Give Blacks and Jews the right to vote and the right to apply for jobs and education, if you must, but don't - for Jefferson Davis's sake ! - give them to right to be treated fairly when they turn up in a hospital ER.
Because DOAs can't vote or take jobs or occupy your stupid son's rightful seat at Yale.
Accept what I claim and you begin to see the real bite in the unholy but quiet battle between medical proponents of Social Medicine and War Medicine (Thomas Parran versus Lewis Weed), circa October 16th 1940.
On that day, Professor Martin Henry Dawson gave history' first ever injections of microbe-made penicillin to two 4Fs, a Jew and a Black, opening our Age of Antibiotics, on a day otherwise devoted to registering America's 1As in the first ever peacetime draft.
His impetus ?
Returning that Fall from vacation to learn that his medical school and hospital was downgrading any focus on social medicine, his area of interest, to up its preparation for war-oriented medicine.
His response ?
Parry, and then thrust, deep, with .1 ml of Pen "G" in butyl alcohol.....
Showing posts with label obamacare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obamacare. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Saturday, April 11, 2015
October 1940's Waves of the Future : Henry Dawson's vs Anne Lindbergh's
No book - not even Hitler's Mein Kampf or Stalin's Foundations of Leninism - so outraged Dr Martin Henry Dawson as early October 1940's The Wave of the Future by the quasi Christian author Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
Perhaps even enraged him enough to advance his team's planned first injections of penicillin into human patients by three months - so his own 'wave of the future' would compete with her 'wave of the future'.
And in the end, he won.
To the extent that any of us know of Dawson's wartime efforts or recall Lindbergh's horrible book, we would all universally applaud him and disdain her.
That is because 'we are all Dawsonites nowadays', to adapt future King Edward VIII's famous 1895 quip.
Lindbergh argued that the entire 1940 world was at truly 'at war' , but intellectually, not militarily.
At war intellectually but not in the expected sense of capitalism versus nazism and communism.
No, it was a war between the ancient (small) staid past and a bold dynamic new (big) future ---- with the future to inevitably win.
Overlook, Lindbergh urged readers, overlook the small temporary horrors currently being inflicted on small countries like Belgium, Denmark and Latvia as they were overrun by their giant neighbours while neutrals like America just watched.
See the big picture, instead, as from Laplacian heights.
All this mere temporary pain and horror was but the inevitable consequence of rigid jaw flesh was being broken through for the first time by emerging baby teeth.
WWII reduced to a baby's temporary teething problem.
The bigger and the newer was always better - evolutionary progress was on the side of the ever bigger battalions : the dogma of Lindbergh's Edwardian era high school science teachers.
But Dawson had uncovered evidence that reality didn't always work that way.
Yes, on some measures, the last were last - but on others they were first - and everything in between, depending on the attribute being measured.
Dawson's compassion having been given wings by his new science, he resolved to use the wisdom of the microbial last to give history's first life-saving injections of penicillin - to save some members of the last in human society.
A gentle, but firm, rebuke to the Anne Morrow Lindberghs of his world.
The unofficial Allied plan had been to first synthesize penicillin 100% pure and then patent it, to make it so expensive that only the peacetime rich could afford it.
But meanwhile, during wartime, to underproduce it and thus justify the giving of it to only the moderately infected among the Allied frontline troops - so as they may more quickly return to battle, instead of their stay-at-home neighbours.
Dawson thought that naturally grown, semi-purified, penicillin would cure just as well and was available much quicker and much much cheaper --- available for all in need of it.
He wanted all in that heartless unforgiving wartime world - the last as well as the first, the 'unfit' as well as the 'fit', enemy as well as friend - to have cheap abundant penicillin, if it alone could save them from needless death from the infections it could stop.
And so it was thus - his small wave of the future, rather than Lindbergh's big wave, became our present : Obamacare is hardly what the President and medicine-for-all advocates wanted, but it is a good start ...
Perhaps even enraged him enough to advance his team's planned first injections of penicillin into human patients by three months - so his own 'wave of the future' would compete with her 'wave of the future'.
And in the end, he won.
To the extent that any of us know of Dawson's wartime efforts or recall Lindbergh's horrible book, we would all universally applaud him and disdain her.
That is because 'we are all Dawsonites nowadays', to adapt future King Edward VIII's famous 1895 quip.
Anne Lindbergh writes off the small and the weak
Lindbergh argued that the entire 1940 world was at truly 'at war' , but intellectually, not militarily.
At war intellectually but not in the expected sense of capitalism versus nazism and communism.
No, it was a war between the ancient (small) staid past and a bold dynamic new (big) future ---- with the future to inevitably win.
Overlook, Lindbergh urged readers, overlook the small temporary horrors currently being inflicted on small countries like Belgium, Denmark and Latvia as they were overrun by their giant neighbours while neutrals like America just watched.
See the big picture, instead, as from Laplacian heights.
All this mere temporary pain and horror was but the inevitable consequence of rigid jaw flesh was being broken through for the first time by emerging baby teeth.
WWII reduced to a baby's temporary teething problem.
The bigger and the newer was always better - evolutionary progress was on the side of the ever bigger battalions : the dogma of Lindbergh's Edwardian era high school science teachers.
In the long run, more accurate science chases out less accurate science
But Dawson had uncovered evidence that reality didn't always work that way.
Yes, on some measures, the last were last - but on others they were first - and everything in between, depending on the attribute being measured.
Dawson's compassion having been given wings by his new science, he resolved to use the wisdom of the microbial last to give history's first life-saving injections of penicillin - to save some members of the last in human society.
A gentle, but firm, rebuke to the Anne Morrow Lindberghs of his world.
Originally, Allied wartime penicillin intended only for the first, not the last
The unofficial Allied plan had been to first synthesize penicillin 100% pure and then patent it, to make it so expensive that only the peacetime rich could afford it.
But meanwhile, during wartime, to underproduce it and thus justify the giving of it to only the moderately infected among the Allied frontline troops - so as they may more quickly return to battle, instead of their stay-at-home neighbours.
Dawson thought that naturally grown, semi-purified, penicillin would cure just as well and was available much quicker and much much cheaper --- available for all in need of it.
He wanted all in that heartless unforgiving wartime world - the last as well as the first, the 'unfit' as well as the 'fit', enemy as well as friend - to have cheap abundant penicillin, if it alone could save them from needless death from the infections it could stop.
And so it was thus - his small wave of the future, rather than Lindbergh's big wave, became our present : Obamacare is hardly what the President and medicine-for-all advocates wanted, but it is a good start ...
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 !
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Defeating the PENICILLIN death panels
Part One : the backstory
President Obama in 2009 had absolutely no intention of emulating Hitler's use of Aktion T4 death panels, but this does not mean that death panels were not in force under an earlier Democratic administration.
These death panels - common to all Allied nations during WWII - did not directly echo the German efforts, instead they and the German death panels were all part and parcel of a world wide ground swell among the well educated and the well off in support of 'eugenic' triage.
Starting at the very outbreak of the war in 1939, Hitler had authorized doctor-run death panels to met to decide which of the weak and elderly in Germany should be actively killed off.
He had wanted to do much earlier, but judged it would be politically risky internally.
Now he could use the excuse of urgent war need as the reason to roll back the Weimar Republic's expansion of Social Medicine , supposedly in an effort to divert the freed up money towards War Medicine instead.
Sharing similar eugenic motives, the mostly eugenically-minded medical elite in Allied and in Neutral nations also used the urgent need for expanded War Medicine for the 1As, as an excuse to roll back Social Medicine for their society's 4Fs.
This roll back could lead to patients dying - death by indirection rather than direct acts of murder, of course ,because these people prided themselves on not being Nazis .
(Vichy France, for example, so reduced funds to institutions for the chronically ill, that tens of thousands were "CODE SLOWED" to death due to inadequate food, heat and medical staff attention. Just as Britain had done similarly during the last years of WWI).
Asking, "how do we ration life-saving medical resources like the 1960s' supply of kidney dialysis machines ?", is the totally wrong question
What we first need to ask is , "why did the 1960s feel the need to ration life machines in the first place, when it didn't ration death machines ?"
Clearly the totally absence of any money isn't the real issue but rather " how do we divide the very big but still limited bag of money that we do have"?
So hospital auxiliary bake sales did raise money for some kidney dialysis machines back then - but no bombers or nuclear weapons were ever fund-raised that way.
All politics is about rationing : 'the authoritative allocation of scarce resources' as the textbooks describe it .
The decision to allocate most of the available money to H-bombs and so to supply only a small amount for the supply of baby incubators and the such like was a human-made decision, not an Act of God or a Law of Nature.
Just as the President who intoned "bombs were dropped on Cambodia" in an academically-correct passive, nay wimpy, voice really meant that "men dropped bombs on Cambodian civilians and killed them, because I ordered it so."
Stalin and Hitler forthrightly ordered millions to be murdered - they did not artificially create a shortage by a human political decision and then sit around piously in death panels trying to decide how to allocate patients to that shortage as 'fairly' as they could.
Bad Faith and Hypocrisy were not among their many sins of Hot and Cold.
But the sins of the lukewarm might well be dealt with even harsher on Judgement Day and it is the lukewarm sinners of wartime penicillin that we now turn to.
Britain's Conservative-dominated government said it would only make enough penicillin in wartime to handle the military cases it wanted penicillin to deal with.
And their Labour and Liberal partners went along with that.
So, no penicillin for penicillin for civilians in Britain or in her colonies, none to Allied POWS, none for British military casualties judged of no further military use.
Canada and Australia "me -too-ed" in agreement - one government liberal the other Labour.
America having a government of competing agencies, on the same Social Darwin model as Hitler's government , spoke with two main voices.
The scientific medical elite (OSRD and NAS) ,with some support from the military and industry , wanted only enough made to deal with priority military cases. Think of FDR as the "Doctor Win the War" of 1940 onwards.
But think also of an earlier FDR, "Doctor New Deal", and all his New Dealer supporters' high hopes.
Because what was now left of all these New Dealers were huddled in a stockade known as the WPB (War Production Board), surrounded on all sides by the hostile Republicans that FDR had brought into his administration, as part of his willingness to lose the internal social war to win the external military war.
The WPB proposed that enough wartime penicillin be made in America to generously supply all the penicillin needs of the military, the civilians and the overseas allies, neutrals and residents of enemy occupied lands.
The WPB won the argument -- when the new Army Surgeon General switched sides .
But until industry went along with the gag, America would still have not enough for anyone domestic , let alone everyone domestic and their foreign cousin.
The year long delay until one industrial firm really climbed on board with gusto allowed the OSRD-NAS to play God by convening penicillin death panels.
They might have operated unchallenged but for one man : Henry Dawson.
He fought them , won and so changed history ....
Clearly the totally absence of any money isn't the real issue but rather " how do we divide the very big but still limited bag of money that we do have"?
So hospital auxiliary bake sales did raise money for some kidney dialysis machines back then - but no bombers or nuclear weapons were ever fund-raised that way.
All politics is about rationing : 'the authoritative allocation of scarce resources' as the textbooks describe it .
The decision to allocate most of the available money to H-bombs and so to supply only a small amount for the supply of baby incubators and the such like was a human-made decision, not an Act of God or a Law of Nature.
Just as the President who intoned "bombs were dropped on Cambodia" in an academically-correct passive, nay wimpy, voice really meant that "men dropped bombs on Cambodian civilians and killed them, because I ordered it so."
Stalin and Hitler forthrightly ordered millions to be murdered - they did not artificially create a shortage by a human political decision and then sit around piously in death panels trying to decide how to allocate patients to that shortage as 'fairly' as they could.
Bad Faith and Hypocrisy were not among their many sins of Hot and Cold.
But the sins of the lukewarm might well be dealt with even harsher on Judgement Day and it is the lukewarm sinners of wartime penicillin that we now turn to.
Britain's Conservative-dominated government said it would only make enough penicillin in wartime to handle the military cases it wanted penicillin to deal with.
And their Labour and Liberal partners went along with that.
So, no penicillin for penicillin for civilians in Britain or in her colonies, none to Allied POWS, none for British military casualties judged of no further military use.
Canada and Australia "me -too-ed" in agreement - one government liberal the other Labour.
America having a government of competing agencies, on the same Social Darwin model as Hitler's government , spoke with two main voices.
The scientific medical elite (OSRD and NAS) ,with some support from the military and industry , wanted only enough made to deal with priority military cases. Think of FDR as the "Doctor Win the War" of 1940 onwards.
But think also of an earlier FDR, "Doctor New Deal", and all his New Dealer supporters' high hopes.
Because what was now left of all these New Dealers were huddled in a stockade known as the WPB (War Production Board), surrounded on all sides by the hostile Republicans that FDR had brought into his administration, as part of his willingness to lose the internal social war to win the external military war.
The WPB proposed that enough wartime penicillin be made in America to generously supply all the penicillin needs of the military, the civilians and the overseas allies, neutrals and residents of enemy occupied lands.
The WPB won the argument -- when the new Army Surgeon General switched sides .
But until industry went along with the gag, America would still have not enough for anyone domestic , let alone everyone domestic and their foreign cousin.
The year long delay until one industrial firm really climbed on board with gusto allowed the OSRD-NAS to play God by convening penicillin death panels.
They might have operated unchallenged but for one man : Henry Dawson.
He fought them , won and so changed history ....
Thursday, October 31, 2013
The OTHER Manhattan Project only made moral arguments rather than A-Bombs : but its impact has been immense
Moral conservatives such as today's American Republican Party frequently argue that morally medical care (such as expensive life saving drugs like Avastin) should only go to those who have worked hard enough to afford them.
They maintain this argument ( hello Obamacare !) even if this means that these drugs as a result of this limited market demand will remain in limited production forever and so be expensive forever.
The opposite moral argument (as made by Dr Martin Henry Dawson in his battle with the Allied governments in WWII) calls for the government to greatly expands the lifesaver's potential market by initially subsidizing the drug so that it available to all regardless of income, geography, race ,gender etc.
It is claimed this will encourage new producers to come in and try and find ways to compete with the established producer by lowering their production costs and hence ultimately reduce the price of the drug to the consumer.
Penicillin G provides the best possible example of this argument, proving the validity of this economical argument beyond all measure.
But greatly expanding the universe of people with affordable access to lifesaving Penicillin G also had an unexpectedly profound impact on the entire world's health.
Unusually cheap abundant public domain Penicillin G saved the lives of many people who are ordinarily too poor or in two remote regions to be treated and who thus remained reserve pools of highly virulent - and contagious - strains of the bacterial diseases that were endemic or epidemic worldwide for millenniums.
In a form of quasi Herd Immunity, billions of us (I estimate ten billion of us so far) have indirectly benefited when tens of millions of us directly had their lives saved by penicillin G shots.
Dangerously contagious bacterial diseases that terrified our grandmothers, that hung like the Sword of Damocles over all households rich or poor, are no more.
Those of us under the age of fifty have never even heard of most of them and few doctors practising today have even seen a single case of them.
The Big Manhattan Project made the A Bomb and made a huge array of massive buildings - it was big in every concrete sense of the word.
By contrast, the other Manhattan Project, that of Dr Dawson, only made moral arguments (and a little home brew penicillin) rather than Bombs or Buildings.
But who can save that this project's impact - 75 years on - is not way, way bigger than that of the project headed by Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves....
They maintain this argument ( hello Obamacare !) even if this means that these drugs as a result of this limited market demand will remain in limited production forever and so be expensive forever.
The opposite moral argument (as made by Dr Martin Henry Dawson in his battle with the Allied governments in WWII) calls for the government to greatly expands the lifesaver's potential market by initially subsidizing the drug so that it available to all regardless of income, geography, race ,gender etc.
It is claimed this will encourage new producers to come in and try and find ways to compete with the established producer by lowering their production costs and hence ultimately reduce the price of the drug to the consumer.
Penicillin G provides the best possible example of this argument, proving the validity of this economical argument beyond all measure.
But greatly expanding the universe of people with affordable access to lifesaving Penicillin G also had an unexpectedly profound impact on the entire world's health.
Unusually cheap abundant public domain Penicillin G saved the lives of many people who are ordinarily too poor or in two remote regions to be treated and who thus remained reserve pools of highly virulent - and contagious - strains of the bacterial diseases that were endemic or epidemic worldwide for millenniums.
In a form of quasi Herd Immunity, billions of us (I estimate ten billion of us so far) have indirectly benefited when tens of millions of us directly had their lives saved by penicillin G shots.
Dangerously contagious bacterial diseases that terrified our grandmothers, that hung like the Sword of Damocles over all households rich or poor, are no more.
Those of us under the age of fifty have never even heard of most of them and few doctors practising today have even seen a single case of them.
The Big Manhattan Project made the A Bomb and made a huge array of massive buildings - it was big in every concrete sense of the word.
By contrast, the other Manhattan Project, that of Dr Dawson, only made moral arguments (and a little home brew penicillin) rather than Bombs or Buildings.
But who can save that this project's impact - 75 years on - is not way, way bigger than that of the project headed by Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves....
Sunday, September 30, 2012
1940's ISOLATIONISTS abandoned Europe's 4Fs and America's 4Fs
 |
| 1A = 53% |
Then in the Fall of 1940, these same Isolationists, using the excuse of preparing for an European war - a war that they were actually working all out to avoid - pushed for an abandonment of Social Medicine , in favour of War Medicine.
Translation of this hypocrisy ?
In Eugenics-speak, this meant abandoning efforts to provide medical care to both the well-to-do 1As and the poorer 4Fs, in favour of research on making the 1As into better fighters.
Rooseveltcare as unpopular then as Obamacare is today
Actually, the Isolationists had high hopes that America's 1As would never have to fight : this was all just an excuse to roll back the clock on providing care for the 47% in 1940s America.
Rooseveltcare was no more popular then among the well-to-do than Obamacare is today. (Or Romneycare was in Boston a few years ago - but that is another story altogether isn't Mitt ?)
It was this Isolationist hypocrisy that I believe pushed Martin Henry Dawson over the edge into his all out effort to rescue some American 4Fs (his equivalent of 1915's Belgians), with 4F natural - impure- penicillin, as his rebuke to uncaring America.....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)