Blog's background tiled image is of the oppressive walls of CUMC circa 1928

I am trying to think of visual ways to convey the sheer unexpectedness of the wartime triumph of Manhattan natural penicillin.

What tab-dropping novelist would ever dare suggest that the attempts to create artificial penicillin blossomed in Oxford University's leafy green setting while the successful effort to bring naturally grown penicillin to the world's dying would emerge from Gotham's concrete jungle ?

Even Superman and Spider Man might be taken back to think something as green as natural penicillin would actually bloom among Gotham City's concrete skyscrapers.

When we think of NYC 's biggest private sector employers we probably  think first of finance's Wall Street, advertising's Madison Avenue, fashion's Seventh Avenue, or of broadway theatres, publishing and media headquarters.

But actually NYC's largest private sector employer is a hospital : the world famous CUMC (Columbia University Medical Center) with its thousands of high tech beds and its tens of thousands of daily outpatient visitors.

And so it was that one of 1940 Manhattan's most impressive concrete skylines wasn't set in Midtown at all.

Instead that vista was the sight of CUMC's massed hospital windows set into concrete, endlessly repeating row on row on row.

It certainly helped that Columbia Presbyterian  had an inherently dramatic location (by design) -- boldly sited high on top of a hill of sheer rock in uppermost Manhattan.

In this unlikely setting, this high tech concrete jungle , this modernist temple to reductionist chemistry , Dr Henry Dawson's tiny team tried to set up 700 two litre flasks of natural penicillium spores - all in the face of passive resistance from CUMC's ever-forward-thinking administrators.

About the best way to kill penicillium is to jostle it from room to room to room and that is exactly what the administrators ensured would happen.

Every other professor seemed to have a higher priority than Dawson on the dean's list of potential labs , so that every vacant room he secured as a nursery for his green friends had to be quickly given up.

Finally , he got use of the tiny space beneath each student's seat in the hospital's big two storey teaching amphitheatre.

The warmth from the butt of each slumbering early morning male med student became like a brood hen to the delicate charges below.

(I am not making this stuff up !)

In typical New York City fashion, even the fire escapes were put to good use - used to let the arid pungent smell of penicillium juice waft out onto Broadway crowds rather than to offend the sensitive noses of the hospital's bosses.

A decidedly concrete jungle setting for an early post-modern attempt to return to a new relationship with Mother Nature.

To help convey the overwhelmingly oppressive sight of CUMC's walls , where even a top surgeon - let alone a humble patient or penicillium spore - is but a mere cog , I  made a tile out of a tiny fragment from an old 1928 era photograph of CUMC.

That tile is now the oppressive concrete jungle backdrop to this blog.

I know I can do much better - possibly by smearing a spot of green penicillium in the center of each window ?

We'll see...

Holocaust Studies (and Jewish genealogy) ignoring the Jews saved from 'death by deliberate neglect' planned for them by hostile ALLIED medical establishments ?

"Code Slowing" New York Jews to a certain death during height of Holocaust - and the dying Gentile who saved them

During the darkest days of WWII - at the height of the Holocaust - Charles Aronson , Miriam Laskowitz, Penny Mehler and Otto Morowitz all faced a death sentence as sure as any issued by the Nazis.

They were children of immigrants growing up in crowded homes in the NYC area during the late 1910s and 1920s , at the height of the deadliest phase of acute Rheumatic Fever.

As a result all had badly damaged heart valves and now as young adults during the war years, faced certain death from the uniformly fatal SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis).

Taking a page out of the Nazi handbook , Anglo-American medical elites were using the excuse of 'war necessity' to deny them the medicine that could save these Jewish lives.

Yet as other Jews around the the world were dying from battlefield bullets or in secret gas chambers , these New York City Jews (and ultimately tens of thousands of other Jews worldwide very like them) , were plucked from death and given a new life.

As the result of a selfless act of agape from a dying Gentile doctor.

This Canadian-born doctor gave up his own life to save the lives of strangers - and changed our whole world for the better - forever.

I mention these patients' names only because they have already been already made public long ago , by Gladys Hobby in her seminal account of the exciting saga of wartime penicillin (PENICILLIN : MEETING THE CHALLENGE).

Hobby was one member of Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny medical team at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital (today's CUMC) who had laboured for five years to save these four and dozens of others.

These four can not be all the wartime Jews plucked from death by the direct and indirect efforts of Dr Dawson's tiny team - it is just that they are the only names I currently know.

And that is almost all I know about them - they have vanished from history.

Next year - October 16th 2015 - will mark the 75th anniversary that the first of these Jews (Charles Aronson) was saved from death by Dr Dawson's hospital-brewed natural penicillin - an event that also ushered in our era of life-saving antibiotics.

Jewish Genealogy in the New York City area

I appeal to those involved in New York City area Jewish genealogy , to New York City medical personnel with an interest in medical history and to all those scholars researching Jewish death and survival during WWII .

Please consider helping to mark the 75th anniversary of the world's first ever penicillin shot (Manhattan Oct 16th 1940) by turning your eyes and skills towards recovering some of this lost story of Jews saved from certain death.

Beginning with recovering the stories of Charles, Miriam, Penny and Otto and their families ...

Charles born about 1913
Miriam born about 1920
Otto born about 1914
Penny born about 1932

Based on my assessment of their penicillin treatment patterns and Gladys Hobby's whereabouts upon retirement , I believe all four were living in the greater NYC area in the mid 1940s (ie including the near-by parts of New Jersey) and the last three were still living there circa 1980 as she prepared her book.

Penny's last name might be Mahler. There is always a distinct possibility that all these names are actually their middle names (or that they are their first names but their families knew them by other names.)

After all , the Dawson patient who was received the world's first penicillin shot was recorded as Aaron Alston , but was known as Leroy to family and friends and he always wrote his name as A. Leroy Alston !

I think that Charles might well have died in the 1950s - for a child and man who cheated death at least six or more times, a by no means bad fate ....

Aaron Alston - Antibiotics pioneer on '40 draft count but not on '40 census ?

In the Spring of 1941 *, the US Census discovered a major embarrassment : it counted far fewer young black men in April 1940 than did the draft registration process in October of that same year, only five months later.

Three percent of draft age men were missed by the census overall, but a whooping 13% of blacks - an even higher difference in the correct count in inner city places like Harlem New York.

This (fiscally important) undercounting of the poor and minorities has never really stopped and probably never will --- not if Republican congressmen have any say in the matter.

But it might mean a little bit of information on Aaron Alston may still be found found on the (sealed) US draft registration card made out for Alston October 16 1940 at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center , the same day he was becoming one of history's first antibiotics patients.
Because there is no Aaron Alston on the April 1940 census in the state of New York or in states nearby to New York City like Connecticut, New Jersey or Pennsylvania .

I have speculated he may have moved to New York from rural America seeking work between April and October that year but the possibility he was already in the New York City area near the hospital and simply uncounted in the census can't be discounted.

In the case of this truly historical event - perhaps that draft registration record might even be unsealed - who knows ?

* Daniel O. Price, "A Check on Under-Enumeration in the 1940 Census" American Sociological Review, Volume 12, Issue 1 (Feb., 1947), pp.44-49

If you don't like NEEDLES....

.... here is the guy you don't like:

MARTIN HENRY DAWSON
1896-1945

On October 16th 1940, on the 8th floor male ward of New York's famous Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, Dr Dawson stuck the first ever needle of antibiotics (penicillin) into patient
Charles Aronson, launching a billion needle jabs of antibiotics in the seventy years since.

OUCH !

This Fall marks the 70th anniversary of the much feared/ much revered antibiotic needle - at New York City's CUMC.

And if  CUMC are true to form, they will totally ignore it:

Plus ça change (plus c'est la même chose)