The acorn becomes an oak : October 16th 1940

Adults of a certain age were all quite small when they first learned the acute difference between those two very similar sounding medical words that adults like to use : antiseptic and antibiotic.

For when we scratched our knee falling off our trike, Mom washed it, put an orange antiseptic that stung like heck and then gave us a kiss and a cookie.

We had long forgotten the spill before the orange washed off and the scratch healed.

But then one dread-filled summer's afternoon, the whole house was extremely tense as neighbours filed in. whispering low.

"Spinal Meningitis".

Suddenly old Dr Mattison, who never ever made housecalls, came speeding up the drive on two wheels and ran up the steps two at a time, dragging his black bag.

Without as much as even a curt hello, he drew a big needle out of his bag and plunged it deep into little sister and held his thumb full down until it emptied.

Then, after a profound release of pent up air, he casually tapped Mom on the shoulder and in an unnaturally loud voice said , "Marg, where's your manners, how about a cuppa ?"

No one but no one ever dared call Mom 'Marg' and she looked momentarily shocked,  but then she shook all over, gave off a relieved laugh and scurried off to the kitchen.

And for the first and only time in your life, you saw Dad burst into tears, balled like a baby, as Doctor Mattison patted baby sister's on the head repeatedly and said, "you'll be alright" until the ambulance arrived.

That is the difference an antibiotic makes.

But just as even a mighty oak started as a tiny acorn, so too the most famous of all antibiotics, penicillin, started out as a harmless antiseptic rather than a mighty life-saving antibiotic.

For the first twelve years of its existence as a medicine, its prolonged childhood of the soul, penicillin was only used occasionally, dabbed as an antiseptic on external infections, with usually modest results.

But seventy five years this Fall, on October 16th 1940, at NYC's famous Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre, Penicillin finally climbed out of short pants and into long pants as it was injected for the very first time in a dying patient with the intention of saving his life.

That patient, Charles Aronson, was a young man dying of then invariably fatal SBE, the form of heart valve disease caused by earlier bouts of Rheumatic Fever.

That pioneering dose of penicillin, ushering in our present Age of Antibiotics, must of helped because unexpectedly Charles lived and returned to a useful working life.

An in that instant, an acorn became an oak....

His agape love had no hometown....

(Martin) Henry Dawson was born in Truro but spent his formative years going to school in Halifax and Montreal or saving lives and fighting Huns in World War One France.

He later worked in hospitals in Kentucky and in New York City.

In WWII, he gave up his own life to try and save hundreds of thousands of people - people totally unknown to him and from all over the world - who were dying (needlessly) of subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) .

His actions ultimately has benefitted ten billion of us , so far, since 1940 - via a form of herd immunity generated when penicillin, thanks largely to Henry, became a inexpensive public domain lifesaver.

Whatever Henry did, Henry did by himself - it was not done by the community of his birth, Truro.

So honour him in Truro, if you want ,  but also honour him everywhere valour earns acclaim ...

Needed : a MORAL history of Wartime Penicillin

SBE fatal to heart valves

It is impossible to write a truthful scientific or economic history of how wartime natural penicillin production became the template for today's enormous biotechnology industry.

Not impossible to write such histories - dozens of historians have already done so.

 Just not possible to do the job --- with any faithfulness to the actual contemporary record --- through those prisms.

Penicillin History has been Whig History....

By artfully cutting and pasting bits of the contemporary primary record it is possible to recast everything, even from that day in September 1928 when Fleming first saw that funny mold in his petri dish, as moving steadily and inevitably forward to the time when billions of units of natural produced systemic penicillin daily rolled off the line at Pfizer in the early Spring of 1944 - with natural (microbe produced) antibiotics being the norm to this day.

But in fact, most of the early1940s scientific, medical and commercial establishment was stunned into silence when penicillin ended up (a) suddenly proven up as the world's best-ever systemic life-saver and (b) being produced cheaply, abundantly and reliably - and produced only thanks to microbes to boot.

The 15 years up to 1944 had seen no new scientific advances or new commercial reasons to suddenly turn to penicillin as a systemic/lifesaver or to favour its production by natural (microbial) means  ---- over the situation as Alexander Fleming had described it in his first paper of  June 1929.

The scientific and commercial arguments against natural systemic penicillin in mass production were as good in March 1944 as they had been in March 1929, 15 years earlier.

Only the moral situation had changed.

All the scientific, medical and commercial reasons were still valid against Henry Dawson for staking his life to cure invariably fatal SBE with natural systemic penicillin and against "John L" Smith of Pfizer for staking his company to help him.

But their personal moral reasons for doing so were overwhelming to these two men and so they attempted and achieved the impossible.

 And our whole world was changed for the better, forever, as a result of those two - individual - moral decisions.....