A Presbyterian with a Monstrance of Penicillium Mold

Devout Presbyterian layperson and wartime penicillin researcher Gladys Hobby recounts in her book "Penicillin : Meeting The Challenge" of  her rounds carrying a petri dish containing a big circular 'wedged' penicillium mold, every day through the wards at Presbyterian-Columbia Hospital.

This daily pilgrimage served no medical or scientific purpose, but it did serve the moral purpose of helping to sustain the spirits of the young SBE patients there.

They all knew that faced imminent and inevitable death from their disease, unless the tiny team of which she was a part of could produce in time enough of the natural penicillin to save their lives.

Anyone who has even seen an artistic rendering of  such 'wedged' penicillium mold and an artistic rendering of a Monstrance is immediately struck, as I was, that the two paintings are very hard to tell apart.

As a Catholic, I particularly relish the image of a Calvinist Protestant dutifully carrying a monstrance, so alien to her religious traditions ( and albeit a monstrance of penicillin-hope), daily through the pain-filled wards.

Truly, God works in mysterious ways ....

Dawson rebukes the "bystanders" of the Allied "coalition of the UN-willing"

In 1939, the British and French empires were initially unwilling to honour even the letter of their solemn pledge to come to the aid of Poland if it was attacked.

And they remained in no mood to truly honour the spirit of that pledge and provide serious help to the Poles.

But - pushed by some bold MPs in the British Parliament - they at least (and at last) declared war on Hitler and thus began the formation of the coalition of people that finally stopped him.

And these two empires did so without themselves being attacked by Hitler's forces.

Let us always honour them for at least that.

For all the other nations in the ultimately victorious Allied "Coalition of the Unwilling" only took up arms against Hitler when his forces attacked their own nation.

And then they defended their homeland against him with a fiery determination.

Militarily impressive but morally indefensible.

Because until then, the sight of Hitler (and Mussolini and Tojo) attacking neighbour after neighbour the previous ten years had left the bulk of these people strangely unmoved.

They loved their own collectivity (group-love) oh fully well , but not their neighbours (no agape self-less love for them).

Often their narrow group-love went beyond the indifference of bystanders to an active dislike of neighbours as a collectivity and as individuals.

So the battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil would have had very few participants, if Hitler and his Axis trio had only restrained themselves.

Just a few aggressors, a few victims and a few defenders ----- along with a whole bunch of "bystanders" , as such conduct is referred to in books on the (Jewish) Holocaust.

Maybe it is past due time that we extend the use of this term "bystander" to cover the conduct of most people on most aspects of WWII - in particular their global inaction during the long ,slow buildup to the formal declaration of war.

We bystanders stood back and did nothing while Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ,Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece and Yugoslavia got gobbled up by bigger bully neighbours.

It took two Axis mistakes to finally get the American people into the ultimate fight of good versus evil .

One was the stupid Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbour along with the British and Dutch eastern empires , and the other was the even stupider personal decision of Hitler to declare war on America.

So there never was any internal moral impulse that moved the bulk of Americans to 'do the right thing'.

But individual Americans did try to do the right thing : I intend to focus on the largely unknown agape efforts of Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson.

Conventionally, Agape, the English word, means openness in general, including openness to new experiences and ideas ; Agape, the Greek word, means openness to others' needs .

My sense of Dawson's efforts was that his agape-ness showed a very broad 'openness to others' ,  open both to their individual needs and to their individual experiences and ideas.

His WWI efforts to help those wounded in combat extended to his 1930s and 1940s concern for the forgotten institutionalized chronically ill.

He was clearly open to others in need ; this is why he started to grow his own penicillin to try and save the dying SBE patients.

They had been abandoned to die by an American wartime medical establishment seeking to emulate how the wartime Nazis would treat their own SBE patients.

But Dawson was open to the pioneering idea of using natural penicillin made by the lowly penicillium mold .

All the other doctors expected penicillin could only be made by man-made efforts.

I think he did so because his studies on commensal oral bacteria had opened his eyes to the versatility of the humblest types of lifeforms.

Because when we approach others in a spirit of Dawson-like agape-ness, we not only seek to help them when they are in trouble, we also cherish them when they are not - because they have interesting ideas and experiences that we do not have and we are never smug that our group has all the answers.

Agape-ness gives us clarity as well as charity....

WWII : excessive group-love led to excessive groupthink

In my previous postings over the past few years, I have tried - separately - to indicate that the horrors of WWII were caused by excessive group-love and by excessive groupthink : I now realize both are bound intimately together.

The Age of Modernity (1870s to 1960s) was exemplified above all by a lack of charity and a lack of clarity.

By excessive group-love, I mean an inability to regard others others outside your nationality, ethnicity, race , class or religion as worthy of concern and compassion.

It is why most nations and most people choose to remain neutral in WWII, even as the greatest evil ever known gobbled up small nation after small nation, unless they themselves were directly attacked.

But the Allied willingness - even eagerness - to bomb and bombard a hundred thousand civilians to death in occupied Europe and Asia - people supposedly on the Allied side, does not just stem just from a group-love disregard for others.

It also stems from the Allies' prewar groupthink that touted strategic aerial bombing and naval blockading as the fastest, cheapest way to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini.

It hadn't worked in WWI - the evidence was already there if you were willing to look - and it prolonged rather than hastened the end to the misery of WWII.

But groupthink cherry-picks from a mass of conflicting evidence only that which fits their rhetorical-cum-scientific thesis.

WWII still holds powerful lessons for all of us - particularly for new emerging giants like Brazil and India where the powerful middle class still disdains their own poorer citizens as less than human.

Other people may appear simple-minded, small, weak, ill, dark, dirty, and poor but they are actually are as fully complex and interesting as we are.

In addition they hold useful gene combinations we don't have and would do well to preserve.

They definitely have different viewpoints we would do well to consider.

An unwillingness to open our hearts to other people goes hand in glove with an unwillingness to open our minds to other ideas.

Reality out there has always been and always will be highly dynamic and uncertain : a diversity of peoples and a diversity of ideas is the best way that humanity can survive life's challenges.

At least I think that is what Henry Dawson thought when he embarked upon his project to de-weaponize penicillin and other so called "war-medicines"....

Some conversations, a couple should never have to have...

It was a private conversation , so we can only imagine what was said, based upon our knowledge of the events discussed and the personalities of the pair.

Marjorie, always a bit of a coquette , never more than when she has news like this, came in to talk to Henry just before New Year's Eve 1940 :

"I've been to see the doctor and..." a teasing, girlish lilt leaves the sentence unfinished.

Henry has a more subdued personality while also being much more intense. With a ready wit.

A dry,wry ,sardonic sort of wit, very much in the scottish presbyterian style.

So typically he simply says, in a quiet throwaway voice:

"...And so have I..."

Marjorie, the flow of her expected storytelling interrupted, reacts with surprise :

"Why Henry, whatever for ?!"

(Because after all, Henry himself was a highly regarded medical doctor.)

"No. Marjorie, you go first."

Marjorie proceeds to tell Henry the hardly unexpected news, given her obvious manner : they are to have a new baby, in September or October of next year.

It will be their third - a late child, because their others (Shirley and Keith) were born in 1928 and 1930.

Marjorie will be almost 38 when the baby is born, Henry just turned 45.

But parents their age are much more likely to immediately start calculating just how old they will be when baby is in some expensive university.

No couples more so than the Dawsons, themselves both were educators and very well (and very expensively) educated.

Both are likely to be retired by the time this third baby finishes its first of several degrees.

Yet it was already looking like they won't have enough money to provide a good education to their two existing children.

In fact it was the only issue the two ever fought about.

"You're always helping other people's children - isn't past due time you started helping your own children ? By opening a downtown private practise like all your friends ?"

Part of the problem was that a post-graduate education takes time and money and so Henry was 33 before he had his first steady job, and that at the very bottom of the academic hierarchy.

He had only gotten tenure as a professor four years earlier, at the last possible opportunity : obviously then he was not one set for the fast advancement lane.

His real problem - if there was one - was he lived only for his science work and had no aptitude for well paid medical administration or making lots of money working with well-to-do private patients.

Marjorie had a job but it was low paying and her obviously good education and drive had to be set against the fact she had a severe congenital hip defect, which despite many childhood operation hadn't been able to be set right.

She needed a cane sometimes, and a special driving license, and the problem was only going to get worse with time.

But enough about the good news.

There was no way to sugarcoat Dawson's news and he wasn't inclined to either over-dramatitize it or lie about it.

(To his wife anyway, his children needn't have this hanging over their crucial teenage years.)

"You remember the odd way my eyes and face have been looking the last month ?"

Marjorie had .

But she had put it down to Henry trying to do his day job and be a good father and husband --- while simultaneously completing the editing of the big book, deal with his father's recent death and above all, by throwing himself headfirst into his latest scientific project.

Oh the Project ! Above all, Henry's unilateral snap decision to advance its pace by about three months : the straw that broke the camel's back, in Marjorie's mind.

Marjorie was not alone in thinking he should have gone slow on his latest project , at least until the big book was back from the printers and in the subscribers' hands.

But Henry had been unmoved, saying death couldn't wait until the beginning of the next semester.

So now this.

"Well", said Henry, "I read a little." " On the possible causes of those - unusual  - set of facial features, because I had never seen anything like them before as a doctor."

"After just a bit of reading, I quickly went to see a specialist - a neurologist."

"Oh."

"It is early days and there be another explanation , or it might only be a minor version of these diseases - but it is starting to look like either a brain tumour or MG : Myasthenia Gravis..."

A quiet, in-drawing, "oh" from Marjorie.

But Henry wasn't quite finished:

"...and I hope to God, its a brain tumour."

A much louder "OH!" this time from Marjorie, because what could be worse than brain tumours ?

Brain tumours, with their intensely painful headaches and their usual quick deaths, possible operation or not.

But what is MG - or rather more importantly, what was MG as seen from the point of view of 1940?

In 1940, it is now certain that many people had mild cases of MG but never saw the inside of a hospital about it . They never knew they had it and generally as long a life as anyone else.

It was not easy to diagnose this autoimmune disease in 1940.

We now know that it happens when our own body creates antibodies that inadvertently interrupts the chemical process that sends signals along our nerves.

But we still don't know what agent triggers the body to create such antibodies in the first place.

It is easiest to detect when it involves the nerves of the eyes and the face : the combination of a flattened smile, distinct facial sagging and drooping eyes is pretty unique.

Repeated use of these nerves and muscles appears to 'tire them', though what is actually happening is a build-up of the antibodies at the nerve interceptors.

Frequent rest periods will stop this process and restore these nerves and muscles' function and the face will appear normal looking --- for a while, until the build-up occurs again.

But often the mouth muscles are involved and then we see a nasal voice and uncontrollable drooling.

It is hard to get a good cough and it becomes difficult to swallow water or food successfully.

Despite this, there is no loss of reflexes, no lack of the senses mental or physical ,no lack of coordination and above all no generalized sense of fatigue.

The disease is not 'progressive' itself ,(progressively getting worse over time), and seems to go away after these localized tired muscles are rested.

So why did a Canadian study, published at the time of Dawson's disease ,discover that on average MG patients lived only four and a half years and had a miserable and painful life over that period ?

The key word is "patient" : only those with severe enough symptoms to become hospital MG patients were counted in those statistics and these patients almost all had bulbar muscle and sometimes even respiratory muscle involvement, in addition to eye and facial issues.

The bulbar muscle affects above all that complicated dance we must all do, all the time, whenever we attempt to swallow and breath at the same time.

Mess it up and food and water end up our nose or in our lungs and we become prone to death by pneumonia either from bacteria or from faulty aspiration of solids into our lungs.

Call this death from the top of the lung.

Some patients even have reduced function of the various 'outside' muscles that support lung function : the muscles of the diaphragm, thoracic and upper airway. Call this death from the bottom of the lung.

By 1940, most patients that were diagnosed with the severe forms of MG and who lived very near good medical care survived the first few of what were called immediately life-threatening "MG Crisis." (Basically a breathing crisis.)

But each crisis left damage to lung and heart and so while the disease itself wasn't really "progressively getting worse", one still died a painfully slow death from the side affects, as each repeated crisis left one more vulnerable to the next one.

By 1940, there was a drug that helped, but its side affects were bad enough ,particularly as correct dosage was in an early stage , to make many patients wish for the quick,quiet release of death instead.

Also by 1940, there was treatment in iron lungs - only decades later was it realized this made the condition fatally worse ,not better, because the air pressure process was moving in the wrong direction (it was negative not positive.)

Unfortunately, this single simple change (a flick of a switch) came too late to save thousands; not arriving at his Henry's own Presbyterian Columbia hospital, for example, until 1962.

Finally by 1940 a brand new surgery process showed a cure for about a half of the severe cases - the other unaffected half were mostly men in Henry's age bracket, for whom it did nothing and only left them further weakened by a major operation.

Still in 1940, there was a flicker of hope, for even the most severe examples of MG.

It was the simple fact that drug, iron lung treatment and surgery were all literally brand new and could only be expected to improve dramatically over time and perhaps spur even better ideas.

If 1940 MG patients could totally change their lifestyle, they might live long enough to be around for the better treatments when they arrived.

But when Marjorie asked Henry what did a patient need to avoid to be spared the worst of MG, she had to cry out in anger.

The things be avoided were all the things that Henry liked to do in excess !

Always had, always would :

Repetitious eye and muscle use, such as reading medical journals, peering into microscopes or talking with patients to get detailed patient histories.

Working long hours into the evenings, weekends and holidays, without proper food ,water or rest, in hot chemical-filled atmospheres.

Working in environments where virulent throat and lung bacteria are common.

Emotional work-related stress. 

"Henry, you just have to stop all your involvement in this project - leave it to someone else - think of your children, above all the new baby."

"I don't want to be raising three kids on my own in four and a half years , not on my tiny salary and this bad hip."

Marjorie was entirely typical of people all around the world in 1940 and it was people like Henry who were - Thank God ! -  the lonely exception.

She cared, truly cared, for example, about all people starving in the French and later Greek famines.

But she was like Henry's colleagues who admired his moral sense but decried his lack of a sense of proportion , of knowing when to stop.

"You've made your point - and it is a good one - but now it is time to move on."

Henry was willing, even eager, to move on - or even more likely not to have gotten involved in the first place - if only there was someone else to do the job right.

For Henry Dawson was no volunteer, no charismatic leader at the front line, spurring others on.

But he was of a type, a not un-common type : a 'stepper into breaches' -------- but only when he was needed.

"If I stepped back, you know that this part of the project would die."

"Sorry, bad choice of words - those young lads in Ward G-East would die."

"I do care about my family and friends, but someone in this darned world has to also care about strangers too."

So, with eyes badly drooping but jaw firmly set, Henry wearily got up.

He had a needle to give ; a very special needle of his very special new home grown drug.

The needle won't contain much of the drug despite months of unremitting hard work and it probably won't save this particular patient.

But it offered the negro lad hope and shown him at least someone cared .

After he gave the youth his needle, Dawson would sit for him a while - not just to see if it had an effect , though that is what he told his colleagues.

He would sit with him because the young man was all alone and he was dying and because it was New Year's Eve.

The young man would be all alone and dying and all around him he could hear the sounds of young student nurses and young student doctors merrily celebrating new beginnings and the New Year.

So Dawson would sit with him through the celebrations and talk with him, maybe share a little something with him.

And do so with dignity : because now he , too, would grow to know what a re-occurring ever-worsening fatal disease feels like.

From the inside.

So there they sat, in the dark of New Year's Morning, January 1st 1941 : dead men , waiting .....

Is Oscar Schindler proof that God has a sense of humour ?

The fact that the scoundrel Schindler personally rescued more Jews than did almost any canonized or beatified "Prince of the Church" is a particular vivid example of an ancient Bible claim.

The Bible repeatedly contends that God deliberately chooses to use the most weak, foolish and the broken of individuals to confound the Wise and Mighty, whenever these powerful beings fail to live up to their advance moral billing.

Almost all of the Princes of almost all the Faiths proved to be desk bureaucrats , rather than martyrs,  at this extreme junction of Good confronting Absolute Evil.

They were determined that their church structure survive as an institution, even if it had to be at the cost of emptying out all their church's ethical teachings.

Another example, perhaps, of God's sense of humour : the fact that some publicly avowed anti-semetics became leaders in the efforts to save Jews from Hitler !

Despite disliking these people individually and collectively, they still struggled to save them as fellow ( if "useless") beings.

Schindler, along with tens of thousands of others, broke Nazi laws and would have been executed if caught, because he operated inside occupied Nazi Europe.

In the rest of the world, probably only a few hundred in total risked, at most, their careers and social reputations when they broke or bent their country's immigration laws to bring out Jews ( or other refugees) from the fires of Hell.

One wants to ask two questions ; why so few when the risks were so much lower AND what personality features led them to become the rare exception ?

Despite death staring them in the face, many in Europe paradoxically had an easier opportunity to save Jews , for the potentially saveable Jewish family just lived next door.

Only a few in the rest of the world had the money, time and connections to be effective 'rescue operators' in the remaining Neutral nations that bordered Occupied Europe.

Today, millions worldwide can easily take to the nearest street to protest , before TV cameras, about an remote injustice - all doing their small bit to achieve an enormous result.

But in the 1930s and 19940s, street protests seemed something only Communists and Fascist-Nazis did : mostly  being deliberately staged street brawls between the two .

If potential protesters from any nations could have done it, culturally, even in wartime, it was Americans, yet even there any street marches on anything were extremely rare.

Street protests were not yet, culturally, a 'middle class' thing to do (and didn't become so until the mass European and North American protests against nuclear war in the mid-1980s , forty years later.)

The answer to the second question is that the people who put in extraordinary efforts to rescue all kinds of refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, operating in the free world, are usually described by the academics who have studied their biographies as already being 'outsiders' , thanks to their ongoing resistance to some institution or other in their own countries.

This seems to have made it easier for them to contemplate breaking the national laws to get the refugees in.

This makes one wonder if Dr Henry Dawson's outsider status revolved around scientific differences he had over the validity of American  War medicine replacing American Social medicine in a time of crisis.

(Dawson rescued 'The 4Fs of the 4Fs', patients dying from SBE, from death by deliberate medical establishment neglect, during WWII : de-weaponizing penicillin in the process.)

War medicine's underlying scientific assumption was that Nature had shown that the Bigger were better than the small and the weak, so that the big replacing the small was not just inevitable, it was also beneficial overall.

War medicine just hastened a process that was not just inevitable anyway but was better for all.

Dawson, through his study of R,S,M,L and V forms of oral commensal strep bacteria, had perhaps grown to see that the most ancient form of life, the bacteria, hadn't died out over billions of years, despite being small and weak and simple.

They were surviving, nay flourishing , and it just might be because they did not evolve the ability to kill-off their chronically weakened and weirdly mutated mates.

In this horizontally-oriented Evolution, the avirulent and the weak bacteria were not second-rate, but rather were just another(equal) part of a vast potential genetic pool, to help bacteria instantly response to changes in an ever dynamic world via Horizontal Gene Transfer.

Somehow, he might have mentally transferred this sense of the value of retaining a bigger genetic pool over to the worthiness of keeping even SBE 4Fs alive inside a Total War.

Sickle cell humans are a mutation that has remained in the human genetic pool, because while it causes one weakening disease, it also reduces the possibility of another life-ending disease.

But in addition,we should, but usually don't, recognize that every human offers up not just more variety to the human gene pool, they also contribute more variety to the human culture and happiness pool.

Every male scientist in 1941 who claimed that severely retarded children with a permanent mental age of only one were suffering and caused their parents to suffer and so deserved a merciful death by lethal injection , had obviously never played with their own one year old children.

( In fact, many a normal parent happens to wish their kids remained forever at age one when they were at their most loveable and obedient behavior ! )

Dawson with his own new infant, might have been struck anew by the absurdity of this old chestnut and became determined to confound the Dr Foster Kennedys of this world.

At least, this is all food for thought....

WWII : more troops , longer war, but only 1/3 number of VCs

Canada had almost twice as many troops in WWII as in WWI, and it was a world-wide war that lasted 50% longer than the first war, but despite all this, Canada had less than 1/3 as many VC winners.

It is only given for bravery in face of the enemy, so the fact that  combat was far more mechanized in WWII ( ie fought at long distances from the enemy)  is often offered up as the excuse.

Dropping bombs from 20,000 ft might seem then to eliminate you from ever receiving a VC in theory --- but not in practise.

Bomber crews actually did get VCs ---- for trying to save fellow crew members  high up in the flak-filled skies.

The other view - mine anyway - is that people were less selflessly brave, over all,  in WWII than in the earlier war.

The character of virtually all the world's western-influenced population changed - for the worse - after WWI .

But not as a result of WWI , merely as the result of death carrying off the holders of older Victorian views on selflessness, replaced by the young bearers of the up-to-date, modernist , scientific, view of the proper morality:

"Be quick to defend your own national group to the death (and beyond) - but ignore or despise all others' cries for help."

In the 1930s and early 1940s, Philip Marlowe's mean streets were world wide......

Bystanders make Bullies : in schoolyards or in World Wars

When Tojo, Mussolini and Hitler first crawled out from under their rocks and set to work, the nations they led were relatively weak and ally-less, particularly compared to the combined 'rest of the world', a world that professed to oppose them root and branch.

But when in fact that whole wide world stood around the schoolyard just watching as bystanders ,without intervening, we gave the bad guys their very first triumph.


Albeit these were triumphs over very small victims, but it gave them the confidence to move on and upwards, to successfully take on ever bigger victims and to take on ever more of them at the same time.

The three were always bullies-in-waiting, from birth, but it was the in-actions of we bystanders which gave them room to grow in self confidence, brutality and hubris.

In  bullyboy genocide, it always takes two types to tango :  one active bully and many in-active bystanders...