Wartime penicillin only cures one NEW disease , until the Allied medical elite put a stop to its efforts...

Allied doctors "Code Slow" minorities, immigrants and poor to certain death 

Sometimes true facts are far stranger than anything that bad acid and bad Hollywood writing could dream up.

Fact is, wartime penicillin's so called 'miracles' usually consisted in curing many diseases than earlier medicines also cured --- albeit very fitfully.

This earlier medications - basically the various biological serums , heavy metal based drugs and the sulfa pills - had dangerous side effects, took a lot longer, were more painful , cost more , required more skill.

Above all, their cure rates were much lower than early penicillin - of the total number of patients both type of medicines treated, penicillin saw far more lives saved.

Only one new disease - SBE - subacute bacterial endocarditis ( the disease that made Rheumatic Fever (RF) so terrifying) was converted from nearly 100% fatal to nearly 100% curable , by penicillin and penicillin alone.

(Thank you Dr Dawson on behalf of my brother Bruce, who got heart valve damage from RF but never got SBE.)

Unbelievably , the Anglo-American medical establishment, taking a page from Hitler's eugenic playbook , used 'military necessity' as an excuse not to give life-saving penicillin to militarily-useless SBE patients.

Unlike Polio research - which was never curtailed during the war and mostly afflicted the middle class (can you say 'doctors', boy and girls ?) , SBE mostly afflicted the minorities, immigrants and the poor.

But perhaps I am telling you something you may have already suspected, bless your cynical little souls ...

Dawson's Follies...

... have improved the lives of ten billion of us , so far.

Dateline Manhattan : Something green and life-nurturing is brewing down the mean corridors of wartime science...

In the stereotyped description of  the biggest teaching hospitals of the mid twentieth century, there is always a strict hierarchy cum pecking order of prestige, power and authority.

At the top were the surgeons, particularly those who had combine high technical skill with the cool ability to save lives under very rushed emergency conditions ; brain surgeons operating on newly discovered operable brain tumours probably being at the top.

At the bottom were the staff in the hospital's day or outpatient clinics, dealing with chronic non-life-threatening conditions - aging-related (osteo) arthritis patients being the classic example.

Henry Dawson was the director of one such arthritis day clinic, at New York's world famous CUMC (Columbia University Medical Centre).

But this clinic work was not the reason why his bemused colleagues referred to his 'Follies' , far from it.

His was a pioneering clinic and he was a nationally and even internationally respected expert in arthritis, well regarded for his common sense caution over the possibility of  quick cures.

Not much for a prior hypothesises, he preferred the naturalist's method of gathering all sorts of data from hundreds of cases, to see if any common 'tendencies' emerged.

No, it was Dawson's private (non-day job, non-grant approved) scientific interests that bemused or angered his fellow medical scientists.

A traditional boon granted to the staff of hospital labs was the right to work on their own private research projects on equipment and in lab corners not in current use.

A boon usually available to the staffer in his off-work hours : evenings, weekends and holidays (hence the term EWH Research).

His day job bosses didn't directly oversee this research if the staffer had something like tenure and nor did senior members of the discipline ride shotgun on it by controlling the issuing of grant money, as is done today.

Nevertheless , the hope was that while this private research might be on the fringes of conventional science, its aim was ultimately to be useful.

And here Dawson seemed to have crossed some sort of line.

He was seen as being too interested in both avirulent commensal bacteria and in avirile 4F patients.

An applied scientist if there ever was any, a medical researcher was expected to be only concerned with virulent pathogens , ones that actually could kill or harm patients.

'Best leave the study of avirulent bacteria to the basic scientists in university biology departments'.

And so between the Spring of 1939 and the Winter of 1941 , the medical elite in America steadily moved staff and money away from the New Deal's emphasis on social medicine - helping to heal the avirile 4Fs in society - towards medical research directed towards helping 'our soon to be fighting boys' (the virile by definition 1As from the draft boards) .

This elite, being mostly Republicans sympathetic to popular eugenics and thus privately and publicly hostile to FDR's social medicine, they eagerly welcomed using the excuse of preparing for the upcoming war to shift emphasis away from this silly 'socialized medicine' stuff .

And they even had FDR's backing , as he publicly said he was no longer Doctor New Deal but now Doctor Win the War.

But Dawson's comeback was that using the excuse of 'war necessity' to throw the weak under the bus was exactly what Hitler did (in his notorious Aktion T4 program) and weren't we supposed to be opposed to his values ?

So his bosses grumbled and restrained but his not stop the work of this respected tenured polite member of their staff.

In the end he was forced to use the corridors of his hospital to house the five gallon bottles of agape penicillium he had brewed up.

But he still could extract enough under these conditions so hostile to the production of penicillin , to treat his pioneering series of  '4Fs of the 4Fs'.

These were young men with subacute bacterial endocarditis (the invariably fatal SBE that tended to befall the survivors of the then endemic Rheumatic Fever) that wartime medicine had directed should be 'code slowed' into an early grave.

Himself dying from an autoimmune disease, Dawson kept at it, in the face of the overt hostility of his colleagues.

Eventually, ordinary GPs, patients' families and ordinary journalists all "ACTED UP" on behalf of his project to see  that wartime penicilin  was made available to all those dying who could benefit from it.

Dawson died as the European part of the war was ending but not before knowing his tiny EWH project had changed world history.

Ten billion of us, to date, can only agree ....

"The other Manhattan Project : Penicillin for 'life unworthy of life'

Henry Dawson was in moral combat with the Allied medical-scientific elite and their handmaids, the wartime Allied governments.

He felt the best way to win over all the people worldwide who were neutral towards the conflict with Hitler and Tojo was to demonstrate - in actions, not just empty words - that morally the Allies were different from the Nazis, not just a weak 'me-too' echo.

He felt the "CODE SLOW" (denying life-saving penicillin)  imposed upon the SBE youths dying in Allied hospitals because their disease was judged to be  "not militarily important" was the moral equivalent of the Nazi Aktion T4 , the project to kill all Germans judged to be" life unworthy of life" .

Time says he was right - when Doctor Mom joined his battle, the Allies reluctantly had to give in and started a massive program - at least in America - to provide abundant cheap penicillin to all....

"Code Slow", the wartime SBE patients and Hearst's "Code Yellow"

What really happens whenever a family directs a hospital that its relative receives the full and rapid CPR response ("Code Blue") in the event of their quickly fatal cardiac or breathing arrest ?

Most the time, the medical and nursing staff will do their damnest to bring that patient back from the imminent grave.

But at times, the medical and nursing staff will form a silent consensus that they will just pretend to "code blue" a patient, but will actually merely go through the motions.

This is known as "Code Slow" and it is a serious breach in medical ethics.

The staff do so because (a) they believe that particular patient isn't worth saving ----(b) or less controversially , they honestly believe that particular patient at this point in their illness can't really be saved by fullout CPR and will merely experience additional pain en route to their death.

Reasons (a) and (b) are often mixed confusingly in actual practise ---- patients judged (subconsciously) as less valuable are more often also judged less able to benefit from full out CPR on strictly medical grounds.

WWII 's own "CODE SLOW"

During WWII, the millions of young people worldwide who had e potential to suffer the invariably fatal disease known as "Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis" (SBE) as a result of endemic Rheumatic Fever, were viewed by both Allied and Axis medical elites alike as 'useless mouths' during a total war.

They consumed a lot of scarce medical care and even if 1% of the time their illness was checked , it always returned a few months later and no one was ever known to survive a second or third hospital stay while suffering SBE.

True, by early 1943, Martin Henry Dawson had cured a few SBE patients , at least the first time, with moderately high amounts of what little public domain penicillin was available between 1940 and 1943 , but the Allied medical elite decided his success had to be discounted at all costs.

For if his success with SBE was accepted and publicised , it would lead overnight to a sudden sharp public demand for enormous amounts of penicillin.

(The thinking being that ordinary doctors would believe that if penicillin can cure SBE, the Mount Everest of infectious disease, then surely to God it could easily cure their patient's less invariably fatal infection.)

This would guy the game for those who hoped to use penicillin as a secret weapon of war - keeping it secret from the Allied public and hence the Axis-friendly diplomatic corps, so it was only available  to the Allied side during the big D-Day push.

It would also guy the game for those who hoped to hold off the public demand for this miracle drug until it had been safely synthesized and patented, when Big Pharma would finally freely sell it to everybody dying of bacterial infections ---- provided the dying or their families also had big wallets.

The hope was to keep Dawson's success out of the public eye until penicillin had been both patented and had been a surprise success on D-Day - mostly by denying him anymore public domain penicillin to repeat his feats.

He was known as not the type to 'spill all' to the press if he was denied more penicillin.

The SBEs wouldn't be denied all medical care and simply left to die, tempting as that was, because that could backfire and clash fearsomely with the Allied talk of the Four Freedoms.

Instead, they would be "code slow"-ed to death : given enormous amounts of useless (and abundant) sulfa drugs so their families would think something useful was being done for them, when it actually was not.

Unfortunately for these schemers, a fiery Italian American doctor,Dante Colitti, armed with his own private grudge against a medical elite for being prejudiced against allowing Italian Catholic cripples to get medical licenses, was far more willing to go to the media.

He got the master of the Yellow Press, Citizen Hearst and his paper chain, to go full out on behalf of this miraculous Yellow Magic stuff.

The rest, as they say, is history.

For in the end, "Code Slow" proved no match against "Code Yellow" .

A "Good News Story" from the "Bad News War".....