'Divided Self' No More : uniting Dr Martin Henry Dawson's preferential option towards the overlooked, the under-estimated and the unappreciated in the human AND natural world

The beta lactam antibiotics, still the front line in our defence against bacterial infections, were hidden - for several billion years - In Plain Sight - literally right beneath our feet.

They come from soil mold - not mold in today's scientific sense of all being fungus - but mold as understood by today's laypeople and yesteryear's scientists (and maybe tomorrow's scientists too).

The soil molds that give us most of our beta lactam antibiotics are actually bacteria that so resemble the white thread-like fungus mold in appearance and habits that they seem kissing cousins.

And several hundred million years some of those kisses exchanged must have included enough initimate bodily fluids that at few fungus species picked up the DNA genes that make beta lactams.

The best known result is The Big Dog of all antibiotics : Penicillin itself.

The process is called HGT (horizontal gene transfer) - and it was Dr Martin Henry Dawson's hard slug effort in keeping this new concept before a bored and doubting scientific community that is Dawson's main claim to fame today.

No such fame for his equally hard slog to defend, before a hostile and doubting wartime scientific community, of the full worthiness of primitive penicillin made by the primitive penicillium.

His efforts, supported at crucial junctions by Dante Colitti and the Hearst media chain, by the WPB and by Pfizer, gave us all of our wartime penicillin and still provides us with almost all of our antibiotics, 75 years later.

But since Dawson's support for the overlooked, the under estimated, the unappreciated was life long affair, all of one piece, this perhaps appropriate.

In September 1940 ,Dawson's fifteen year interest in the under estimated survival abilities of avirulent microbes seemed totally unconnected to to his ten years commitment to the betterment of the unappreciated chronic ill poor in the big city holding tanks cum hospitals.

But on October 16th 1940, his 'Divided Self', to recall William James' famous phrase, finally fused.

Primitive Penicillium's 'burning and shining light'

For on that day, he injected primitive penicillin from those unappreciated microbe chemists the penicillium into humanity's lowest of the low, a black and a Jew dying from a disease judged of no military significance, the Polio of the Poor, SBE - subacute bacterial endocarditis.

And like that other diffident Henry from Nova Scotia (Henry Alline) he was now 'a man on a mission', for his few years left on Earth ....

why Henry Dawson rather than Henry Alline

The revisionist's temperament

By my fifth year in school, I found it almost impossible to resist the urge to publicly expose the difference between cherished myth and actual reality, regardless of the negative effect on my already diminished popularity.

This constant urge to revise and to debunk has made me a sort of historian,  at least by temperament.

Revisionism, however, is much more complicated than it may first appear.

For example, in 1983-1984, I worked hard to raise the profile of Henry Alline a Nova Scotian evangelist from the 18th century .

Alline led a major religious "Awakening" in Nova Scotia during the American Revolution (Nova Scotia then being the area that later became the three Maritime provinces).

This Awakening is a major reason - but not the only reason - why the Maritimes remained apart from the other Thirteen Colonies in their efforts to leave the British Empire , thus allowing the possibility for the nation of Canada to emerge almost a century later.

Most people in the UK, USA or Canada still know nothing of Alline, his writings,  his amazing personal odyssey or his impact on the creation of Canada.

I was thus helping to revise existing notions about Alline in the general population, from the outside.

But, at the same time, I was also inside a vigorous small group consensus , because a lot of historians felt as I did and had already done all the hard archival spade work a few years earlier.

I added not a single new bit of evidence to their case - I merely acted as another cheerleader.

So Henry Alline never grabbed me emotionally at least as a revisionist - only rousing another major part of my personality mix : someone who always like to raise the profile of the underdog.

By contrast, I  quickly discovered enough new information my own - thanks to Google - about Martin Henry Dawson's pioneering penicillin efforts to see that a major revision of the broad historical consensus over wartime penicillin was urgently due.

I saw no small group with an already-formed consensus around Dawson's penicillin that matched my own independent conclusions.

So now  I was emotionally engaged , all thrusters on go ...

The Divided Selves of Nova Scotia's Henrys ....

Thirty years ago, I started researching and writing about the divided mind (to use William James' famous term) of a man named Henry from Nova Scotia.

I still am.

my 1984 Henry Alline poster

But I started off writing and thinking about Henry Alline, a man from New England stock living in Falmouth Nova Scotia , who  very much considered himself a Christian.

Admittedly most see him professing a quite unorthodox variety of the Christian faith.

By contrast, for the last eight years I have been researching, writing and thinking (much, much thinking) about (Martin) Henry  Dawson.

(Martin) Henry Dawson

While this Henry had been raised in a very committed Presbyterian family in Truro Nova Scotia, (with one side of his family reflecting similar New England roots),  he always claimed in adulthood not to be a believer in the Christian God but rather in the new religion of Modern Science.

I believe, however, that while he had stopped believing in the existence of  Jesus, he still tried, perhaps unconsciously, to always practise the ethics of Jesus.

But he was constantly torn between his outer devotion to the stern tenets of Modern Science rationality and his warm compassionate inner nature.

He had joined-up during WWI,  but not in the first heady war-glory days of the summer of 1914, but rather like thousands of like minded people around the world, immediately after he had first heard of the execution of nurse Edith Cavell in October 1915.

Again, typically, he had first volunteered to join a medical unit.

But eventually he joined an infantry unit feeling he wasn't doing enough to end the suffering by merely being a hospital orderly.

He won a Military Cross with citation, for his bravery.  And for his altruism, in giving up his stretcher back to hospital to a man more seriously wounded. For twice he was seriously wounded in battle.

In 1939, these old wounds came back to haunt him.

Together with his now middle-agedness and the fact that he was married and main breadwinner for his wife and two (and eventually three) young children, it all made him an unattractive combat hospital recruit in WWII.

It hurt none the less not to go off to help. His job and home was now in New York City, but while America might still be neutral, he was anything but.

He was sure, with all his advanced medical research skills, he'd be warmly welcomed by the Canadian Army Medical Corps, but in fact he'd  just to end up safe behind a desk in Canada, dealing with medical paperwork in areas remotely connected to his current research efforts.

And if the German mistreatment (and Allied neglect) of Belgium  had fired his sense of outrage and compassion in WWI, in WWII  the equivalent of his poor bleeding Belgium had become poor bleeding Poland , torn apart by Russia and Germany while the Western Allies just said pious nothings.

Every time another small nation fell before the mighty and his adopted country America did nothing, Dawson's anguish only grew.

But what could he do, from a small lab deep in New York City, that would have a major and useful affect ?

I have written extensively on what he eventually did do.

Enough now to say that over the four years between October 1940 and April 1945 , he rebuked and finally reversed the Allies' early decision, at a muted level, to micmic the Nazis' decision to favour medical care for the powerful and the useful over providing basic medical care (like food) to the weak and 'not-so-useful' .

But I want to conclude this brief comparison by noting that for both Henrys, their moral crunch time came in war and that after they had found a moral solution to their divided selves, nothing but nothing would remove their inner calm.

Henry Alline did his most physically tiring work,  after he knew he was dying of TB, but his inner peace seemed to help him hold off this fatal disease until he had completed much of his ministry.

Similarly, Henry Dawson was told not long after he started his penicillin ministering that he had a very tiring and then-fatal disease (MG) and that, on average, people lived only four and half years after diagnosis.

Coincidentally, that is exactly as long as he survived, but he too had time enough on Earth to see success in his efforts.

I am writing this 'comparing and contrasting' sort of post,  after seeing two brief documentary films .

Paul Kimball Alline film

Both were made by Paul Kimball of Redstar Films about Henry Alline*.

I enjoyed them both, but I still think there is a drama movie that could be made of Henry Alline's brief but incident-packed life  that would appeal to even non-Christians.

Just as I see a movie eventually being made of Henry Dawson's similarly eventful last four years of life.....

* I know, I know.  Henry was always called Henry Allen when his name was spoken while he was alive, but today in this age of Googling, I always verbally refer to him as Henry A-lline , so that my listeners can quickly find him online.

Henry Dawson : The biography of dull dishwater or of the first modernist to leave the reservation and go PoMo ?

I don't doubt that Henry Dawson's colleagues felt he made a 'perfectly competent associate professor' ( in the most damming sense of that ominous phrase) ---- but that as an individual he was a man extremely unremarkable and totally non memorable.

Even those who knew him very well, and who choose to write their personal and scientific memoirs, still found virtually nothing to say about Dawson.

I have been attempting to write his non-authorized biography for almost nine years now and I still know very little about the inner Dr Dawson.

What keeps me happily to my post is my fascination with what Dr Dawson did , not what he said or felt - that, and the lure involved in searching for a reasonable explanation why this most ordinary of men did the things he did , and under the most trying conditions imaginable.

We have accounts of the Modern Age and of our own Post Modern Age, just as we have biographies of Modernists and of Post Modernists.

But in Henry Dawson we have the rarest of rare species : a Modernist caught is the process of becoming a Post Modernist and in the process, shaking the world around us completely.

So a dull as dishwater backwater modernist ? Or a world-class disturber of Modern decorum, a ravager of Modernity ? Or a bit of both, a sort of latter-day Henry Alline ?

I chose Answer three......