those with recent American citizenship - was bound to follow the panicky British Empire decision to most of its German refugees from Hitler, biochemist Dr Karl Meyer became the first leader of what was to become the four year long Manhattan penicillin Project.
Dr Meyer was determined to find some sort of way to prove to the American war machine that he was too valuable to intern.
And finally purifying a drug that could kill the few militarily important pathogen bacteria that the hot new Sulfa drugs could not, would do just that.
Purifying a natural substance is sometimes by far the most difficult step on the road to then synthetizing and patenting it.
Any clinical testing could wait until the substance was safely purified.
For now, what Meyer and his assistant Eleanor Chaffee needed most from their two microbiologists (doctors Dawson and Hobby) was their highly practised skills in growing microbes.
And then later, their other well honed skill in measuring the bacteria-killing powers of any substances Meyer's chemical skills threw up.
But all that changed in early October 1940, when new patient A. (Leroy) Alston heard of the project and in a very real sense, hijacked the leadership of the project.
Leroy was a young black man from Harlem, dying of then invariably fatal SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis) the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the leading killer of young people until the 1960s.
Significantly most of those deaths occurred among the poor, immigrants and minorities.
And Leroy didn't like the idea of accepting a SBE death as inevitable, just the assigned fate for America's poor and minorities.
Didn't like it at all - not one bit.
And Leroy was just the sort of person - dying or not - to be able to make significant waves.
He was raised by a poor widow in Harlem who sometimes got waitressing work - but Leroy held down a middle class job at a white commercial insurance firm all through the Dirty Thirties.
A first class athlete in many different sports, he also founded and ran a pioneering track and field club made up of members from the Harlem's black working class.
That club, Harlem's Mercury Athletic Club, competed successfully, not just against the nation's top black (middle class) universities but also against the top white teams as well.
To Leroy, it was always much more than just athletic success - he self consciously sought out obstacles to the ability for blacks to compete on an equal terms with whites - and then challenged them.
In a word, Leroy was a fervent Civil Rights activist - from the Thirties era.
The reason for his unexpected success is best explained by going back to the High Schools that all of us have experienced.
The Jocks cum Preppies in my High School (and probably in your school as well) were indeed mostly made up of kids from the community's best off families - but by no means exclusively.
What they really held in common was not income or race but a winning combination of physical and social agility - they moved gracefully and persuaded gracefully.
By contrast I knew many kids in my high school, from the top families, with all the family resources in the world, were seemingly just born shy, awkward and socially inept.
Leroy was just one of High School Life's natural born leaders and orators.
And in this particular case, this natural born leader had an audience of just one person to persuade : Dr M (Henry) Dawson, senior of the two microbiologists on Meyer's tiny four person team.
Dawson was also the only member with clinical (ward) privileges - and at a relatively high level too.
He was the only one on the team with both the legal right and the practical ability within the hospital culture to inject new untested un-purified medicine to a patient without his superiors putting up (too) much of a fuss.
Even in the most research oriented teaching hospitals, the frontline ward doctor directing patient care stands far higher in the informal hierarchy than does the most senior of the supporting staff, such as the microbiologists and biochemists back in the labs.
And Dawson had just been elevated to associate attending physician status, with an entire admission ward under his direct control and yet he had never really exercised his new powers so far.
Leroy couldn't help noticing all the recent publicity and fundraising dollars devoted to Polio, which killed far less than did Rheumatic Fever/SBE, but affected predominantly white kids from the hyper-clean and spacious suburbs rather than ethnic minorities crowded into inner city tenements.
Rheumatic Fever, by contrast, by 1940 was getting far less attention and funding than had been traditionally the case.
This made him angry and as it happened, it made Dawson even angrier.
Dawson had long seen a long slow shift away from charity to self help cum narrow self interest in the world generally and his belief was well supported by the facts.
The case of polio was particularly instructive.
Usually the March of Dimes is seen as an example of progress in human affairs : the (usually middle class) families of patients with a particular disease banding together to act as a advocacy and fundraising group for their relatives's disease.
But in an earlier age, middle class people donated money freely to help people in need who they didn't even know - this sort of selfless (agape) giving is the true definition of charity - not something you do to help your nearest and dearest or to get a tax deduction.
Hospitals - like Columbia Presbyterian where Dawson worked - had once freely treated those in most need of help with the least funds to pay for it.
Now it only treated the poor if their cases were unique enough to teach the (mostly middle class) medical students well enough to ensure them of a lifetime high income and higher status.
Similarly nations had once went to war - heedless of the cost - to battle to defend the rights of the smallest,weakest nations like Belgium to survive.
Now nations stood silently, bystanders, as Belgium and other small nations got gobbled up, saying it wasn't in their nation's self interest to intervene.
And America's medical schools, like Columbia Presbyterian, in that Fall of 1940, were moving away from their increasingly weak efforts towards Social Medicine (medical research aiding the weakest members of society, regardless of their ability to pay).
Instead they were moving towards War Medicine (medical research oriented to aiding the most fit members in society - her soldiers.)
But Dawson's anger - though in keeping with his character he usually kept it carefully reined in and undercover - was also directed at his colleagues for dismissing his research into the ability of microbes to do many things that the most advanced human civilizations were incapable of.
Meyer in a sense was partially a mouthpiece for such conventional beliefs.
The idea that penicillin was not safe to inject into humans until it was purified by humans was hardly his alone - it was universal in the worldwide medical community since 1928.
But Dawson began to reason that the fungus had probably been making penicillin for hundreds of millions of years and had probably got it down to a science.
After all, he probably reminded Meyer, they already successfully made penicillin at normal atmospheric pressures and normal temperatures and without strong expensive toxic reagents - not something Meyer, even if he was to become totally successful, could ever likely claim.
Dawson had two hands - in his quiet passively aggressive way , on a day when no bosses were around - Draft Registration Day October 16 1940, he could give the world two fingers.
Reluctantly, quietly but firmly, Dawson became the third leader of the project.
On that day, Dawson would give the world's first ever penicillin injections, ushering the Age of Antibiotics.
And do so by using (a) a medicine made by conventional evolutionary biology's under-estimated underdogs (tiny penicillium cells) to aid (b) society's under-estimated underdogs - Jewish and black youths from NYC's working class ....
Showing posts with label aaron leroy alston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aaron leroy alston. Show all posts
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Friday, April 10, 2015
Bickel penicillin book vivid -- at cost in accuracy
Lennard Bickel's 1972 book, "Rise Up To Life", was the first book that covered the wartime saga of penicillin as it occurred around the entire world.
But it was also one of the first written by someone who was not an eyewitness to the actual events.
But Bickel, an Englishman who emigrated to Australia in mid life, was a very good journalist and interviewed all and everyone he could find from the wartime era and got lively quotes from all.
Unfortunately, as a journalist rather than a historian, he sometimes chose to sacrifice all the facts in order to keep things lively and vivid.
I believe that as a result, he chose to detail almost no pioneering penicillin patient -- unless they could be fully named in his account --- regardless how important they actually were in historical terms.
But even back in the more innocent era of the 1940s, peer reviewed medical articles tended to simply describe but not name patients -- or just given them unique numbers or initials.
Revealing full names was simply no indication of relative historic or scientific importance.
Bickel, probably in 1971, interviewed American Gladys Hobby, who as a PhD in microbiology had personally witnessed many pioneering wartime penicillin events from late 1940 through to late 1945.
But she recalled them mostly from memory and a few personal papers.
In the early 1970s, she surely knew the birthdate, medical history and the initials (CA) for one patient from wartime's pioneering Patients Zero.
Because she had surely read - many times - the medical article her friend and co-worker, the late Dr Martin Henry Dawson, had written in late 1944.
The Patients Zero were the first people ever in history to get injections of life saving antibiotics - doing so on October 16th 1940 from Doctor Dawson at New York's famous Columbia Presbyterian hospital.
But she had forgotten what name lay behind those initials CA.
For the first half of the 20th century, Rheumatic Fever was the leading killer of young people.
Most actually died a few years later, when their heart valves earlier damaged due to Rheumatic Fever, failed because of an attack by common and usually harmless mouth bacteria.
The dreaded SBE - then an invariably fatal form of endocarditis - was what was due to shortly kill this historic duo of patients.
Hobby remembered the other Patient Zero well enough.
Aaron Alston, a young black man from Harlem, had received quite extensive penicillin treatment from Hobby's teammates while Hobby was employed at the hospital but had still died in late January 1941, despite all her's and their best personal efforts.
It wasn't till the 1980s, while writing her own book on wartime penicillin, that Hobby contacted a Columbia Presbyterian Hospital employee named Louise Good, who did have access to more detailed contemporary records.
Good revealed that CA was Charles Aronson and confirmed that Hobby was correct in believing that the other was Aaron Alston.
Charles Aronson was actually treated far more extensively with penicillin than Alston - but treated in 1944, when Hobby was then employed elsewhere.
Employed at Pfizer, which had earlier worked very closely with her and Dawson.
Still, she stayed in very close touch with Dawson's team and had certainly read the medical article describing CA's extensive second penicillin treatment.
But that wasn't the same as actually being there at his bedside, daily for months, to burn his real name permanently into her memory.
This was unfortunate, because Bickel - for reasons perhaps not altogether honourable - chose to focus only on Hobby's fully named patient, the one who died.
By not also including the patient with only initials, the one who survived his invariably fatal disease twice thanks to Dawson's penicillin, he tilted his account of Dawson's work to the side of failure.
Failure, rather than the actual facts - which was that five years of life-costing hard work by Dawson - and Dawson alone - had made an once common and then invariably fatal heart disease the most curable heart condition known.
Bickel's brief account of Alston's early death - followed by Dawson's 'early' death, became the gospel on the whole fascinating penicillin story at Columbia-Presbyterian and Pfizer to generations of writers.
I fully and truly understand the curiosity that drives people to inquire as to who is the real person behind mysterious initials .
That is why I have worked so hard to recover the lost story of CA - and of Alston and the handful of other patients of Dawson who were given full names names in Hobby's 1985 book, "Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge" ...
But it was also one of the first written by someone who was not an eyewitness to the actual events.
But Bickel, an Englishman who emigrated to Australia in mid life, was a very good journalist and interviewed all and everyone he could find from the wartime era and got lively quotes from all.
Unfortunately, as a journalist rather than a historian, he sometimes chose to sacrifice all the facts in order to keep things lively and vivid.
I believe that as a result, he chose to detail almost no pioneering penicillin patient -- unless they could be fully named in his account --- regardless how important they actually were in historical terms.
But even back in the more innocent era of the 1940s, peer reviewed medical articles tended to simply describe but not name patients -- or just given them unique numbers or initials.
Revealing full names was simply no indication of relative historic or scientific importance.
How this historical travesty all began :
Bickel, probably in 1971, interviewed American Gladys Hobby, who as a PhD in microbiology had personally witnessed many pioneering wartime penicillin events from late 1940 through to late 1945.
But she recalled them mostly from memory and a few personal papers.
In the early 1970s, she surely knew the birthdate, medical history and the initials (CA) for one patient from wartime's pioneering Patients Zero.
Because she had surely read - many times - the medical article her friend and co-worker, the late Dr Martin Henry Dawson, had written in late 1944.
The Patients Zero were the first people ever in history to get injections of life saving antibiotics - doing so on October 16th 1940 from Doctor Dawson at New York's famous Columbia Presbyterian hospital.
But she had forgotten what name lay behind those initials CA.
Fatal SBE was their fate
For the first half of the 20th century, Rheumatic Fever was the leading killer of young people.
Most actually died a few years later, when their heart valves earlier damaged due to Rheumatic Fever, failed because of an attack by common and usually harmless mouth bacteria.
The dreaded SBE - then an invariably fatal form of endocarditis - was what was due to shortly kill this historic duo of patients.
Hobby remembered the other Patient Zero well enough.
Aaron Alston, a young black man from Harlem, had received quite extensive penicillin treatment from Hobby's teammates while Hobby was employed at the hospital but had still died in late January 1941, despite all her's and their best personal efforts.
Louise Good to the rescue
It wasn't till the 1980s, while writing her own book on wartime penicillin, that Hobby contacted a Columbia Presbyterian Hospital employee named Louise Good, who did have access to more detailed contemporary records.
Good revealed that CA was Charles Aronson and confirmed that Hobby was correct in believing that the other was Aaron Alston.
Charles Aronson was actually treated far more extensively with penicillin than Alston - but treated in 1944, when Hobby was then employed elsewhere.
Employed at Pfizer, which had earlier worked very closely with her and Dawson.
Still, she stayed in very close touch with Dawson's team and had certainly read the medical article describing CA's extensive second penicillin treatment.
But that wasn't the same as actually being there at his bedside, daily for months, to burn his real name permanently into her memory.
Bickel lays his thumb on the history balance
This was unfortunate, because Bickel - for reasons perhaps not altogether honourable - chose to focus only on Hobby's fully named patient, the one who died.
By not also including the patient with only initials, the one who survived his invariably fatal disease twice thanks to Dawson's penicillin, he tilted his account of Dawson's work to the side of failure.
Failure, rather than the actual facts - which was that five years of life-costing hard work by Dawson - and Dawson alone - had made an once common and then invariably fatal heart disease the most curable heart condition known.
Bickel's brief account of Alston's early death - followed by Dawson's 'early' death, became the gospel on the whole fascinating penicillin story at Columbia-Presbyterian and Pfizer to generations of writers.
I will satisfy the natural curiosity
I fully and truly understand the curiosity that drives people to inquire as to who is the real person behind mysterious initials .
That is why I have worked so hard to recover the lost story of CA - and of Alston and the handful of other patients of Dawson who were given full names names in Hobby's 1985 book, "Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge" ...
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Antibiotics' Patients Zero, part 2
In the end, finding out about the Patient Zero I knew the least about, Aaron Alston, turned out to be by far the easiest.
But first I had to make all sorts of naive mistakes.
I knew that if an acute case of Rheumatic Fever attacks a young child's heart, they can quickly die, without prompt and appropriate medical intervention.
But if they don't die, most of the attacked heart tissue will more or less heal - unless the area attacked is the very delicate and extremely vital heart valves.
You can literally hear damaged heart valves.
Many people have harmless heart murmurs but these particular stethoscope sounds tell a doctor that the valves are damaged and the entire heart is straining in overtime, to pump blood through these only partially closed/open doors.
So doctors will then strongly advise the parents to not tax this particular child's heart.
So no strenuous sports - later on, no vigorous dancing, no passionate sex acts, pregnancies are very dangerous, chasing after toddlers is too stressful, etc.
While my brother Bruce had childhood Rheumatic Fever and was left with a heart murmur and damaged valves, ironically enough he was the only athletic member of our extended family !
Though small, he was eager to try out for high school football and was a city level long distance running champion.
So you'd think I would have known better about Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) and young athletes.
In my defence, I had just assumed that the heart valves of Rheumatic Fever patients who go on to develop life-ending subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) were far more damaged than most RHD patients - so obviously far less capable of championship level athletics.
But this simply isn't so - SBE, like cancer, has a pronounced stochastic (for PhDs) or random (for ordinary folk) nature to it : sheer bad luck as well as bad valves plays a part.
Dawson treated patients who got SBE fifty or more years after their childhood heart valves were first damaged and some who got SBE only a year or two after first getting Rheumatic Fever.
But most patients get SBE ten or twenty years after their valves are first attacked.
Still, when I did find an Aaron Alston finishing in the top level in NYC wide races in 1930, ten years before my Aaron Alston first got SBE, I dismissed that it might be him.
I also got search results for A. Alston too : an A. Leroy Alston also winning athletic events.
I just felt I had got nowhere with Alston - the lack of his birthdate was so crippling.
As I described in an earlier blog, knowing first and last name, residence in greater NYC area in 1940, and birthdate, usually means that 140 million possible American patients is reduced down to one or two.
Without a birthdate, it goes up to at least a hundred possible names.
But in 2014, I suddenly realized I probably did have a death date on him as well.
For his brief medical history made it clear he was going to get all the penicillin Dr Dawson's team had (they were making themselves) but suddenly all the penicillin was switched to another patient.
Alston had obviously died, died in mid January 1941, and almost certainly while undergoing treatment in Dawson's hospital, ie in the borough of Manhattan.
Now a search for an index of NYC death certificates seemed easier.
Well, thanks to many tireless volunteers, it certainly was.
I din't really need a specific borough or specific day or month - a volunteer-run online death index for NYC in the first half of the twentith century, didn't show tons of deceased Aaron Alstons in all of 1941 in all boroughs - just him !
With his death certificate number in hand and because he had died before 1948, I a white stranger from Canada could order up the death certificate of someone who was probably a black man from Harlem.
When the certificate copy arrived, it wasn't as detailed as many death certificates I had seen - but his mother's maiden last name Glaze was one I had never seen - rare maybe enough to find her on on Google Search ?
I kept typing in Louise Glaze Harlem or variations thereof and presto one evening, a website came up of her nephew talking about her - i had found one of Aaron's living cousins !
I phoned him (Claude Jay of Harlem My Love) and first I astounded him and then he astounded me --- because he knew of Aaron as Leroy - or more formally as A. Leroy Alston.
He said he was a big athlete.
A person who used his middle name and not his first name - well who would have thought ?!
Well, my wife's huge family has many who do just that - and Dr Martin Henry Dawson was alway Henry - from birth.
Armed with this unexpected information, I soon found tons of material on Aaron Leroy Alston - some in his own voice.
And Claude made it clear Aaron had hundreds of living relatives all over the US.
I astounded Claude again - discovering Aaron Leroy wasn't widowed as his mom said on the death certificate - Claude thought he was always single.
Instead Leroy and Charlotte Lee had been married in the good times of 1930 but the couple were living back with their separate mothers in 1940 when Leroy was too sick to provide an income.
(Both families, once doing okay, were unbelievably poor in 1940 thanks to the Great Depression, racism and early deaths/severe illness of breadwinners.)
I gave all my information to Claude and tried not to research too much further.
I don't feel, as a white Canadian, that I should tell the story of a black man from Harlem - Claude is a relative, journalist, activist and author - he'll tell the full story well I am sure.
Now I turned my hand to another named SBE patient of Dawson - known only as Mr Conant.
(I came to assume that the highly unusual use of that word Mr meant he probably wasn't a young black or Jewish charity case but that he was a private patient, middle class,middle aged and white, from outside NYC)and treated in January 1941.
I searched for a middle aged dead Mr Conant, Manhattan, early 1941, in the NYC death index and up came George M Conant.
Google gave me him in spades - his small town daily describing his SBE illness and his treatment at Columbia Presbyterian at the right dates.
I found Dawson's death certificate and that of little Patty Malone as well - but no Charles Aronson.
That was because he had survived into 1949 at least and NYC death certificates after that date were hard to locate and even harder to gain a legal right to access...
Now read Antibiotics' Patients zero, part 3
But first I had to make all sorts of naive mistakes.
I knew that if an acute case of Rheumatic Fever attacks a young child's heart, they can quickly die, without prompt and appropriate medical intervention.
But if they don't die, most of the attacked heart tissue will more or less heal - unless the area attacked is the very delicate and extremely vital heart valves.
You can literally hear damaged heart valves.
Many people have harmless heart murmurs but these particular stethoscope sounds tell a doctor that the valves are damaged and the entire heart is straining in overtime, to pump blood through these only partially closed/open doors.
So doctors will then strongly advise the parents to not tax this particular child's heart.
So no strenuous sports - later on, no vigorous dancing, no passionate sex acts, pregnancies are very dangerous, chasing after toddlers is too stressful, etc.
While my brother Bruce had childhood Rheumatic Fever and was left with a heart murmur and damaged valves, ironically enough he was the only athletic member of our extended family !
Though small, he was eager to try out for high school football and was a city level long distance running champion.
So you'd think I would have known better about Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) and young athletes.
In my defence, I had just assumed that the heart valves of Rheumatic Fever patients who go on to develop life-ending subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) were far more damaged than most RHD patients - so obviously far less capable of championship level athletics.
But this simply isn't so - SBE, like cancer, has a pronounced stochastic (for PhDs) or random (for ordinary folk) nature to it : sheer bad luck as well as bad valves plays a part.
Dawson treated patients who got SBE fifty or more years after their childhood heart valves were first damaged and some who got SBE only a year or two after first getting Rheumatic Fever.
But most patients get SBE ten or twenty years after their valves are first attacked.
Still, when I did find an Aaron Alston finishing in the top level in NYC wide races in 1930, ten years before my Aaron Alston first got SBE, I dismissed that it might be him.
I also got search results for A. Alston too : an A. Leroy Alston also winning athletic events.
I just felt I had got nowhere with Alston - the lack of his birthdate was so crippling.
As I described in an earlier blog, knowing first and last name, residence in greater NYC area in 1940, and birthdate, usually means that 140 million possible American patients is reduced down to one or two.
Without a birthdate, it goes up to at least a hundred possible names.
But in 2014, I suddenly realized I probably did have a death date on him as well.
For his brief medical history made it clear he was going to get all the penicillin Dr Dawson's team had (they were making themselves) but suddenly all the penicillin was switched to another patient.
Alston had obviously died, died in mid January 1941, and almost certainly while undergoing treatment in Dawson's hospital, ie in the borough of Manhattan.
Now a search for an index of NYC death certificates seemed easier.
Well, thanks to many tireless volunteers, it certainly was.
I din't really need a specific borough or specific day or month - a volunteer-run online death index for NYC in the first half of the twentith century, didn't show tons of deceased Aaron Alstons in all of 1941 in all boroughs - just him !
With his death certificate number in hand and because he had died before 1948, I a white stranger from Canada could order up the death certificate of someone who was probably a black man from Harlem.
When the certificate copy arrived, it wasn't as detailed as many death certificates I had seen - but his mother's maiden last name Glaze was one I had never seen - rare maybe enough to find her on on Google Search ?
I kept typing in Louise Glaze Harlem or variations thereof and presto one evening, a website came up of her nephew talking about her - i had found one of Aaron's living cousins !
I phoned him (Claude Jay of Harlem My Love) and first I astounded him and then he astounded me --- because he knew of Aaron as Leroy - or more formally as A. Leroy Alston.
He said he was a big athlete.
A person who used his middle name and not his first name - well who would have thought ?!
Well, my wife's huge family has many who do just that - and Dr Martin Henry Dawson was alway Henry - from birth.
Armed with this unexpected information, I soon found tons of material on Aaron Leroy Alston - some in his own voice.
And Claude made it clear Aaron had hundreds of living relatives all over the US.
I astounded Claude again - discovering Aaron Leroy wasn't widowed as his mom said on the death certificate - Claude thought he was always single.
Instead Leroy and Charlotte Lee had been married in the good times of 1930 but the couple were living back with their separate mothers in 1940 when Leroy was too sick to provide an income.
(Both families, once doing okay, were unbelievably poor in 1940 thanks to the Great Depression, racism and early deaths/severe illness of breadwinners.)
I gave all my information to Claude and tried not to research too much further.
I don't feel, as a white Canadian, that I should tell the story of a black man from Harlem - Claude is a relative, journalist, activist and author - he'll tell the full story well I am sure.
Now I turned my hand to another named SBE patient of Dawson - known only as Mr Conant.
(I came to assume that the highly unusual use of that word Mr meant he probably wasn't a young black or Jewish charity case but that he was a private patient, middle class,middle aged and white, from outside NYC)and treated in January 1941.
I searched for a middle aged dead Mr Conant, Manhattan, early 1941, in the NYC death index and up came George M Conant.
Google gave me him in spades - his small town daily describing his SBE illness and his treatment at Columbia Presbyterian at the right dates.
I found Dawson's death certificate and that of little Patty Malone as well - but no Charles Aronson.
That was because he had survived into 1949 at least and NYC death certificates after that date were hard to locate and even harder to gain a legal right to access...
Now read Antibiotics' Patients zero, part 3
Antibiotics' Patients Zero , part 1
When I began the search for Antibiotics' Patients Zero ten years ago, I very naively thought like a historian, not a genealogist, and as a result, I got precisely nowhere for ten wasted years.
Professional historians are taught to distrust family oral histories and to put all their faith in official paper documents.
Professional genealogists tell their clients to do exactly the opposite: don't quickly dismiss old family tales as myths and legends and never simply take the evidence of official documents at face value.
I also made a fundamental error in math which I suspect you and 99% of the world would do at first try.
If about all you knew about a missing antibiotics' patient zero was that they were 31 in 1944, quickly, what year do you think they were born ?
1913, of course.
And if they were born on January 1st 1913, that fact is always true, no matter when in 1944 the question is raised.
But what if, like my sister Margo, they were born on December 27th ?
Strictly speaking, wouldn't she also be 31 for 99% of 1944, though born in 1912 ?
I had also assumed wrongly, for ten years, that the doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) making this statement about his patient's age was calculating it from late 1944, as he was finalizing the submission of an very important scientific article on this man and others.
But doctors are very busy people and the only time they tend to ask you your age is on admission.
This man (Charles Aronson) was admitted in April 1944 but his birthday was in June 1912, as it turns out.
Further mistake : I took on faith the claim made by many (without any backing evidence - whatsoever) that this patient's doctor long had an overwhelming interest in curing patients with invariably fatal SBE (a form of endocarditis brought about by Rheumatic Fever.)
The strongest claim about this was made by his closest colleague, a colleague for almost all of his scientific career : so a claim hard to dismiss.
But as Google Search got better and as I gathered up all of this doctor's public utterances in articles, at conferences, in textbooks etc, in 2014 I was suddenly struck by the fact that he never once talked about endocarditis -- despite having considerable freedom to do so.
I also now knew that his first antibiotics efforts with patients came just after he had finally moved up from assistant attending physician at a huge research and teaching hospital (aka dogsbody) to associate attending physician, in charge (more or less) of one public charity ward.
Admitting patients to world class teaching hospitals is never easy for 99.9% of doctors - patients themselves are never the priority, to put it bluntly but truthfully.
In a 24 hours a day, seven days a week teaching hospital, most patients are considered for admission when any particular doctor is at home or busy working in another part of the hospital.
The priority for the admitting doctor - a medical student of a sort themselves - is always, 'do my teachers need a patient with this condition - right now - to fit in with the teaching schedule for us medical students' ?
Followed by, 'or would this sort of patient and illness fit in with the research work of the more senior and powerful teacher-researchers here', people who can make or break my future career?
The known wishes of the thus usually absent Dr Dawson, being in charge of a world class outpatient clinic for people with arthritis - would have had considerable sway in the admission process of (private or charity) patients with rare forms of arthritis but that is all.
The only SBE cases he would have any say over occurred whereever seriously ill people simply arrive at the hospital doorstep and basically had to be admitted right away,regardless, for humanitarian reasons.
If they arrived at the one charity ward Dawson was mostly in command of, he not their lowly GP, would have the most say of their medical care.
After all, the patient and their GP were not paying the medical piper.
And I now knew that Depression Era patients seeking admission to Manhattan hospital charity wards almost always came from just a few convenient miles away by bus, subway or even foot - their families were too poor to own a car and worked at tiring physical jobs.
Their frequent, easy, presence at the hospital was a key emotional asset in the patients' speedy recovery --- or in their last days on earth.
Only when a poor person, with an unique set of medical conditions, in a distant community came to the attention of a powerful doctor with good personal and professional connections with the top doctors at a big teaching hospital in Manhattan, could they secure admission on that hospital's charity ward, regardless of the opinion of the ward's attending physician in charge.
And then, be assured, that attending physician would have little say in their treatment : the various Drs Big from outside and inside the hospital would take over !
I now sensed that unless the available evidence suggested otherwise , as it did with history's third antibiotics' patient, the first two patients zero probably came from about a three mile radius around Dawson's hospital (the world famous Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre in upper Manhattan.)
His hospital had no shortage of very poor people near by in 1940 - blacks in Harlem and Jews in South Bronx.
Research and teaching hospitals can really only thrive if large supplies of poor patients are near by.
These poor, in return for advanced medical care for free, agree to be constantly examined and probed by huge numbers of strangers and agree to submit to new, scary and painful treatments.
Almost all I knew about Dawson's Patient Zeros was their names : Aaron Alston and Charles Aronson.
Alston was/is a common black name in Harlem New York, ditto Aronson was then a common Jewish name in South Bronx --- both places just two or three miles from Dawson's hospital.
But Google provided too many Aaron Alstons (I had no birthdate on him) to narrow my search easily and only one Charles Aronson born in 1913 in the whole USA.
Dawson's Aronson had spent so much of his young life in hospitals fighting off death so many times that I doubted he could have lived too many years past 1945.
(In his last known illness known to me, he had such a severe stroke that he was left paralyzed on one side and speechless as well.)
But when I tracked down the sons of one American Charles Aronson born in 1913 and they said he had been healthy as a horse, all his very long life, and was not in a hospital in NYC in 1940 or 1944.
By this time, some American census results came up in Google search : a Charles Aronson in the Bronx in 1940, but with a birthdate of 1915 not 1913.
But it was close enough for me - because it soon became clear that in all of 1940 USA and searching very generously for birthdates between 1908 and 1918 ,there was only three Charles Aronsons, period - two far from NYC and one in the Bronx.
But the historian in me soon drew a blank .....
See part two
Professional historians are taught to distrust family oral histories and to put all their faith in official paper documents.
Professional genealogists tell their clients to do exactly the opposite: don't quickly dismiss old family tales as myths and legends and never simply take the evidence of official documents at face value.
I also made a fundamental error in math which I suspect you and 99% of the world would do at first try.
If about all you knew about a missing antibiotics' patient zero was that they were 31 in 1944, quickly, what year do you think they were born ?
1913, of course.
And if they were born on January 1st 1913, that fact is always true, no matter when in 1944 the question is raised.
But what if, like my sister Margo, they were born on December 27th ?
Strictly speaking, wouldn't she also be 31 for 99% of 1944, though born in 1912 ?
I had also assumed wrongly, for ten years, that the doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) making this statement about his patient's age was calculating it from late 1944, as he was finalizing the submission of an very important scientific article on this man and others.
But doctors are very busy people and the only time they tend to ask you your age is on admission.
This man (Charles Aronson) was admitted in April 1944 but his birthday was in June 1912, as it turns out.
Further mistake : I took on faith the claim made by many (without any backing evidence - whatsoever) that this patient's doctor long had an overwhelming interest in curing patients with invariably fatal SBE (a form of endocarditis brought about by Rheumatic Fever.)
The strongest claim about this was made by his closest colleague, a colleague for almost all of his scientific career : so a claim hard to dismiss.
But as Google Search got better and as I gathered up all of this doctor's public utterances in articles, at conferences, in textbooks etc, in 2014 I was suddenly struck by the fact that he never once talked about endocarditis -- despite having considerable freedom to do so.
I also now knew that his first antibiotics efforts with patients came just after he had finally moved up from assistant attending physician at a huge research and teaching hospital (aka dogsbody) to associate attending physician, in charge (more or less) of one public charity ward.
Admitting patients to world class teaching hospitals is never easy for 99.9% of doctors - patients themselves are never the priority, to put it bluntly but truthfully.
In a 24 hours a day, seven days a week teaching hospital, most patients are considered for admission when any particular doctor is at home or busy working in another part of the hospital.
The priority for the admitting doctor - a medical student of a sort themselves - is always, 'do my teachers need a patient with this condition - right now - to fit in with the teaching schedule for us medical students' ?
Followed by, 'or would this sort of patient and illness fit in with the research work of the more senior and powerful teacher-researchers here', people who can make or break my future career?
The known wishes of the thus usually absent Dr Dawson, being in charge of a world class outpatient clinic for people with arthritis - would have had considerable sway in the admission process of (private or charity) patients with rare forms of arthritis but that is all.
The only SBE cases he would have any say over occurred whereever seriously ill people simply arrive at the hospital doorstep and basically had to be admitted right away,regardless, for humanitarian reasons.
If they arrived at the one charity ward Dawson was mostly in command of, he not their lowly GP, would have the most say of their medical care.
After all, the patient and their GP were not paying the medical piper.
And I now knew that Depression Era patients seeking admission to Manhattan hospital charity wards almost always came from just a few convenient miles away by bus, subway or even foot - their families were too poor to own a car and worked at tiring physical jobs.
Their frequent, easy, presence at the hospital was a key emotional asset in the patients' speedy recovery --- or in their last days on earth.
Only when a poor person, with an unique set of medical conditions, in a distant community came to the attention of a powerful doctor with good personal and professional connections with the top doctors at a big teaching hospital in Manhattan, could they secure admission on that hospital's charity ward, regardless of the opinion of the ward's attending physician in charge.
And then, be assured, that attending physician would have little say in their treatment : the various Drs Big from outside and inside the hospital would take over !
I now sensed that unless the available evidence suggested otherwise , as it did with history's third antibiotics' patient, the first two patients zero probably came from about a three mile radius around Dawson's hospital (the world famous Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre in upper Manhattan.)
His hospital had no shortage of very poor people near by in 1940 - blacks in Harlem and Jews in South Bronx.
Research and teaching hospitals can really only thrive if large supplies of poor patients are near by.
These poor, in return for advanced medical care for free, agree to be constantly examined and probed by huge numbers of strangers and agree to submit to new, scary and painful treatments.
Almost all I knew about Dawson's Patient Zeros was their names : Aaron Alston and Charles Aronson.
Alston was/is a common black name in Harlem New York, ditto Aronson was then a common Jewish name in South Bronx --- both places just two or three miles from Dawson's hospital.
But Google provided too many Aaron Alstons (I had no birthdate on him) to narrow my search easily and only one Charles Aronson born in 1913 in the whole USA.
Dawson's Aronson had spent so much of his young life in hospitals fighting off death so many times that I doubted he could have lived too many years past 1945.
(In his last known illness known to me, he had such a severe stroke that he was left paralyzed on one side and speechless as well.)
But when I tracked down the sons of one American Charles Aronson born in 1913 and they said he had been healthy as a horse, all his very long life, and was not in a hospital in NYC in 1940 or 1944.
By this time, some American census results came up in Google search : a Charles Aronson in the Bronx in 1940, but with a birthdate of 1915 not 1913.
But it was close enough for me - because it soon became clear that in all of 1940 USA and searching very generously for birthdates between 1908 and 1918 ,there was only three Charles Aronsons, period - two far from NYC and one in the Bronx.
But the historian in me soon drew a blank .....
See part two
Friday, March 20, 2015
The Double V victory : the Last shall be First
On October 16th 1940, it is said, Dr Martin Henry Dawson gave history's first ever antibiotic injections to a black man, Aaron Leroy Alston and to a Jew, Charles Aronson.
"And" : not "and then to".
But how ? How on earth do you give two injections at the same time ?
I struggled recently with the actual mechanics while thinking how to present this event as a single painted image.
Eventually I realized that a painting of this athletically double-jointed historic event might also symbolize the ambiguous "Double V victory" of Manhattan's two biggest war projects : the autarkical A-Bomb and Dawson's openly commensal natural penicillin.
My proposed image for the first volume of my book Janus Manhattan's Children ?
It shows the soon-to-be-injected arm of Alston (to the left) and Aronson (to the right) joined at their hands, making one natural "V".
Above them, the limitations of human anatomy ensures that the arms of Dr Dawson (preparing to inject the penicillin into each patient's arm at the same time) would also form another natural "V" above and inside the patients' "V".
As anyone struggling to emulate Dawson's twin effort soon realizes, it is probably easiest and most natural to let their left hand inject rightward and their right hand inject leftward --- the twin hypo needles crisscrossing at the hands.
The criss crossing also helps emphasize Dawson secondary goal.
On that October 16th, he particularly wanted to exalt the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the smallest, sickest and weakest ("The Last") among 1940 America's minorities.
Because on this day, set aside in law for the first ever peacetime draft registration, the rest of America was otherwise exalting the biggest and the strongest (the 1As) among its population.
True, the 1As might do all the actual military fighting overseas to end Nazi mistreatment of minorities.
But Dawson and others realized that all the 1As' deaths and the eventual victory would be useless, if at home the values of the Nazis continued in America's treatment of its own minorities.
To really put paid to Hitler, we needed to defeat his thinking, abroad and at home.
But instead, American medical conservatives
were moving to emulate Hitler even more !
They had long been hostile to 1930s liberals and their efforts to try and save all of the dying even if they couldn't pay for their treatment (Social Medicine).
Hitler's Aktion T4 program had begun in September 1939, deliberately using the cover of war efforts to begin the killing off all of Germany's handicapped.
So too, these American conservatives were actually using the medical preparations for a possible war with Hitler (War Medicine) as an excuse to cut off medical efforts towards the poorest minorities !
So with 'enemies' like the AMA's Morris Fishbein leading the charge, Hitler hardly needed friends.
Instead, on this day, he got a moral enemy in Dr Dawson ...
"And" : not "and then to".
But how ? How on earth do you give two injections at the same time ?
I struggled recently with the actual mechanics while thinking how to present this event as a single painted image.
Eventually I realized that a painting of this athletically double-jointed historic event might also symbolize the ambiguous "Double V victory" of Manhattan's two biggest war projects : the autarkical A-Bomb and Dawson's openly commensal natural penicillin.
My proposed image for the first volume of my book Janus Manhattan's Children ?
It shows the soon-to-be-injected arm of Alston (to the left) and Aronson (to the right) joined at their hands, making one natural "V".
Above them, the limitations of human anatomy ensures that the arms of Dr Dawson (preparing to inject the penicillin into each patient's arm at the same time) would also form another natural "V" above and inside the patients' "V".
As anyone struggling to emulate Dawson's twin effort soon realizes, it is probably easiest and most natural to let their left hand inject rightward and their right hand inject leftward --- the twin hypo needles crisscrossing at the hands.
The criss crossing also helps emphasize Dawson secondary goal.
On that October 16th, he particularly wanted to exalt the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the smallest, sickest and weakest ("The Last") among 1940 America's minorities.
Because on this day, set aside in law for the first ever peacetime draft registration, the rest of America was otherwise exalting the biggest and the strongest (the 1As) among its population.
True, the 1As might do all the actual military fighting overseas to end Nazi mistreatment of minorities.
But Dawson and others realized that all the 1As' deaths and the eventual victory would be useless, if at home the values of the Nazis continued in America's treatment of its own minorities.
To really put paid to Hitler, we needed to defeat his thinking, abroad and at home.
But instead, American medical conservatives
were moving to emulate Hitler even more !
They had long been hostile to 1930s liberals and their efforts to try and save all of the dying even if they couldn't pay for their treatment (Social Medicine).
Hitler's Aktion T4 program had begun in September 1939, deliberately using the cover of war efforts to begin the killing off all of Germany's handicapped.
So too, these American conservatives were actually using the medical preparations for a possible war with Hitler (War Medicine) as an excuse to cut off medical efforts towards the poorest minorities !
So with 'enemies' like the AMA's Morris Fishbein leading the charge, Hitler hardly needed friends.
Instead, on this day, he got a moral enemy in Dr Dawson ...
When the upward causation of 'invariably fatal' SBE meets the downward causation of Dawson's agape penicillin
Let us accept - for the sake of the argument - the unproven assumption that many kids could even get SBE disease out there in the Social Darwinists' belovedly savage "Nature" that existed before Christian compassion peed on their picnic.
Then, yes, the SBEs' premature death out there in early Nature does seem assured - even 'invariable'.
A clear case of what philosophic reductionists (such as Adolf Hitler) liked to call "upward causation", mandated from the virile little bacteria at the bottom to the big - damaged - heart valves at the top.
Seemingly, end of story.
But remember, even when the evolutionary upward causation of tiny mutating genes throw ups three headed horses, the varying reproductive odds out there in the big eternal environment also get to have their say.
And to date, those reproductive odds has shown a decided preference for horses with only one head.
A clear example of Evolution's "downward causation" (from the top big to the bottom small) having its two cent say on the final results.
In September 1940, the upward causation of Aaron (Leroy) Alston's inevitably death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis - the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the number one killer of kids for 50 years) hit a speed bump.
Inspired by Alston's black activist spunk, a middle aged doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) decided to strike his own personal blow for freedom during WWII by trying to stop Social Darwinists in America from doing to SBE patients what Hitler was already doing to their counterparts in Germany under the Aktion T4 program.
Despite Dawson's best efforts with his historic home-brewed antibiotic injections, Alston did not survive in the end, but Dawson's efforts ultimately ensured that ten billion of us - so far - have led longer happier healthier years.
Seventy five years later, the downward causation of Dawson's agape penicillin is still working itself out in all its complex manifestations, all over our world.
Try and reduce that .....
Then, yes, the SBEs' premature death out there in early Nature does seem assured - even 'invariable'.
A clear case of what philosophic reductionists (such as Adolf Hitler) liked to call "upward causation", mandated from the virile little bacteria at the bottom to the big - damaged - heart valves at the top.
Seemingly, end of story.
But remember, even when the evolutionary upward causation of tiny mutating genes throw ups three headed horses, the varying reproductive odds out there in the big eternal environment also get to have their say.
And to date, those reproductive odds has shown a decided preference for horses with only one head.
A clear example of Evolution's "downward causation" (from the top big to the bottom small) having its two cent say on the final results.
In September 1940, the upward causation of Aaron (Leroy) Alston's inevitably death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis - the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the number one killer of kids for 50 years) hit a speed bump.
Inspired by Alston's black activist spunk, a middle aged doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) decided to strike his own personal blow for freedom during WWII by trying to stop Social Darwinists in America from doing to SBE patients what Hitler was already doing to their counterparts in Germany under the Aktion T4 program.
Despite Dawson's best efforts with his historic home-brewed antibiotic injections, Alston did not survive in the end, but Dawson's efforts ultimately ensured that ten billion of us - so far - have led longer happier healthier years.
Seventy five years later, the downward causation of Dawson's agape penicillin is still working itself out in all its complex manifestations, all over our world.
Try and reduce that .....
Friday, March 13, 2015
Three of four pioneering SBE patients (first patients ever to be treated with penicillin injections) still alive at first published report
I know two* and believe possibly three of Martin Henry Dawson's first four SBE patients treated with the first ever injections of penicillin were still alive at the time of his May 5th 1941 paper on this project.
But none had shown a lasting benefit from receiving this new treatment for SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis - the then invariably fatal disease that made Rheumatic Fever a feared word for all parents).
That they received an indirect benefit is always possible and even likely - because we well know that a freshly uplifted mind assists the body to better fight off illnesses.
So Dawson was rightly low key in his public presentation, in regards to these four patients.
He only emphasized that repeated and varied penicillin injections did not harm them in any way.
This was a clear rebuke to the world's doctors for the 12 years of their collective neglecting to use penicillin injections to save countless millions of lives.
I see nothing in his published statement to indicate that all four patients had died at the time of his report - those historians who state that are simply wrong.
* Charles Aronson and George M Conant were certainly alive on May 5th. Aaron Leroy Alston had died January 25th 1941.
Amazingly, even the various doctors and nurses (cum eye witnesses) on the team could not recall anything of the fourth (almost certainly also male) patient, even a few short years later !
But none had shown a lasting benefit from receiving this new treatment for SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis - the then invariably fatal disease that made Rheumatic Fever a feared word for all parents).
That they received an indirect benefit is always possible and even likely - because we well know that a freshly uplifted mind assists the body to better fight off illnesses.
So Dawson was rightly low key in his public presentation, in regards to these four patients.
He only emphasized that repeated and varied penicillin injections did not harm them in any way.
This was a clear rebuke to the world's doctors for the 12 years of their collective neglecting to use penicillin injections to save countless millions of lives.
I see nothing in his published statement to indicate that all four patients had died at the time of his report - those historians who state that are simply wrong.
* Charles Aronson and George M Conant were certainly alive on May 5th. Aaron Leroy Alston had died January 25th 1941.
Amazingly, even the various doctors and nurses (cum eye witnesses) on the team could not recall anything of the fourth (almost certainly also male) patient, even a few short years later !
Thursday, March 12, 2015
75 years ago, on a day supposedly devoted to 1As, two New York City 4Fs made medical history instead
It is an irony beyond all measure that on America's first ever peacetime Draft Registration Day, October 16th 1940, a day designed to separate the 1A sheep from the 4F goats, two 4Fs (a black man from Harlem and a Jew from the Bronx) instead made medical history by ushering in our current Age of Antibiotics !
And they made history not by accident of sheer coincidence either.
For their doctor, Martin Henry Dawson of Columbia University's Presbyterian medical campus,was incensed that his colleagues were using the move to a War Medicine footing (of which the separating of valued 1As from unvalued 4Fs was but one part) as an excuse to drop Social Medicine - the extending of life-saving medical care to those in need, regardless of their income, color or origins.
Dawson felt that a Double V Victory was needed to defeat the hold that Fascist values held among much of the world's Neutral nations - both a military defeat and a moral defeat.
Abandoning America's weakest and the smallest to medical benign neglect, just as the Nazis were currently doing with their own weak and small, was no way to win the 'hearts and minds' of the neutral nations.
These two young New York City boys, famed athlete Aaron Leroy Alston of St Nicholas Avenue and teletype operator Charles Aronson of Vyse Avenue, were dying of then invariably fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis, known to all as SBE, the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the most feared and fatal of all school age children's diseases.
It was also known as "The Polio of the Poor", which gives an indication that minorities , immigrants and the poor were the hardest hit by it.
For these two reasons, people with it were judged, by a medical establishment echoing the Manhattan of Gordon Gekko, to be of no value to the military or to hard-slog war-factory work ---- and so best left to die.
But Dawson, perhaps channelling the spirit of Manhattan's equally famous Emma Lazarus, saw the pair as worth saving and their disease as curable if only.
If only, twelve long years after penicillin's non toxic and bacteria killing nature were first discovered, some doctor plucked up enough courage to test its toxicity in the human blood stream.
Dawson did that crucial test - injecting it in himself.
Convinced it was safe, he then injected his team's home made penicillin into the pair and quietly, off stage in all that day's media splash, made history.
For journalistic hindsight is always 20/20, but back then it seemed clear that reporting upon possible student resistance (on the same Columbia campus) to the draft registration process was a far,far bigger story.
Hopefully, this time around, on the October 16th 2015 seventy fifth anniversary of those historic pair of antibiotic injections, the NYC area media will run with the ball ...
And they made history not by accident of sheer coincidence either.
For their doctor, Martin Henry Dawson of Columbia University's Presbyterian medical campus,was incensed that his colleagues were using the move to a War Medicine footing (of which the separating of valued 1As from unvalued 4Fs was but one part) as an excuse to drop Social Medicine - the extending of life-saving medical care to those in need, regardless of their income, color or origins.
Dawson felt that a Double V Victory was needed to defeat the hold that Fascist values held among much of the world's Neutral nations - both a military defeat and a moral defeat.
Abandoning America's weakest and the smallest to medical benign neglect, just as the Nazis were currently doing with their own weak and small, was no way to win the 'hearts and minds' of the neutral nations.
These two young New York City boys, famed athlete Aaron Leroy Alston of St Nicholas Avenue and teletype operator Charles Aronson of Vyse Avenue, were dying of then invariably fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis, known to all as SBE, the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the most feared and fatal of all school age children's diseases.
It was also known as "The Polio of the Poor", which gives an indication that minorities , immigrants and the poor were the hardest hit by it.
For these two reasons, people with it were judged, by a medical establishment echoing the Manhattan of Gordon Gekko, to be of no value to the military or to hard-slog war-factory work ---- and so best left to die.
But Dawson, perhaps channelling the spirit of Manhattan's equally famous Emma Lazarus, saw the pair as worth saving and their disease as curable if only.
If only, twelve long years after penicillin's non toxic and bacteria killing nature were first discovered, some doctor plucked up enough courage to test its toxicity in the human blood stream.
Dawson did that crucial test - injecting it in himself.
Convinced it was safe, he then injected his team's home made penicillin into the pair and quietly, off stage in all that day's media splash, made history.
For journalistic hindsight is always 20/20, but back then it seemed clear that reporting upon possible student resistance (on the same Columbia campus) to the draft registration process was a far,far bigger story.
Hopefully, this time around, on the October 16th 2015 seventy fifth anniversary of those historic pair of antibiotic injections, the NYC area media will run with the ball ...
Sunday, March 1, 2015
First injection of penicillin into patients : October 16th 1940 New York
The first penicillin needle into a patient, ushering in our present Era of Antibiotics, was one of the most signal events in all medical history and it happened exactly 75 years ago this Fall.
Yet, until this present article, even the barest of its bare facts have never been publicly reported accurately - not even by the three key team leaders that first performed them !
Here is how it went, based on cross-checking the various published report by the three team leaders against public records and newspaper accounts:
On October 15th 1940, after a hectic six weeks learning from scratch just where to find the right strain of penicillium and then how to coax the temperamental fungus to produce raw penicillin juice, the three key members of the tiny team at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre were finally ready.
The team leader (Nova Scotia born and raised Dr Martin Henry Dawson) would inject the penicillin into himself, a healthy volunteer, to test whether the never-before injected drug was dangerous to human life once in the bloodstream.
If he survived unharmed, the team planned to use the free time provided the next day by the university's registration of students and young staff in America's very first peacetime Draft to inject some penicillin into two young male patients dying of then invariably fatal SBE.
More formally known as subacute bacterial endocarditis, SBE was the then common disease that made Rheumatic Fever the leading killer of the young.
So only October 16th (in between the two dying boys being registered for the Draft) and once again on October 17th 1940, Dr Dawson injected some of the team's hospital brewed penicillin into the two young men.
One was a young black star athlete , Aaron Leroy Alston born 1910 and residing on St Nicholas Avenue in Harlem and the other was a deathly-sick-all-his-life young Jewish man, Charles Aronson, born 1913 and residing on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx.
Next, the two young men got a much longer and and a much larger regime of oral Sulfa drugs.
Unexpectedly, the Sulfa worked on the sickly Aronson and he went home apparently cured, on a maintenance dose of Sulfa, in late December.
His cure held and he survived alright for three and a half years until another bout of SBE brought him back to Dawson.
This time Dawson had plenty of penicillin to cure SBE reliably and he did so again with Aronson.
Unfortunately, star athlete Alston did not respond to Sulfa drugs (more accurately his particular strain of SBE-causing Viridans Strep didn't respond) and Dawson started him again on a larger and longer regime of stronger injected penicillin on December 31st 1940.
He died mid-treatment in mid January 1941 and his tragically short sports career was celebrated and mourned by many sports fans across the city.
The penicillin brewed for him but not used was given to a third patient, a young middle class salesman in his thirties from upstate New York - Middletown to be precise ; his name George Milton Conant.
He got at least one course of Dawson's penicillin in late January.
He died on May 31st 1941 -nearly a month after Dawson gave a cautious report May 5th on his treatment of four SBE patients with penicillin , delivered before a huge convention of medical researchers at Atlantic City and given extraordinary wide coverage in the news media.
I (and even the team itself) know nothing of the fourth patient - but Dawson's May 5th report specifically says four were treated ( thus treated between between October 16th 1940 and late April 1941).
(It is is worth remarking, given the canonical status and wide circulation of this newspaper, that The New York Times' science correspondent William L Laurence (who wrote the famous eye-witness account of the first atomic explosion ,"Dawn Over Zero") reported the next day that he had heard Dawson saying that he had treated 4 patients suffering from SBE with his penicillin.)
As of the May 5th date, we know for sure that only one patient had definitely died but Dawson refused to crow about his small successes ---- or give specifics of just when the first injections were given and to how many patients.
Dawson later referred , in his 1944 JAMA article, to treating five SBE patients with early hospital brewed penicillin, of a potency not stated.
This allows us to assume that the fifth patient was probably treated very early in the Fall of 1941.
Because that was before Dawson had been introduced, after a visit from Norman Heatley, to the idea of calibrating the biological activity of penicillin by using Oxford units - as we still do to this day.
(The team seems to have stopped making penicillin during the high summer months because the temperature in the hospital, anywhere than in a bottom basement room, was far too high to successfully grow penicillium that would give off penicillin juice.)
Later he and his fellow team mates bacteriologist Dr Gladys Hobby and chemist Dr Karl Meyer would all give partially accurate and incomplete public accounts of those early (clearly non-dramatic) days - so who could blame the lay press or science historians for repeating their errors and adding some of their own ?
Yet, until this present article, even the barest of its bare facts have never been publicly reported accurately - not even by the three key team leaders that first performed them !
Here is how it went, based on cross-checking the various published report by the three team leaders against public records and newspaper accounts:
On October 15th 1940, after a hectic six weeks learning from scratch just where to find the right strain of penicillium and then how to coax the temperamental fungus to produce raw penicillin juice, the three key members of the tiny team at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre were finally ready.
The team leader (Nova Scotia born and raised Dr Martin Henry Dawson) would inject the penicillin into himself, a healthy volunteer, to test whether the never-before injected drug was dangerous to human life once in the bloodstream.
If he survived unharmed, the team planned to use the free time provided the next day by the university's registration of students and young staff in America's very first peacetime Draft to inject some penicillin into two young male patients dying of then invariably fatal SBE.
More formally known as subacute bacterial endocarditis, SBE was the then common disease that made Rheumatic Fever the leading killer of the young.
So only October 16th (in between the two dying boys being registered for the Draft) and once again on October 17th 1940, Dr Dawson injected some of the team's hospital brewed penicillin into the two young men.
One was a young black star athlete , Aaron Leroy Alston born 1910 and residing on St Nicholas Avenue in Harlem and the other was a deathly-sick-all-his-life young Jewish man, Charles Aronson, born 1913 and residing on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx.
Next, the two young men got a much longer and and a much larger regime of oral Sulfa drugs.
Unexpectedly, the Sulfa worked on the sickly Aronson and he went home apparently cured, on a maintenance dose of Sulfa, in late December.
His cure held and he survived alright for three and a half years until another bout of SBE brought him back to Dawson.
This time Dawson had plenty of penicillin to cure SBE reliably and he did so again with Aronson.
Unfortunately, star athlete Alston did not respond to Sulfa drugs (more accurately his particular strain of SBE-causing Viridans Strep didn't respond) and Dawson started him again on a larger and longer regime of stronger injected penicillin on December 31st 1940.
He died mid-treatment in mid January 1941 and his tragically short sports career was celebrated and mourned by many sports fans across the city.
The penicillin brewed for him but not used was given to a third patient, a young middle class salesman in his thirties from upstate New York - Middletown to be precise ; his name George Milton Conant.
He got at least one course of Dawson's penicillin in late January.
He died on May 31st 1941 -nearly a month after Dawson gave a cautious report May 5th on his treatment of four SBE patients with penicillin , delivered before a huge convention of medical researchers at Atlantic City and given extraordinary wide coverage in the news media.
I (and even the team itself) know nothing of the fourth patient - but Dawson's May 5th report specifically says four were treated ( thus treated between between October 16th 1940 and late April 1941).
(It is is worth remarking, given the canonical status and wide circulation of this newspaper, that The New York Times' science correspondent William L Laurence (who wrote the famous eye-witness account of the first atomic explosion ,"Dawn Over Zero") reported the next day that he had heard Dawson saying that he had treated 4 patients suffering from SBE with his penicillin.)
As of the May 5th date, we know for sure that only one patient had definitely died but Dawson refused to crow about his small successes ---- or give specifics of just when the first injections were given and to how many patients.
Dawson later referred , in his 1944 JAMA article, to treating five SBE patients with early hospital brewed penicillin, of a potency not stated.
This allows us to assume that the fifth patient was probably treated very early in the Fall of 1941.
Because that was before Dawson had been introduced, after a visit from Norman Heatley, to the idea of calibrating the biological activity of penicillin by using Oxford units - as we still do to this day.
(The team seems to have stopped making penicillin during the high summer months because the temperature in the hospital, anywhere than in a bottom basement room, was far too high to successfully grow penicillium that would give off penicillin juice.)
Later he and his fellow team mates bacteriologist Dr Gladys Hobby and chemist Dr Karl Meyer would all give partially accurate and incomplete public accounts of those early (clearly non-dramatic) days - so who could blame the lay press or science historians for repeating their errors and adding some of their own ?
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
First antibiotic penicillin patient : when did we learn his name?
How do we know what we know ?
I am very confident that the very first patient of the Antibiotic Era was a young black man named Aaron (Leroy) Alston and that he lived on St Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, New York City.
But when I was asked recently by one of Aaron's relatives (journalist Claude Jay) to demonstrate my proof, I was momentarily nonplussed.
That was when because I initially came across the statement that Aaron was the first systemic penicillin (penicillin-the-antibiotic) patient in history in early 2005, it was in about a dozen different books, all read at the exactly the same time.
(People who know what a bookworm I am, will not find that last statement at all incredible !)
I gradually assembled more information about that historic event and on Aaron himself , from scattered bits of evidence here and there - material I realized had never been assembled into a coherent and self-confirming whole.
My biggest breakthrough - discovering Aaron's death certificate - was quickly followed by my second biggest breakthrough , discovering Claude Jay himself.
That is because, outside of his medical records, Aaron was generally known to the world as Leroy, or more formally, as A. Leroy Alston.
Aaron Leroy Alston was a superb athlete -- not just someone who died to furnish a footnote to someone else's story
I had held a strong clue that could have led me/ should have led me to Leroy years earlier.
But I discounted the evidence : that an A. Alston had won some very big amateur races in the NYC area.
I mistakingly assumed that anyone who had had acute rheumatic fever leading to severe heart valve damage, as Leroy/Aaron had to have had, couldn't possibly go on to be a top runner.
Now that I knew Aaron was also a Leroy Alston or an A. Leroy Alston and a great athlete to boot, I quickly found a good deal more about Leroy from newspapers of the day.
So I spent last week trolling through my files and the books on penicillin and rheumatic heart disease at Dalhousie University's medical library, trying to establish a timeline as to when the world first knew that Aaron was Patient One of the penicillin-the-antibiotic era.
I found nothing that named Aaron in the books and medical reports and newspapers of the war years.
NY World-Telegram first to get it (partially) right
But on the premature death of Aaron's penicillin doctor Martin Henry Dawson in April 1945, one New York newspaper, the World-Telegram, did correctly mention that his first penicillin patient was a Negro, as well as claiming that Dawson was the first to treat a patient with penicillin in the USA.
But the story not only does not name that patient, it confuses his story with that of the other first penicillin patient of Dawson's, Charles Aronson !
(Yes, Aaron was the first patient selected to receive systemic penicillin, but as the fates would have it, on the day he first received it, a new fellow sufferer (Charles) also got it at the very same time.)
The story describes Aaron as being 27 and being cured - that age and fate correctly belongs to Charles because sadly Aaron died despite the penicillin.
Now Dawson and his closest fellow worker, his lab chief Dr Gladys Hobby, were modest to the point of giving me a stroke.
The pair knew, when they initially read Howard Florey's August 1941 article on his team's first clinical use of systemic penicillin in February 1941, that Dawson's team had beat him by four months in first using penicillin systemically.
But maddeningly, they still modestly claimed only to be the first to do so in North America , in any newspaper interviews or medical articles published during the war years.
Hobby, I sense, had no great memory.
This is because already by 1949 (only 8 years later) and after consulting her own personal records (!), Hobby writing in a report for her then employer, Pfizer, says the first injection only happened on January 11th in 1941 !
Reading her later - more accurate - accounting, I can only suggest that in 1949 she meant to say that January 11th marked the first day of intravenous injections.
This after a series, in the months earlier, of first intracutaneous injections, then sub -cutaneous and then intramuscular injections.
(As doctors will know, there are actually dozens of different forms of medical injections - varying by both site and method.)
Hobby went to her grave also convinced that Dawson gave the first penicillin shots on October 15th 1940 - a statement she repeatedly gave to fellow penicillin historians who dutifully spread it far and wide.
I don't believe it --- and neither should you.
For nowhere in her ultimately relatively detailed chronological account of the first days of penicillin-the-antibiotic does she indicate when the totally new drug was first tested on a healthy volunteer before being injected into the two severely ill patients for real.
Even in the relatively relaxed medical research atmosphere of the 1940s, that would never have happened.
Durack and Bentley provide more clues
Let us turn first to a little known medical paper by Dr David T Durack, who based his article in part on a personal conversation with the biochemist of Dawson's tiny four person team, a person moreover who started Columbia's pioneering penicillin effort even before Dawson joined it.
Around 1980, Durack contacted that biochemist Karl Meyer, a distinguished scientist then in his early fifties and in full control of his faculties and memory.
(Durack's article was published before Hobby published her definitive 1986 book on penicillin but was never mentioned by Hobby - signalling to me that Hobby and Meyer were hardly close after Dawson's death.)
Durack's article, "Review of Early Experience in treatment of bacterial Endocarditis, 1940-1955", I found in the book "Treatment of Infectious Endocarditis", edited by Alan L Bisno.
Meyer's story at first seemed incredible to me, but as I gathered up more information here and there, it was confirmed by an article by Ronald Bentley at various key points.
Meyer had gone to a Berlin medical school with his fellow (German) (Jewish) student Ernst Chain and I believe had taken a mild dislike to him, something very easy to do with the mercurial Chain.
Now in September 1940 he had learned (directly via Chain's former graduate student, Jewish American Leslie Epstein*) that Chain was taking credit for important work first done by Meyer on Lysozyme and that he was now trying to synthesize penicillin.
*Read Bentley's fascinating account of Leslie Epstein Falk struggling with Chain to grow a little penicillin in the Fall and Spring of 1939-1940 and when Epstein is ordered out of Oxford only months before finishing his PhD, how he completes it partly thanks to a stay with Meyer at Columbia.
For both Chain and Meyer, I believe an elbows- out attitude, even against fellow German Jewish emigre scientists, was morally right in 1940.
Both knew that if they didn't prove themselves quickly to be top scientists in some way, they would end up interned by the German-and-Jew-distrusting Anglo-Saxon government elites, stuck in miserable prison camps along side Nazi Germans.
Meyer and Chain both thought synthesizing a small (350 Dalton weight) molecule like penicillin would be a breeze.
Meyer simply involved Dawson to do the early biological activity tests and then to do the much later clinical trials, after the drug had been synthesized.
Dawson jumped Meyer's gun, insisting on testing the drug's efficacy inside the human body long before it was synthesized.
Why?
Partly to save the lives of two young men before him who he thought were being discarded by a medical establishment using the excuse that they were gearing up for total war.
Partly to secure Meyer's flank, because the biochemist was working after all in a hospital, a workplace oriented strongly to instantly applied science, not in a more leisurely basic research lab.
So Meyer tells Durack, on October 15th 1940, penicillin was indeed injected for the very first time, as Hobby (and all those after her) claimed.
But not injected into a patient.
Injected instead by Dawson into Dawson acting as the human guinea pig to test it for human toxicity - Dawson believing it was better that he the doctor died than the patient doing so.
(Entirely typical of the decorated war hero Dawson, as was entirely typical the decision of war shirker Sir Howard Florey not to risk his 'valuable' life testing his penicillin on himself !)
But Durack reports (indirectly - no names are used) that Dawson only injected Charles Alston, not on Charles and Aaron.
This could be because he also interviewed Dr Thomas T Hunter.
Hunter was a later member of Dawson's team, who never met Aaron but who did meet Charles many, many times.
He first met him in the Spring of 1944 when he came back with a second attack of endocarditis and was cured by Dawson yet again, this time by penicillin alone instead of with a little penicillin and a lot of sulfa drugs.
Hunter did further checkups on the health of Charles until early 1946 at least - so his story naturally stuck in Hunter's mind years later.
Hobby was not on the team - but still in close touch - when Charles returned in the Spring of 1944 - maybe why she remembered him much less.
This raises a significant point - why do almost all writers choose to mention just Aaron or just Charles instead mentioning both ?
Penicillin writers and their hidden agendas
Because most writers have a not so hidden agenda.
(Mine is that I think Dawson got a raw deal from history for his pioneering HGT and Penicillin work.)
To date, most others writing about wartime penicillin have sought, above all else, to exalt Howard Florey over the man who they feel wrongly gets the credit for penicillin-the-antibiotic, Sir Alexander Fleming.
They are equally worried that the real credit should not slip off of Fleming's mantle only to fall onto that of the colonial Henry Dawson.
Like Florey, and unlike Dawson and Hobby , they realize Dawson was the first to ever give a needle of penicillin-the-antibiotic and hence it was he who ushered in our Age of Antibiotics.
Further they know that Dawson championed natural penicillin (and it is worth noting that most of our current antibiotics are still based on the original natural penicillin), to be made by Pfizer and others.
Florey and Fleming, by pointed contrast, strongly championed synthetic penicillin, to be made by ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) and others.
ICI never made a single commercial drop of the synthetic stuff - no one ever has - and 80% of all the penicillin landed on D-Day and there after came from Pfizer alone.
Seemingly hard then not give Dawson the lion's share of the wartime penicillin glory - but it can be done, if you work at it.
So these agenda-driven writers dutifully note, in almost footnote fashion, that Dawson indeed gave history' first (very small) penicillin injection.
They then decide to focus on just one of the two initial patients (Aaron), the one that died.
Next they note that Dawson quickly got Myasthenia Gravis and that he also died.
All half truths, but enough truth in them so they feel they needn't cover his four further years* of clinical penicillin activities between April 1941 and April 1945.
*Dawson had much, much longer period of clinical involvement with wartime penicillin than did either Florey or Fleming.
Hunter and Durack, by contrast, want to see Dawson's first medical glass as half full.
So they focus on Charles (the other one of the original pair, the one who lived) as the first patient to ever receive penicillin.
Someone, they imply, as a result went on to survive a hitherto invariably fatal disease.
The truth is that two low status young men - one a black and another a Jew - got history's first penicillin shots basically out of the agape concern of a doctor who wasn't even their lead doctor or a specialist in their disease.
One patient, Aaron, was extensively treated with penicillin but still died, while the other patient Charles was responsive to sulfa (unlike Aaron) and lived.
The little penicillin Charles got had almost no effect clinically but it sure boosted his morale and that might have helped save him as much as the massive sulfa doses.
Bickel to the rescue
Now we move ahead in time to about 1970, when Australian write Lennard Bickel decides to write a biography* of Australian born penicillin pioneer Sir Howard Florey, who had just died in 1968.
"Rise up to Life", first published in 1972.
He interviews anyone who he can find who was there at the time to talk about wartime penicillin, tracking down people in America, Britain and Australia.
Many buried names and stories only survive today because of his fine journalistic efforts.
Bickel wanted to exalt his fellow countryman of that there is no doubt, but he did not wish to bury Dawson - in fact he exhumed him from the grave of human forgetfulness.
I do not believe that Hobby would have even written her seminal account of wartime penicillin without Bickel .
His book and the reaction to it, finally convinced her, almost 25 years after the fact, that Dawson had indeed been the first in the world to inject systemic penicillin and hence held a story worth recalling.
Because we know she told Bickel in circa 1970 interviews for his book that she was still convinced that Dawson was merely the first to treat patients in the USA alone with penicillin.
And she - citing her notes - claimed he had treated only one patient on that historic day, which she said was October 15th 1940 - and that the patient died.
But at least and finally, she brought forth his name : Aaron Alston.
And she talks forthrightly about Dawson's fatal Myasthenia Gravis.
But she - and Bickel - make it clear that if he worked less as a result of this crippling disease, he still worked full out on penicillin till his death in the spring of 1945.
Since Bickel became the key - almost primary source level - "go to source" for most of the academic accounts of wartime penicillin, it is remarkable how this clear statement of his four more years of penicillin activities could be so twisted and ignored.
Flash forward to 1985, Hobby has retired after a modestly successful paid career working at at Pfizer on new antibiotics and a Veterans' hospital working on TB and a more successful volunteer career as a editor of various scientific society journals.
She has gotten to know everybody who was anybody in early penicillin in both North America and in Britain.
Yale University* Press, her publisher was admirably demanding and so Hobby trolled deep to firm up her claims - even consulting a Miss Louise Good for her lab records of the early use of Dawson's penicillin.
If only Yale was as demanding upon its own staff, who persist in claiming that their University was the first place to use penicillin in America.
Dawson was their first and was also the first to see cures with local (topical) use of penicillin to treat staph eye infections.
But Yale can rightfully claim a first, for inn March-April 1942, they successfully treated a case and saved a life with the systemic use of penicillin alone.
Charles Aronson's life was saved too, and much earlier - in December 1940 - but by lots of sulfa and perhaps a little contribution from pioneering penicillin.
Good's work
Good seems to be the sole source in Hobby's 1985 book "Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge" of Hobby's new information on Aaron and on who she calls Charles Aronson, his fellow needle pioneer on October 16th and 17th 1940.
Now I could reliably confirm the relatively detailed information on patient C.A. found in Dawson and Hunter's 1945 JAMA article on their clinically successful use of systemic penicillin in curing subacute bacterial endocarditis.
Dawson and Hunter's C.A. had to be Good and Hobby's Charles Aronson, born in 1913 and thus highly likely to be a young Jewish-American man with that name from the Bronx found in the 1940 US Census.
Similarly, it seemed clear from Good's information that Aaron had died in the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, in the Borough of Manhattan, in the days around January 18th 1941.
So I could then overcome a problem unique to the New York City death certificate of that era.
They are easy to obtain and quite detailed - but do not give the cause of death, unlike those of most other jurisdictions - that information is given to the city government alone in another document.
So in a city that big, and when one seeks someone with an ethnically common name, one needs the borough the death was registered in and the exact day of death to safely match death certificate of a particular Aaron Alston with the unique penicillin/endocarditis Aaron Alston.
Thanks to Claude, I could now find newspaper accounts of Aaron Leroy Alston getting sick and then dying in the time periods that Hobby and Good address - both sets of data confirming each other.
So there you have it - Aaron Alston , the very first to receive penicillin-the-antibiotic is never directly named in any of a dozen or so clinical medical articles published during or just after the war years at the time that do reference him but indirectly.
His name and his connection to the first ever use of penicillin-the-antibiotic is mentioned in dozens of more recent medical history oriented academic articles, all dating after Bickel's pioneering book of 1972.
In addition, Aaron's story is mentioned in least one wire service story from Warren Leary, the AP science reporter.
In early October 1978, Leary reported that the longstanding belief that the British had been the first to inject penicillin into a patient was wrong.
Leary based his claim on a recent report in the Journal Chemistry from Dr George Kauffman that talked of Dawson's pioneering work.
One suspects Kauffman in turn had recently read Bickel's new book !
Aaron's story is still distorted
Gladys Hobby's penicillin book is probably found in every first class medical research library in the world and she gives the most detail about Aaron Alston - my blog aside.
Problems persist : author and wartime penicillin pioneer John C Sheehan, in a MIT Press* published book, "The Enchanted Ring" , confusingly thinks Aaron Alston is the doctor giving that very first needle to some unnamed patient.
He even regards Dawson's team, operating in the same hospital, as totally separate from 'Dr Alston' and his team !
*New Yorker magazine stories are throughly fact-checked, scientific journal articles a little, university press books by distinguished scholars from the same university as is publishing their book ? Not so much.
Okay, now for the biggest and serious problem : the near universal inclination for all sorts of researchers, even historians who really should know better, to read into Dawson's 1941 claim that he treated four SBE patients with penicillin all unsuccessfully, as meaning they all died.
Yes, SBE was then 99% fatal on its first presentation, but Charles Aronson was in that 1%, cured by sulfa, a little penicillin, God's grace and his own documented ability to survive more lives than a cat.
I know for certain the names of three of Dawson's first five SBE patients, that they were all five clinical failures re treatment with penicillin, that two Aaron Leroy Alston and George M Conant) died for sure, one lived for sure (Charles Aronson).
The other two I know nothing about, except that they were likely young men from the greater NYC area and that their likely months of admission were April 1941 and October 1941.
All the team members that treated them are dead and the hospital records from that time destroyed - we will likely never know more unless some family member remembers a relative dying of SBE around those dates at Columbia Presbyterian.
We have good information on the two dozen later SBEs that Dawson subsequently treated - but only have three full names provided by Hobby's book all which have so far produced dead ends.
What we need most for Aaaron is a picture of him.
I recall much of the fifty year mystery of blue singer Robert Johnson wasn't lack of reliable data about his life, but rather a lack of an ability to put a human face on a terribly interesting individual.
I feel the same about the fascinating Aaron Leroy Alston 1910-1941...
Monday, October 20, 2014
Gotham's hunky comicbook super-heroes written and drawn by 97 lb Jewish weaklings and a 4F Negro with a bad heart
Forgotten black comic book pioneer Matt Baker, Harlem artist 1921-1959
In 1940 Gotham City (and in the rest of America and the world) , if we can judge by the popularity of certain new super-heroes, moral strength seemed to be equated with physical strength.
Perfect morals requiring a perfect body.
Unfits need not apply to be super-heroes or indeed any kind of hero - moral or physical.
Ironic then if we look deep behind the colourful covers of Gotham's Golden Age of Comics because there we see them mostly written and drawn by weedy Jewish kids from poverty row , along with at least black artist with a bad heart, Matt Baker.
Clarence Matthew Baker was born down South in December 1921 and suffered a bad childhood attack from "the polio of the poor" (Rheumatic Fever) which permanently weakened his heart valves.
Probably told not to play strenuous sports , he learned to love to draw and after high school came to New York to learn art skills at the famous Cooper Union and freelance as an illustrator.
His forte was extremely gorgeous women (and hunky good looking men !) and he soon found enough work to keep him fed and housed.
No comic book artist got well paid or published credits in those days, so he doesn't seem to have suffered any worse in his art career than his white friends and competitors.
(Baker lived at 103 E 116th Street in Harlem.)
Like athlete and coach Aaron Leroy Alston, Baker's story is another case of what might have been, if only his heart condition could have been prevented or cured so he could have lived longer.
Tragically he died, aged only 37, in 1959 -- well before comic book artists found world fame.
His return to partial fame is based on the fact he was the pencil artist for a pioneering graphic novel, "IT RHYMES WITH LUST".
This in turn led to a fuller examination of his total work and to ask - were there other pioneering black comic book artists out there being overlooked ?
But let me state as gently as possible that whether as white protestant or Jew or black, all these comic book artists of the 1940s only got work if they played ball within the social conventions of the day.
That meant no weedy Jew or weak-hearted black (or weedy weak hearted white) was going to be seen in these comic books defeating criminals and Nazis.
So even when non-Aryan hunks took on blond beast Aryan hunks - the Aryans lost the resulting physical battle but won the real (intellectual) battle : their claim that only the physically fit were morally fit.
By way of contrast, in 1940 Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson tried to save weak-hearted Alston's life and would have tried to save Baker's as well (if he had gotten sick in his early twenties instead of his late thirties.)
Dawson saw the 'unfit' as worthy of a full life and worthy of being allowed to do great moral deeds.
He saw potential moral super-heroes everywhere - in the physically fit and in the physically challenged ....
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Updating J D Ratcliff's wartime penicillin classic, YELLOW MAGIC
I like to think that my "UN-SUPER HEROES" is an 21st century updating of JD (John Drury) Ratcliff's written-to-order 1945 popular science classic "YELLOW MAGIC" .
Ratcliff wrote the facts as truthfully he knew them in 1945 (or was told about them by the few penicillin participants he was able to contact firsthand).
Since late 1941, Penicillin had been surrounded by an ever more effective wall of wartime censorship all over the Allied world.
This allowed anyone involved in wartime penicillin's development to spin their own take to Ratcliff, without fear Ratcliff would have any access to paper documents to query their oral account.
Since 1945 , many of the paper documents have been archived or made public via scholarly articles and books.
But no one has since tried to do with the dramatic tale of wartime penicillin what Ratcliff ( following somewhat upon Paul de Kruif's style) did so well in his little volume.
JD could make any Science story come alive simply by re-telling it in a series of dramatic scenes.
And by freely adding his purple imaginings whenever his participants' eye witness accounts of specific incidents failed to actually recall much color or specifics.
Remember - unlike with the contemporary workings out of atomic energy and atomic bombs - no participants in this particular medical story had any sense - until mid 1943 - that they were making world-shaking history instead of just making penicillin.
So the drama and the little personal details were generally liberally 'recalled' later - after penicillin had become world famous - rather than being accurately recorded at the time.
So we only know the distinctive smell of wartime (crude) penicillin because an otherwise ordinary 1945 war nurse recounts the smell , in passing , in her much later memoir of combat hospital experiences.
Like all writers and historians, JD had to first hear all and read all of the varying accounts about wartime penicillin and then insert his reasoned opinion as to which composite account was mostly likely to be correct.
I can't tell you what SBE patients Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson felt like on October 16 1940 - but I can and will tell you how SBE patients their age tended to act at that stage in their disease.
The same with the smell of Dawson's crude penicillin as that first historic ampoule was broken ---- I'll have to use that wartime combat nurse's description - his penicillin , being much cruder, could only have smelt worse.
I do not know how the specific ward nurses looking after Aronson and Alston on October 16th 1940 felt about a new medicine that smelt like a return to dirty dank moldy old basements.
But we do know lots about the house-proud nurses of the 1940s , in the days before handling high tech machines replaced pails and mops in the priority list of nurse training !
I won't invent speech inside quote marks - if it is inside quote marks, it will only be there because it is a direct quote from a contemporary document.
Instead I will use a lot of an old fashioned form of free indirect speech - something quite common until the 20th century , when authors were strongly discouraged from commenting inside their own works .
I will freely intermingle my comments (my opinions) in a sound alike version of those particular participants' voice, as I try to imagine what typical participants of their age, nationality, class, gender etc would likely say at that place and point in time.
I call my book a drama in five acts - so dramatizing each scene really isn't much of a stretch ....
Ratcliff wrote the facts as truthfully he knew them in 1945 (or was told about them by the few penicillin participants he was able to contact firsthand).
Since late 1941, Penicillin had been surrounded by an ever more effective wall of wartime censorship all over the Allied world.
This allowed anyone involved in wartime penicillin's development to spin their own take to Ratcliff, without fear Ratcliff would have any access to paper documents to query their oral account.
Since 1945 , many of the paper documents have been archived or made public via scholarly articles and books.
But no one has since tried to do with the dramatic tale of wartime penicillin what Ratcliff ( following somewhat upon Paul de Kruif's style) did so well in his little volume.
JD could make any Science story come alive simply by re-telling it in a series of dramatic scenes.
And by freely adding his purple imaginings whenever his participants' eye witness accounts of specific incidents failed to actually recall much color or specifics.
Remember - unlike with the contemporary workings out of atomic energy and atomic bombs - no participants in this particular medical story had any sense - until mid 1943 - that they were making world-shaking history instead of just making penicillin.
So the drama and the little personal details were generally liberally 'recalled' later - after penicillin had become world famous - rather than being accurately recorded at the time.
So we only know the distinctive smell of wartime (crude) penicillin because an otherwise ordinary 1945 war nurse recounts the smell , in passing , in her much later memoir of combat hospital experiences.
Like all writers and historians, JD had to first hear all and read all of the varying accounts about wartime penicillin and then insert his reasoned opinion as to which composite account was mostly likely to be correct.
I can't tell you what SBE patients Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson felt like on October 16 1940 - but I can and will tell you how SBE patients their age tended to act at that stage in their disease.
The same with the smell of Dawson's crude penicillin as that first historic ampoule was broken ---- I'll have to use that wartime combat nurse's description - his penicillin , being much cruder, could only have smelt worse.
I do not know how the specific ward nurses looking after Aronson and Alston on October 16th 1940 felt about a new medicine that smelt like a return to dirty dank moldy old basements.
But we do know lots about the house-proud nurses of the 1940s , in the days before handling high tech machines replaced pails and mops in the priority list of nurse training !
I won't invent speech inside quote marks - if it is inside quote marks, it will only be there because it is a direct quote from a contemporary document.
Instead I will use a lot of an old fashioned form of free indirect speech - something quite common until the 20th century , when authors were strongly discouraged from commenting inside their own works .
I will freely intermingle my comments (my opinions) in a sound alike version of those particular participants' voice, as I try to imagine what typical participants of their age, nationality, class, gender etc would likely say at that place and point in time.
I call my book a drama in five acts - so dramatizing each scene really isn't much of a stretch ....
Saturday, October 4, 2014
October 16 1940 : the Eyes of History focus in on a small hospital room on the nearly deserted Columbia University campus
Global contemporary opinion (and global contemporary journalism) was unanimous : the most important event in the world on October 16 1940 was Registration Day for America's first ever peacetime draft.
A world at war (Allied, Axis and Neutral) was momentarily united in wanting to know two things and two things only.
After the deprivation of the decade-long Great Depression and all the American university anti-war protests , were the young men of the world's greatest power able to fight and were they willing to fight ?
The fate of the world literally hung in the balance.
So all contemporary eyes were on the registration of America's potential A1 males.
But the Eyes of History, distilling events through the long glass tubes of time and sober second thoughts , may differ from global contemporary opinion , even when that global opinion was as united as it was on October 16 1940.
Because history - 75 years on - is agreed that a rare world-changing event actually did happen in America on October 16 1940 but it wasn't the coming of the Draft.
Instead it all happened, unnoticed at the time , in a small hospital room on the medical campus of New York City's Columbia University.
Despite the fact that almost all assumed that both in that hospital room would shortly be dead from then invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis , the young black man (Aaron Leroy Alston) and the Jewish youth (Charles Aronson) had been earlier been dutifully registered by a selective service team specially assigned to hospital patients.
Clearly these two were not just 4F , but 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs'.
But one man - Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson - didn't assume their death was inevitable.
He hoped to have them both up and around and turning up for their selective service medical exam when called.
The engine of his hopes lay in a small hypodermic needle in his hand.
By his own admission his medicine was new, untested, crude.
To the sceptical nurses watching in the corridor, it was also as dirty as rust and smelt like a moldy old damp basement.
Their response was natural - successful 1940 nursing was less about high tech machines and more about extreme cleanliness.
The nurses in the corridor couldn't believe that Dr Dawson was actually thinking of injecting something so dirty and foul smelling into the temple of the human body.
But he was - and he did.
And with that needle sliding into the young mens' arm began the Age of Antibiotics - because that crude moldy powder was penicillin, made - as the nurses suspected - from a mold of the penicillium family .
This was the first time ever that penicillin (available for a dozen years as a lab clearing agent) was given its proper - real job - lifesaving.
Thanks partly to that October 16 1940 penicillin shot, Charles Aronson went on to beat his endocarditis death sentence.
A small Brooklyn supplier to the soda pop industry (Pfizer !) got inspired by Dawson's success with penicillin and went on not just to produce most of WWII's penicillin but also to develop the biological production techniques that still used to produce most of today's antibiotics.
All of this was reported in a seminal book (Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge) by a women scientist (Dr Gladys L Hobby) who was not merely a close participant at many of the seminal events of the entire Age of Antibiotics but who was part of the tiny team that day in that small hospital room.
She confirmed her memories by consulting hospital records that have since been destroyed and she too has since died.
It has been possible to trace relatives of Aaron Alston but the sole survivor of the pair, Charles Aronson, has slipped from the grasp of historians.
The best hope we have of learning more about this Patient Zero of our Age of Antibiotics is - ironically enough - in those registration records complied by the Selective Service personnel and now held in the US government archives in St Louis.
So in the end, in a surprisingly satisfying way - both stories (Draft and Penicillin) come together to a happy conclusion...
A world at war (Allied, Axis and Neutral) was momentarily united in wanting to know two things and two things only.
After the deprivation of the decade-long Great Depression and all the American university anti-war protests , were the young men of the world's greatest power able to fight and were they willing to fight ?
The fate of the world literally hung in the balance.
So all contemporary eyes were on the registration of America's potential A1 males.
But the Eyes of History, distilling events through the long glass tubes of time and sober second thoughts , may differ from global contemporary opinion , even when that global opinion was as united as it was on October 16 1940.
Because history - 75 years on - is agreed that a rare world-changing event actually did happen in America on October 16 1940 but it wasn't the coming of the Draft.
Instead it all happened, unnoticed at the time , in a small hospital room on the medical campus of New York City's Columbia University.
Despite the fact that almost all assumed that both in that hospital room would shortly be dead from then invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis , the young black man (Aaron Leroy Alston) and the Jewish youth (Charles Aronson) had been earlier been dutifully registered by a selective service team specially assigned to hospital patients.
Clearly these two were not just 4F , but 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs'.
But one man - Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson - didn't assume their death was inevitable.
He hoped to have them both up and around and turning up for their selective service medical exam when called.
The engine of his hopes lay in a small hypodermic needle in his hand.
By his own admission his medicine was new, untested, crude.
To the sceptical nurses watching in the corridor, it was also as dirty as rust and smelt like a moldy old damp basement.
Their response was natural - successful 1940 nursing was less about high tech machines and more about extreme cleanliness.
The nurses in the corridor couldn't believe that Dr Dawson was actually thinking of injecting something so dirty and foul smelling into the temple of the human body.
But he was - and he did.
And with that needle sliding into the young mens' arm began the Age of Antibiotics - because that crude moldy powder was penicillin, made - as the nurses suspected - from a mold of the penicillium family .
This was the first time ever that penicillin (available for a dozen years as a lab clearing agent) was given its proper - real job - lifesaving.
Thanks partly to that October 16 1940 penicillin shot, Charles Aronson went on to beat his endocarditis death sentence.
A small Brooklyn supplier to the soda pop industry (Pfizer !) got inspired by Dawson's success with penicillin and went on not just to produce most of WWII's penicillin but also to develop the biological production techniques that still used to produce most of today's antibiotics.
All of this was reported in a seminal book (Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge) by a women scientist (Dr Gladys L Hobby) who was not merely a close participant at many of the seminal events of the entire Age of Antibiotics but who was part of the tiny team that day in that small hospital room.
She confirmed her memories by consulting hospital records that have since been destroyed and she too has since died.
It has been possible to trace relatives of Aaron Alston but the sole survivor of the pair, Charles Aronson, has slipped from the grasp of historians.
The best hope we have of learning more about this Patient Zero of our Age of Antibiotics is - ironically enough - in those registration records complied by the Selective Service personnel and now held in the US government archives in St Louis.
So in the end, in a surprisingly satisfying way - both stories (Draft and Penicillin) come together to a happy conclusion...
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
'There's just something about a Mercury ' : how the potential of a young black man kickstarted penicillin and has benefitted ten billion of us ever since
Can we still - 75 years on - get some sense of the personality of the very first person in history to get an antibiotics injection ?
Fortunately , yes.
But why then should we even care ?
Because, children , just because.
Because the normally reserved doctor who kickstarted natural lifesaving penicillin-for-all (the medical approach that has benefited about ten billion of us since 1940) personally wrote and told Nobel winning Ernst Chain that this patient's personality and potential had directly inspired him to take up his penicillin crusade.
When the personality of a young black man inspired medicine's biggest ever paradigm shift, an event that saved my life and that of many in my family, of course I want to know all I can about this wonderful person.
And if you have ever had a family member saved by antibiotics and if you have even an ounce of gratitude within you, so should you.
So here is a long "letter to the editor" that A. (Aaron) Leroy Alston wrote , addressed to the black-oriented New York Age newspaper in early April 1939.
That is just 18 months before he received that historic first ever needle.
And it allows us to learn something of the patient who inspired a doctor to change our whole world for the better , forever .
Aaron, a young black man with a high school graduation certificate , held a good day job in an insurance company at the height of the Great Depression.
This is quite impressive because the Depression was a tragic event for most Americans but certainly hit black Harlem extra extra hard.
He was also a winning track star who then founded the Mercury Athletic Club.
The club, with him as coach, manager, pr rep and fundraiser , focused on seeing that Harlem's black female runners finally got a chance to compete in the big races.
They did very well, as he says in this letter to the editor - for the first time black girls were being judged as the best runners in America in various categories.
Who knows what further good young Aaron might have done if only Alexander Fleming had tried harder, earlier, to see to it that penicillin become a real lifesaver.
True, (Martin) Henry Dawson in October 1940 did kickstart the process to make penicillin into a cheap abundant lifesaver that was available to all .
But though Dawson was inspired to do so by seeing all of young Alston's great potential going with him if he should die, Dawson had made too little penicillin - at that time - to save Aaron.
So young Aaron died. But he was not a victim or a loser.
He had already done a lot.
And I sincerely believe that for all the good he might have gone on to do over a long life, if he hadn't contracted invariably fatal SBE endocarditis, it would never have matched what he did do as a dying patient.
For when his buoyant-personality-in-the-face-of-imminent-death met a doctor looking for a way to help retain social values in the middle of a big war, our whole world started to change for the better.
Who among us - including the fictional trio of Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm - can claim that great honour ?
Fortunately , yes.
But why then should we even care ?
Because, children , just because.
Because the normally reserved doctor who kickstarted natural lifesaving penicillin-for-all (the medical approach that has benefited about ten billion of us since 1940) personally wrote and told Nobel winning Ernst Chain that this patient's personality and potential had directly inspired him to take up his penicillin crusade.
When the personality of a young black man inspired medicine's biggest ever paradigm shift, an event that saved my life and that of many in my family, of course I want to know all I can about this wonderful person.
And if you have ever had a family member saved by antibiotics and if you have even an ounce of gratitude within you, so should you.
So here is a long "letter to the editor" that A. (Aaron) Leroy Alston wrote , addressed to the black-oriented New York Age newspaper in early April 1939.
That is just 18 months before he received that historic first ever needle.
And it allows us to learn something of the patient who inspired a doctor to change our whole world for the better , forever .
Words of first patient in history to get an antibiotics injection
This is quite impressive because the Depression was a tragic event for most Americans but certainly hit black Harlem extra extra hard.
He was also a winning track star who then founded the Mercury Athletic Club.
The club, with him as coach, manager, pr rep and fundraiser , focused on seeing that Harlem's black female runners finally got a chance to compete in the big races.
They did very well, as he says in this letter to the editor - for the first time black girls were being judged as the best runners in America in various categories.
Who knows what further good young Aaron might have done if only Alexander Fleming had tried harder, earlier, to see to it that penicillin become a real lifesaver.
True, (Martin) Henry Dawson in October 1940 did kickstart the process to make penicillin into a cheap abundant lifesaver that was available to all .
But though Dawson was inspired to do so by seeing all of young Alston's great potential going with him if he should die, Dawson had made too little penicillin - at that time - to save Aaron.
So young Aaron died. But he was not a victim or a loser.
He had already done a lot.
And I sincerely believe that for all the good he might have gone on to do over a long life, if he hadn't contracted invariably fatal SBE endocarditis, it would never have matched what he did do as a dying patient.
For when his buoyant-personality-in-the-face-of-imminent-death met a doctor looking for a way to help retain social values in the middle of a big war, our whole world started to change for the better.
Who among us - including the fictional trio of Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm - can claim that great honour ?
Monday, August 11, 2014
First patient to get a penicillin shot , Harlem's Aaron Leroy Alston , possibly not a widower.
Census information on individuals is always useful but bring along a couple grains of salt.
A possible case in point is whether or not history's first antibiotics patient, Harlem's Aaron Leroy Alston, was or was not a widower - as reported by his mother on his January 1941 death certificate.
After all there was no indication he had ever been married let alone widowed on the April 1940 census - where he was simply known as Leroy Alston - the name family and friends called him.
His nephew Claude Jay told me he does not recall any in the extended Glaze family mentioning that Leroy was ever married widowed or separated.
But the 1930 census tells a different story.
Born in Rockhill South Carolina in 1910 , Leroy had arrived in Harlem in 1923, an only child, with his mother mother Louise (Glaze) Alston and his father William "Stock" Alston and his cousin Reginald Daniels, about his same age.
They then opened a restaurant at the corner of 8th Avenue and 148th Street.
By 1930, Aaron and his mother are living in different apartments in Harlem.
Louise is reported as a widow - and a check of the indexed NYC death certificates does show a death of a William Alston on March 12 1924 , at the very young age of age 36.
She is described as a waitress working in a tea shop and earning an appallingly low annual income.
A. Leroy Alston, which was the preferred way that Leroy liked to call himself in print, in 1930 is shown as married to a Charlotte L Alston.
It indicated both married two years earlier at 18 , on completing High School.
She is a homemaker and Leroy has a good job - a clerk in a NY Underwriters office ( fire insurance) .
A check of the indexed death certificates finds no dead Charlotte Alston in all NYC up to the end of 1948 - period.
Instead in 1940 , the census shows a Charlotte L (L for maiden name Lee ?) Alston, living in Harlem as a daughter to Julia Lee and her age and birth state is the same as indicated in 1930.
Now it is true that census returns , until recently, almost never used the words separated, deserted , divorced or common law.
My partner's own father's parents both remarried without getting an (expensive / public) divorce first and continued to live very close to each other in rural Nova Scotia!
Older family adults probably knew and small children - and the authorites - were never set wise.
If the couple separated and both returned home to live with mother , it wasn't for lack of jobs during the terrible Great Depression which destroyed so many families in Harlem.
Leroy kept his good job and worked it a full 52 weeks in 1939.
Many breadwinners then , white and black , had only intermittent work even when employed.
It is mystery , either way this widowed/married or not issue is finally resolved ....
A possible case in point is whether or not history's first antibiotics patient, Harlem's Aaron Leroy Alston, was or was not a widower - as reported by his mother on his January 1941 death certificate.
After all there was no indication he had ever been married let alone widowed on the April 1940 census - where he was simply known as Leroy Alston - the name family and friends called him.
His nephew Claude Jay told me he does not recall any in the extended Glaze family mentioning that Leroy was ever married widowed or separated.
But the 1930 census tells a different story.
Born in Rockhill South Carolina in 1910 , Leroy had arrived in Harlem in 1923, an only child, with his mother mother Louise (Glaze) Alston and his father William "Stock" Alston and his cousin Reginald Daniels, about his same age.
They then opened a restaurant at the corner of 8th Avenue and 148th Street.
By 1930, Aaron and his mother are living in different apartments in Harlem.
Louise is reported as a widow - and a check of the indexed NYC death certificates does show a death of a William Alston on March 12 1924 , at the very young age of age 36.
She is described as a waitress working in a tea shop and earning an appallingly low annual income.
A. Leroy Alston, which was the preferred way that Leroy liked to call himself in print, in 1930 is shown as married to a Charlotte L Alston.
It indicated both married two years earlier at 18 , on completing High School.
She is a homemaker and Leroy has a good job - a clerk in a NY Underwriters office ( fire insurance) .
A check of the indexed death certificates finds no dead Charlotte Alston in all NYC up to the end of 1948 - period.
Instead in 1940 , the census shows a Charlotte L (L for maiden name Lee ?) Alston, living in Harlem as a daughter to Julia Lee and her age and birth state is the same as indicated in 1930.
Now it is true that census returns , until recently, almost never used the words separated, deserted , divorced or common law.
My partner's own father's parents both remarried without getting an (expensive / public) divorce first and continued to live very close to each other in rural Nova Scotia!
Older family adults probably knew and small children - and the authorites - were never set wise.
If the couple separated and both returned home to live with mother , it wasn't for lack of jobs during the terrible Great Depression which destroyed so many families in Harlem.
Leroy kept his good job and worked it a full 52 weeks in 1939.
Many breadwinners then , white and black , had only intermittent work even when employed.
It is mystery , either way this widowed/married or not issue is finally resolved ....
New York Times - succinct for once - on Fleming's penicillin vs Dawson's penicillin
On Feb 23rd 2009 , the New York Times did a story about the first times it ever mentioned penicillin on its pages.
In that article the Times reporter , Nicholas Bakalar , correctly (and yet so succinctly) said that in a major story on May 6th 1941 , the Times described the first ever use of penicillin IN a patient (Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , October 16th 1940 at Manhattan's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital).
Completely true , because all previous clinical use of penicillin - stretching back 12 years and all in the UK - had involved the use of penicillin ON a patient.
The breakthrough from harmless to lifesaving happened in North America - in NYC - first.
It was left to Dr Martin Henry Dawson from new Scotland - not Dr Alexander Fleming from old Scotland -to elevate penicillin from a harmless enough antiseptic (ON) to the potent lifesaver it became (IN) - thus ushering in the Age of Lifesaving Antibiotics.
Overwhelming , external antiseptic medications* by themselves do not save patients from acute life-threatening infections - but internal antibiotic medications do .
(*Surgical and nursing procedures that follow strict disinfectant and antiseptic protocols of course do save hundreds of millions of lives worldwide each year , but indirectly, by avoiding future potential infections.)
It was Dr Dawson who lifted penicillin out of a dusty museum of medical curios and stuck it into a dying man's arm and saved his life - not Fleming.
Fleming thought penicillin was only useful as an antiseptic and only if it was first made artificially synthetic - neither which proved in any way accurate.
Bravo Nicolas ------ Fleming : first to put penicillin ON a patient , Dawson : first to put penicillin IN a patient ...
In that article the Times reporter , Nicholas Bakalar , correctly (and yet so succinctly) said that in a major story on May 6th 1941 , the Times described the first ever use of penicillin IN a patient (Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , October 16th 1940 at Manhattan's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital).
Completely true , because all previous clinical use of penicillin - stretching back 12 years and all in the UK - had involved the use of penicillin ON a patient.
The breakthrough from harmless to lifesaving happened in North America - in NYC - first.
It was left to Dr Martin Henry Dawson from new Scotland - not Dr Alexander Fleming from old Scotland -to elevate penicillin from a harmless enough antiseptic (ON) to the potent lifesaver it became (IN) - thus ushering in the Age of Lifesaving Antibiotics.
Overwhelming , external antiseptic medications* by themselves do not save patients from acute life-threatening infections - but internal antibiotic medications do .
(*Surgical and nursing procedures that follow strict disinfectant and antiseptic protocols of course do save hundreds of millions of lives worldwide each year , but indirectly, by avoiding future potential infections.)
Antibiotics can only save patients from imminent death if used IN the body - never ON the body
It was Dr Dawson who lifted penicillin out of a dusty museum of medical curios and stuck it into a dying man's arm and saved his life - not Fleming.
Fleming thought penicillin was only useful as an antiseptic and only if it was first made artificially synthetic - neither which proved in any way accurate.
Bravo Nicolas ------ Fleming : first to put penicillin ON a patient , Dawson : first to put penicillin IN a patient ...
Friday, August 8, 2014
Aaron (Leroy) Alston : for once, a black at the FRONT of the bus : recipient of world's first ever penicillin shot
The world's first ever penicillin shots , October 16th 1940 (the first ever day of American peacetime draft registration),actually did little medically for their recipients - except in raising their morale a great deal.
Because those two patients - one black and one Jewish - knew that these penicillin shots were really 'shots across the bow' against an American establishment prepared - nay eager - to use the need to prepare for war as an excuse to roll back recent efforts to provide medical care to all those in need, even if they were unable to pay.
Regrettably, FDR himself led the charge - and would formally give this movement a name a while later when he said 'Doctor New Deal' was being replaced by 'Doctor Win the War' (at all costs).
Dr Dawson, the doctor who fired those penicillin shots across FDR's bow , argued to the contrary with his penicillin shots that we really needed to beat the Nazis by winning the moral war against them - not merely by emulating their practises in an effort to win militarily.
Because let us never forget that the day war was declared, Hitler used the excuse of war necessity to start killing those needing medical help but unable to contribute much to the war effort : the notorious Aktion T4.
America hardly needed to follow Hitler by its own Aktion 4F , in effect "Code-Slowing" its weakest and poorest citizens to an early grave.
In an era when blacks were universally told to give up their seats and go stand in the back of the bus, the fact that the very first patient to ever get a shot of the new miracle drug was not white and upper class but black and working class spoke volumes.
And it shows that the current battle against the right of all Americans to medical care against deadly diseases has ancient - and ugly - roots.
'Nuff said !
Because those two patients - one black and one Jewish - knew that these penicillin shots were really 'shots across the bow' against an American establishment prepared - nay eager - to use the need to prepare for war as an excuse to roll back recent efforts to provide medical care to all those in need, even if they were unable to pay.
Regrettably, FDR himself led the charge - and would formally give this movement a name a while later when he said 'Doctor New Deal' was being replaced by 'Doctor Win the War' (at all costs).
Dr Dawson, the doctor who fired those penicillin shots across FDR's bow , argued to the contrary with his penicillin shots that we really needed to beat the Nazis by winning the moral war against them - not merely by emulating their practises in an effort to win militarily.
Because let us never forget that the day war was declared, Hitler used the excuse of war necessity to start killing those needing medical help but unable to contribute much to the war effort : the notorious Aktion T4.
America hardly needed to follow Hitler by its own Aktion 4F , in effect "Code-Slowing" its weakest and poorest citizens to an early grave.
In an era when blacks were universally told to give up their seats and go stand in the back of the bus, the fact that the very first patient to ever get a shot of the new miracle drug was not white and upper class but black and working class spoke volumes.
And it shows that the current battle against the right of all Americans to medical care against deadly diseases has ancient - and ugly - roots.
'Nuff said !
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