"The penicillin shot heard around the world" (Washington Heights , October 16th 1940) changed our entire world , for the better , forever.
But it almost didn't happened.
If Dr Dawson had been content (as most of the world's doctors were) to wait for the wartime British (led by Fleming and Florey) to totally synthesize (patentable) penicillin, the world would still be waiting for the first mass produced antibiotic these 75 years later.
Thank God the other Manhattan Project rescued natural penicillin from the British.
Because New York got natural penicillin into mass production well before WWII was over, when it was most needed , and then turned that Mother Nature-produced technology into the cornerstone of our entire antibiotic defences against death from microbes.
Move over Concord ( or is it Lexington ?!) ...
Sunday, July 27, 2014
The Stone the Builders Rejected : how New York saved natural penicillin antibiotics from the British
In London in 1928 , Sir Alexander Fleming discovered natural penicillin as a potential antibiotic but then rejected it - saying it would only be useful if chemically synthesized and even then only as a external antiseptic.
Sir Howard Florey at Oxford, together with chemist Sir Ernst Chain, took up Fleming's challenge to chemically synthesize penicillin and for a decade - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, his lab chased the chimera of totally synthesized commercial penicillin without any success.
All three men - and these three men alone - got the Nobel Prize for penicillin .
This despite the fact that the penicillin that actually saves lives is still natural in origin, not synthetic , and is a general antibiotic and not a external antiseptic --- never before or since has abject failure been so grandly rewarded !
Sir Howard Florey at Oxford, together with chemist Sir Ernst Chain, took up Fleming's challenge to chemically synthesize penicillin and for a decade - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, his lab chased the chimera of totally synthesized commercial penicillin without any success.
All three men - and these three men alone - got the Nobel Prize for penicillin .
This despite the fact that the penicillin that actually saves lives is still natural in origin, not synthetic , and is a general antibiotic and not a external antiseptic --- never before or since has abject failure been so grandly rewarded !
Saturday, July 26, 2014
Seemingly, educated white Allied males would prefer to lose to white educated Nazi males - rather than see war won thanks to darkies , women, the small and the weak
Britons - to this day - never tire of telling us that the British Empire troops couldn't contest German troops on German soil till January 1945 because the empire could never come close to matching the manpower of the Third Reich .
Particularly as a successful offensive effort usually needs to outnumber the defenders three to one.
And if you only count the white population of the British Empire that is true (but even there, only narrowly so.)
But India alone - despite feeling badly mistreated by Britain - raised a volunteer army of six million.
Particularly as a successful offensive effort usually needs to outnumber the defenders three to one.
And if you only count the white population of the British Empire that is true (but even there, only narrowly so.)
But India alone - despite feeling badly mistreated by Britain - raised a volunteer army of six million.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Manhattan gave the world the first life-saving penicillin shot - as well as the first death-dealing A-Bomb
Don't let terrorists like Ramzi Yousef limit Manhattan's wartime role to killing (and here I quote his justification for blowing up the twin towers of the World Trade Centre) "250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki".
Let us never forget that Manhattan also gave the world its first ever penicillin shots 75 years ago next year.
New York then went on to provide the wartime world with the biggest chunk of its life saving penicillin and in the process developed the new micro-engineering technology used by all the world ever since to make all antibiotics.
It did so by returning to 'the stone the (British) builders had rejected' ---- and made it the cornerstone of our world of antibiotic lifesavers.
Let us never forget that Manhattan also gave the world its first ever penicillin shots 75 years ago next year.
New York then went on to provide the wartime world with the biggest chunk of its life saving penicillin and in the process developed the new micro-engineering technology used by all the world ever since to make all antibiotics.
It did so by returning to 'the stone the (British) builders had rejected' ---- and made it the cornerstone of our world of antibiotic lifesavers.
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Memo to RAMZI YOUSEF : Wartime Manhattan gave the world's first penicillin shots --- as well as the world's first A-bomb
Manhattan's first ever penicillin shots (75 years ago next October 16th 2015) were a deliberate act of provocation by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.
Penicillin shots across the bow against the Allied medical establishment for using the excuse of war medicine preparation to dismiss efforts of social medicine directed at the poor and minorities.
He felt that penicillin should be deliberately given a high enough wartime production priority to be able to give penicillin to all those in wartime dying from lack of it .
This would serve as a very public rebuttal to the Axis who felt only the 'fit' from the 'fittest' nations deserved medicine, food and indeed life itself.
Wartime penicillin for all the Allied armed forces and civilians , as well as for Allied and enemy POWs, and the people in Neutral lands , even via the Red Cross into the occupied lands and eventually used to save the lives of former enemies.
The aftershock from Manhattan's first penicillin shots radiated out in ever-widening circles.
The then modest biological firm of Pfizer , from Brooklyn , was quickly recruited by news of those historical first shots and began helping out Dawson.
But first Dawson had to demonstrate success against a hitherto invariable fatal disease (SBE) to really suggest what penicillin might do if it was mass produced.
He did so, starting in November 1942, by 'going off the reservation' and used some OSRD controlled penicillin to save a group of women dying of SBE - something the OSRD strictly forbade - which meant abandoning them to a certain death.
But the astounding success he had with SBE was enough evidence for Dawson's former patient , industrialist Floyd Odlum , to suggest to his boss at the powerful (the New Deal-oriented) War Production Board (WPB) that it greatly up the original production proposed by its rival Vannevar Bush's OSRD .
But Big Pharma sat on its hands, convinced it could make much more money for a much smaller investment (and without a need to learn new skills) when it had synthetic (aka patentable) penicillin instead of this dangerous natural penicillin - which could be made by any competitor.
Such as Dawson - whose modest hospital pilot plant was for several months , the world's "biggest" penicillin producer !
Dawson had certainly convinced a fellow colleague and fellow WWI vet, Dr Rudolph (Rudy) N Schullinger in the Surgical Service of his hospital.
Rudy went overseas in mid 1942 with the CUMC's wartime Second General Hospital unit to Oxford England. Dawson had full-blown Myasthenia Gravis (MG) by that date or he would have been the Lab Chief for that military hospital.
Rudy Schullinger tried very hard to get some of the OSRD's penicillin sent into the European Theatre of War so he could both treat wounded American troops in wartime and contribute the results to the ongoing research pool.
Despite repeated entreaties the OSRD would have done of it !
Thankfully Schullinger's protests finally did pull some some penicillin out of the hands of stay-at-home civilian researchers and into the frontlines (before the war ended).
Though it was only to be used to treat american troops , he broke Regulations and used a good deal of it to save the life of a British soldier dying of the same disease Dawson was trying to cure - endocarditis !
(Dawson's "Acting Up" was infectious .)
Then another former patient , med resident Dr Dante Colitti , threw an emotional spanner in the works - suggesting to the parents of a dying two year old girl from Queens called Patty Malone that they call up Citizen Hearst's biggest paper and beg them to get penicillin the OSRD was denying her.
The Hearst media empire's emotional accounts of rushing the penicillin to the little girl with "just seven hours to spare" gripped first a nation and then a world.
It gripped - in particular - the hearts of Mr and Mrs John L Smith . They had lost a young girl to meningitis that mass produced penicillin - as Dr Dawson always insisted - could easily have cured.
The normally hyper-cautious Smith - the boss of Pfizer - now threw all caution to the wind - ordering his firm to build the world's first really big penicillin plant in as few months as a 24/7 schedule could produce.
Bolder yet - he decided to use the penicillin allocated to his firm to do synthetic studies (to secure a share of the future patents) to save the lives of people in New York with SBE that his government was refusing to save.
A mysterious woman (probably the otherwise very upright Gladys Hobby) would arriving offering bottles of penicillin without labels to doctors like Ward J MacNeal and Leo Loewe with the oblique suggestion it might just help their SBE patients - and then disappear.
At the time it seemed clear to people inside Big Pharma that Smith had recklessly threw away a certainty of big future profits for Pfizer, just to help save the lives of a few worthless nobodies.
But his - and our - salvation lay in the most unlikeliest of all places : the former eugenic laboratories at Cold Spring Harbour in Long Island , once one of the intellectual godfathers to the Nazi holocausts agains Jews, Slavs and the 'unfit'.
For several years, its new (non-eugenically oriented) director Milislav Demerec had pleaded in vain with Vannevar Bush's OSRD to let him help develop more productive natural strains of penicillin-producing penicillium.
But the OSRD - like Florey and Fleming in England - had its heart set on a man-made synthetic triumph with penicillin - they had no intention to share the glory with anyone small and weak - let alone microbes.
Once again , the WPB saved the day. Its Office for Production Research and Development (OPRD) had about one hundredth the budget and influence of Vannevar Bush's better known Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).
But the OPRD had street smarts in spades and it wisely gave a tiny amount of money and a lot of morale-boosting support to Demerec's and the spectacular results has repaid that debt a million fold and more ever since.
Demerec gave the penicillium spores a nasty sunburn under an ordinary tanning lamp - most died from the radiation.
But a few survived and were soon producing ten - then one hundred and today 50,000 times as much penicillin from the same amount of feedstock as Fleming's original strain (and Fleming's was an extraordinarily good natural producer !)
Yet Demerec remains the most unsung among all the unsung true heroes of the wartime penicillin story : a case once again where the moral scum - not the moral cream - rises to the top of the fame charts.
Now Dawson's team wasn't the only team in New York thumbing their nose at Big Pharma and Big Medicine by starting a penicillin grow-op.
A doubting doctor John Mahoney out on Staten Island Marine Hospital questioned the OSRD's claim that penicillin couldn't cure syphilis .
With unofficial help from Dawson's team they started growing their own and tested their theory on "Easter" Bunnies (as they told their innocent children) that they kept in their home garages over the Easter holidays !
The public clamour from Doctor Mom for "more penicillin now !" that had started with the story of Patty Malone really took off with the thought that with penicillin families need no longer be threatened with VD from errant husbands.
We can't negate the atomic Manhattan Project and Hiroshima.
But Manhattan Penicillin ,the other Manhattan Project , can point with pride to the fact that 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day (in its first ever mass clinical trial) came from Pfizer's Marcy Avenue Brooklyn plant and that plant went on to supply the biggest chunk of the world's penicillin for the rest of the war.
So much penicillin that America - not the Britain of Nobel prize winners Florey and Fleming ( who were still chasing the decade old chimera of synthetic penicillin and only then mass production) - supplying most of the penicillin for the Allied, Neutral, occupied and Enemy lands.
And that in turn ushered in a Pax Americana based on diplomatic gifting of abundant New York penicillin.
Dawson's dream of abundant - non-patented - penicillin cheap enough to help all has come true - it is life-saving too cheap to meter, lifesaving far cheaper than bottled water.
It has beaten back age old diseases kept endemic by residing among remote and poor people not reached by clean water, adequate food and proper health care.
As a result a sort of herd immunity has occurred as ten billion of us since 1940 have indirectly had better health from seeing diseases like Rheumatic Fever fade from sight.
No, the 250,000 lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki can never be re-gained by actions in other areas - but I think I have offered up evidence to terrorists like Ramzi Yousef and others that wartime Manhattan was at least as much from Venus as it was from Mars.
And if Manhattan citizens are too modest to blow their own horn about its decisive role in making cheap abundant penicillin available to ALL in a world tired, huddled and wretched - then the rest of us should do it for them.
We can't continue to let a terrorist like Ramzi Yousef be the last word on Manhattan's wartime role ....
Penicillin shots across the bow against the Allied medical establishment for using the excuse of war medicine preparation to dismiss efforts of social medicine directed at the poor and minorities.
He felt that penicillin should be deliberately given a high enough wartime production priority to be able to give penicillin to all those in wartime dying from lack of it .
This would serve as a very public rebuttal to the Axis who felt only the 'fit' from the 'fittest' nations deserved medicine, food and indeed life itself.
Wartime penicillin for all the Allied armed forces and civilians , as well as for Allied and enemy POWs, and the people in Neutral lands , even via the Red Cross into the occupied lands and eventually used to save the lives of former enemies.
The aftershock from Manhattan's first penicillin shots radiated out in ever-widening circles.
The then modest biological firm of Pfizer , from Brooklyn , was quickly recruited by news of those historical first shots and began helping out Dawson.
But first Dawson had to demonstrate success against a hitherto invariable fatal disease (SBE) to really suggest what penicillin might do if it was mass produced.
He did so, starting in November 1942, by 'going off the reservation' and used some OSRD controlled penicillin to save a group of women dying of SBE - something the OSRD strictly forbade - which meant abandoning them to a certain death.
But the astounding success he had with SBE was enough evidence for Dawson's former patient , industrialist Floyd Odlum , to suggest to his boss at the powerful (the New Deal-oriented) War Production Board (WPB) that it greatly up the original production proposed by its rival Vannevar Bush's OSRD .
But Big Pharma sat on its hands, convinced it could make much more money for a much smaller investment (and without a need to learn new skills) when it had synthetic (aka patentable) penicillin instead of this dangerous natural penicillin - which could be made by any competitor.
Such as Dawson - whose modest hospital pilot plant was for several months , the world's "biggest" penicillin producer !
Dawson had certainly convinced a fellow colleague and fellow WWI vet, Dr Rudolph (Rudy) N Schullinger in the Surgical Service of his hospital.
Rudy went overseas in mid 1942 with the CUMC's wartime Second General Hospital unit to Oxford England. Dawson had full-blown Myasthenia Gravis (MG) by that date or he would have been the Lab Chief for that military hospital.
Rudy Schullinger tried very hard to get some of the OSRD's penicillin sent into the European Theatre of War so he could both treat wounded American troops in wartime and contribute the results to the ongoing research pool.
Despite repeated entreaties the OSRD would have done of it !
Thankfully Schullinger's protests finally did pull some some penicillin out of the hands of stay-at-home civilian researchers and into the frontlines (before the war ended).
Though it was only to be used to treat american troops , he broke Regulations and used a good deal of it to save the life of a British soldier dying of the same disease Dawson was trying to cure - endocarditis !
(Dawson's "Acting Up" was infectious .)
Then another former patient , med resident Dr Dante Colitti , threw an emotional spanner in the works - suggesting to the parents of a dying two year old girl from Queens called Patty Malone that they call up Citizen Hearst's biggest paper and beg them to get penicillin the OSRD was denying her.
The Hearst media empire's emotional accounts of rushing the penicillin to the little girl with "just seven hours to spare" gripped first a nation and then a world.
It gripped - in particular - the hearts of Mr and Mrs John L Smith . They had lost a young girl to meningitis that mass produced penicillin - as Dr Dawson always insisted - could easily have cured.
The normally hyper-cautious Smith - the boss of Pfizer - now threw all caution to the wind - ordering his firm to build the world's first really big penicillin plant in as few months as a 24/7 schedule could produce.
Bolder yet - he decided to use the penicillin allocated to his firm to do synthetic studies (to secure a share of the future patents) to save the lives of people in New York with SBE that his government was refusing to save.
A mysterious woman (probably the otherwise very upright Gladys Hobby) would arriving offering bottles of penicillin without labels to doctors like Ward J MacNeal and Leo Loewe with the oblique suggestion it might just help their SBE patients - and then disappear.
At the time it seemed clear to people inside Big Pharma that Smith had recklessly threw away a certainty of big future profits for Pfizer, just to help save the lives of a few worthless nobodies.
But his - and our - salvation lay in the most unlikeliest of all places : the former eugenic laboratories at Cold Spring Harbour in Long Island , once one of the intellectual godfathers to the Nazi holocausts agains Jews, Slavs and the 'unfit'.
For several years, its new (non-eugenically oriented) director Milislav Demerec had pleaded in vain with Vannevar Bush's OSRD to let him help develop more productive natural strains of penicillin-producing penicillium.
But the OSRD - like Florey and Fleming in England - had its heart set on a man-made synthetic triumph with penicillin - they had no intention to share the glory with anyone small and weak - let alone microbes.
Once again , the WPB saved the day. Its Office for Production Research and Development (OPRD) had about one hundredth the budget and influence of Vannevar Bush's better known Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).
But the OPRD had street smarts in spades and it wisely gave a tiny amount of money and a lot of morale-boosting support to Demerec's and the spectacular results has repaid that debt a million fold and more ever since.
Demerec gave the penicillium spores a nasty sunburn under an ordinary tanning lamp - most died from the radiation.
But a few survived and were soon producing ten - then one hundred and today 50,000 times as much penicillin from the same amount of feedstock as Fleming's original strain (and Fleming's was an extraordinarily good natural producer !)
Yet Demerec remains the most unsung among all the unsung true heroes of the wartime penicillin story : a case once again where the moral scum - not the moral cream - rises to the top of the fame charts.
Now Dawson's team wasn't the only team in New York thumbing their nose at Big Pharma and Big Medicine by starting a penicillin grow-op.
A doubting doctor John Mahoney out on Staten Island Marine Hospital questioned the OSRD's claim that penicillin couldn't cure syphilis .
With unofficial help from Dawson's team they started growing their own and tested their theory on "Easter" Bunnies (as they told their innocent children) that they kept in their home garages over the Easter holidays !
The public clamour from Doctor Mom for "more penicillin now !" that had started with the story of Patty Malone really took off with the thought that with penicillin families need no longer be threatened with VD from errant husbands.
We can't negate the atomic Manhattan Project and Hiroshima.
But Manhattan Penicillin ,the other Manhattan Project , can point with pride to the fact that 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day (in its first ever mass clinical trial) came from Pfizer's Marcy Avenue Brooklyn plant and that plant went on to supply the biggest chunk of the world's penicillin for the rest of the war.
So much penicillin that America - not the Britain of Nobel prize winners Florey and Fleming ( who were still chasing the decade old chimera of synthetic penicillin and only then mass production) - supplying most of the penicillin for the Allied, Neutral, occupied and Enemy lands.
And that in turn ushered in a Pax Americana based on diplomatic gifting of abundant New York penicillin.
Dawson's dream of abundant - non-patented - penicillin cheap enough to help all has come true - it is life-saving too cheap to meter, lifesaving far cheaper than bottled water.
It has beaten back age old diseases kept endemic by residing among remote and poor people not reached by clean water, adequate food and proper health care.
As a result a sort of herd immunity has occurred as ten billion of us since 1940 have indirectly had better health from seeing diseases like Rheumatic Fever fade from sight.
No, the 250,000 lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki can never be re-gained by actions in other areas - but I think I have offered up evidence to terrorists like Ramzi Yousef and others that wartime Manhattan was at least as much from Venus as it was from Mars.
And if Manhattan citizens are too modest to blow their own horn about its decisive role in making cheap abundant penicillin available to ALL in a world tired, huddled and wretched - then the rest of us should do it for them.
We can't continue to let a terrorist like Ramzi Yousef be the last word on Manhattan's wartime role ....
Emma Lazarus's message to immigrants : America , if it is about anything , is ALL about second acts ...
F Scott Fitzgerald got it wrong. Not about everything , of course. But the bit about there being 'no second acts in American lives' - that 24/7 bromide of the modern news and entertainment biz.
As Emma Lazarus's own legacy demonstrates , there is plenty of room in America for second and even third acts.
Not really a surprise to readers of the New Testament I suppose.
Or to tens of millions of born again Americans (or to the many fans of Richard M Nixon) .
Emma was actually quite an internationally prominent poet and social activist in her day.
Her poem written to raise funds for the pedestal of the French-donated Statue of Liberty was the definite hit of the fund-raising effort.
But then she took seriously ill with a terminal cancer and so became inactive in America's literary cum social action circles.
Thus, in the lead up to the actual ceremony mounting the statue in New York harbour neither she or her poem was mentioned.
(Again , re-affirming a cliche of the modern news and celebrity biz - you have to be out there all the time self-promoting or you're yesterday's news.)
The poem was also almost totally absent from the many tributes to her on her death in 1887.
No artistic figure , no matter how prominent or how big a seller while alive , remains so unless they created a historically important institution, school of thought or work of art.
That is to say no one remains prominent unless they are taught about in school or college.
One sixty word poem tossed off in an hour, but considered highly suitable for a students' anthology, can easily out-weigh a lifetime spent writing three million profitable words , in this fame game.
Seemingly , Emma lacked that 'hit' .
But in 1903 , a friend of Ms Lazarus , Georgina Schuyler , re-discovered the poem about the statue (The New Colossus) in an used book store.
She succeeded , after a great deal of resistance from Emma's family, in having the last few lines of it engraved on a modest bronze plaque in a corner of the statue.
There it remained un-noticed for another thirty years until a Slovene immigrant and social activist , Louis Adamic , campaigned tirelessly for decades , until his death in 1951 , to turn the poem and the statue into a symbol of how America should still welcome immigrants.
(In 1924, America had closed its doors to all but a handful of immigrants from a handful of nordic protestant countries.)
By 1936, at the fifty year celebration of the statue, FDR's carefully eloquent speech had to take in this new sense of the statue taking in (all) refugees who thereby got a second chance at life in America --- because, in FDR's equally careful bow to the right - America offered expanded liberties (to all those who qualified as good enough to become Americans) - the original meaning of the statue.
Gradually , though still contested today by many on the right, Lazarus's hijacking of the Statue of Liberty's original meaning has won the day.
And what person worldwide would be considered truly educated by others if they instantly failed to know what the words tired, huddled and wretched refer to ?
I have written and spoken before (on my local CBC) about how fragile the early existence of today's universally understood myths often were.
My starting point was simply a passing reference in George F Williston's Saints and Strangers of how during the Revolutionary War , the British took the crucial manuscripts of Governor Bradford, the only real chronicler of the early Plymouth Colony , from out of a Boston church steeple and behind the counter of a humble Halifax grocery store.
There the sheets of paper manuscript detailing the tale of the First Thanksgiving Dinner almost got consumed itself --- as wrappers for greasy pieces of cheese on their way home to hungry post-revolutionary Nova Scotian diners !
This led me to discover the long and windy path to today's universally known account of that first dinner.
So today's story of the first thanksgiving dinner actually is fully faithful to the original event.
However , for most of the 19th century, the story was re-cast as the Indians sending hostile arrows and tomahawks, not peaceful food, to the gathering !
Now I am trying to revive a symbolic tale for Manhattan and America.
True but nevertheless forgotten : Martin Henry Dawson and penicillin-for-all.
His hugely significant role was well noted in the first detailed newspaper and book accounts about wartime penicillin - which coincided with his premature death.
But Dawson had four problems if he wished to have a 'hit' .
He was extremely modest about his role while alive.
He was dead. ( And had no kin or friend who felt like working hard to keep his story alive.)
Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey were alive.
They were total failures in terms of totally failing to do what they intended to do with penicillin versus what America had done so successfully with penicillin.
They were pushy self-promoters. And all of Britain backed them fully in this need to re-cast the history of wartime penicillin as a British triumph.
Academic historians have fully bought into either the Fleming or Florey version .
Though I find it rather noteworthy that generations of Hollywood producers (armed only with cigars rather than doctorates) consider both men's story to be box office poison and have failed to make a movie out of the dramatic events of wartime penicillin.
My efforts might thus seem totally hopeless but for one more bromide from the North American newsroom.
Those heartless bastards in the news and entertainment biz who give you your fleeting 15 minutes of fame and then toss you out like a used condom ?
They love - simply love - a comeback story - clawing your way back out of the grave like a 'where are they now' lazarus.
The latest example - timely this - is Weird Al Yankovic , who write , sings and performs musical video parodies of well known pop songs while sending up pop culture.
The very physically unattractive and supernerdy Yankovic was supposed to remain a one hit wonder from almost 40 years ago - a weird guy playing accordion at a time of heavy metal and punk.
But he hung on in and gradually getting him to parody you
became as crucial to an superstar's ego as dipping your feet in cement in Hollywood or seeing yourself in wax at Madame Tussauds .
This week his latest album debuted at number one in America and the press went crazy --- this just seemed the-paint-by-numbers kit of all comeback stories - even if Weird Al never really left.
Dawson's no prettier than Al - his biting wit not as potent - but morally , his story really can't be beat.
There's hope yet ...
As Emma Lazarus's own legacy demonstrates , there is plenty of room in America for second and even third acts.
Not really a surprise to readers of the New Testament I suppose.
Or to tens of millions of born again Americans (or to the many fans of Richard M Nixon) .
Lazarus arising
Emma was actually quite an internationally prominent poet and social activist in her day.
Her poem written to raise funds for the pedestal of the French-donated Statue of Liberty was the definite hit of the fund-raising effort.
But then she took seriously ill with a terminal cancer and so became inactive in America's literary cum social action circles.
Thus, in the lead up to the actual ceremony mounting the statue in New York harbour neither she or her poem was mentioned.
(Again , re-affirming a cliche of the modern news and celebrity biz - you have to be out there all the time self-promoting or you're yesterday's news.)
The poem was also almost totally absent from the many tributes to her on her death in 1887.
No artistic figure , no matter how prominent or how big a seller while alive , remains so unless they created a historically important institution, school of thought or work of art.
That is to say no one remains prominent unless they are taught about in school or college.
One sixty word poem tossed off in an hour, but considered highly suitable for a students' anthology, can easily out-weigh a lifetime spent writing three million profitable words , in this fame game.
Seemingly , Emma lacked that 'hit' .
But in 1903 , a friend of Ms Lazarus , Georgina Schuyler , re-discovered the poem about the statue (The New Colossus) in an used book store.
She succeeded , after a great deal of resistance from Emma's family, in having the last few lines of it engraved on a modest bronze plaque in a corner of the statue.
There it remained un-noticed for another thirty years until a Slovene immigrant and social activist , Louis Adamic , campaigned tirelessly for decades , until his death in 1951 , to turn the poem and the statue into a symbol of how America should still welcome immigrants.
(In 1924, America had closed its doors to all but a handful of immigrants from a handful of nordic protestant countries.)
By 1936, at the fifty year celebration of the statue, FDR's carefully eloquent speech had to take in this new sense of the statue taking in (all) refugees who thereby got a second chance at life in America --- because, in FDR's equally careful bow to the right - America offered expanded liberties (to all those who qualified as good enough to become Americans) - the original meaning of the statue.
Gradually , though still contested today by many on the right, Lazarus's hijacking of the Statue of Liberty's original meaning has won the day.
And what person worldwide would be considered truly educated by others if they instantly failed to know what the words tired, huddled and wretched refer to ?
I have written and spoken before (on my local CBC) about how fragile the early existence of today's universally understood myths often were.
My starting point was simply a passing reference in George F Williston's Saints and Strangers of how during the Revolutionary War , the British took the crucial manuscripts of Governor Bradford, the only real chronicler of the early Plymouth Colony , from out of a Boston church steeple and behind the counter of a humble Halifax grocery store.
There the sheets of paper manuscript detailing the tale of the First Thanksgiving Dinner almost got consumed itself --- as wrappers for greasy pieces of cheese on their way home to hungry post-revolutionary Nova Scotian diners !
This led me to discover the long and windy path to today's universally known account of that first dinner.
So today's story of the first thanksgiving dinner actually is fully faithful to the original event.
However , for most of the 19th century, the story was re-cast as the Indians sending hostile arrows and tomahawks, not peaceful food, to the gathering !
Now I am trying to revive a symbolic tale for Manhattan and America.
True but nevertheless forgotten : Martin Henry Dawson and penicillin-for-all.
His hugely significant role was well noted in the first detailed newspaper and book accounts about wartime penicillin - which coincided with his premature death.
But Dawson had four problems if he wished to have a 'hit' .
He was extremely modest about his role while alive.
He was dead. ( And had no kin or friend who felt like working hard to keep his story alive.)
Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey were alive.
They were total failures in terms of totally failing to do what they intended to do with penicillin versus what America had done so successfully with penicillin.
They were pushy self-promoters. And all of Britain backed them fully in this need to re-cast the history of wartime penicillin as a British triumph.
Academic historians have fully bought into either the Fleming or Florey version .
Though I find it rather noteworthy that generations of Hollywood producers (armed only with cigars rather than doctorates) consider both men's story to be box office poison and have failed to make a movie out of the dramatic events of wartime penicillin.
My efforts might thus seem totally hopeless but for one more bromide from the North American newsroom.
Those heartless bastards in the news and entertainment biz who give you your fleeting 15 minutes of fame and then toss you out like a used condom ?
They love - simply love - a comeback story - clawing your way back out of the grave like a 'where are they now' lazarus.
The latest example - timely this - is Weird Al Yankovic , who write , sings and performs musical video parodies of well known pop songs while sending up pop culture.
The very physically unattractive and supernerdy Yankovic was supposed to remain a one hit wonder from almost 40 years ago - a weird guy playing accordion at a time of heavy metal and punk.
But he hung on in and gradually getting him to parody you
became as crucial to an superstar's ego as dipping your feet in cement in Hollywood or seeing yourself in wax at Madame Tussauds .
This week his latest album debuted at number one in America and the press went crazy --- this just seemed the-paint-by-numbers kit of all comeback stories - even if Weird Al never really left.
Dawson's no prettier than Al - his biting wit not as potent - but morally , his story really can't be beat.
There's hope yet ...
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Charlie and Miss "H" : these Lazruses of Manhattan defied the odds time and again to offer hope to a war-weary world
"Dead Men Waiting" or "Dead Women Waiting" is the way most staff in hospital regarded the the patients in the Green Wards where earlier Rheumatic Fever sufferers with green strep in their heart valves waited out their turn to die.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was determined that his hand-grown penicillin could help them to beat those odds and return these lazaruses to health , to give them a fair crack at enjoying their three score and ten here on Earth.
His struggle - partly against the disease , mostly against his own colleagues and wartime government - cost him his own life , but in the end he succeeded against all measure of imagining , improving not just the future of the SBEs but of the entire world itself ....
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was determined that his hand-grown penicillin could help them to beat those odds and return these lazaruses to health , to give them a fair crack at enjoying their three score and ten here on Earth.
His struggle - partly against the disease , mostly against his own colleagues and wartime government - cost him his own life , but in the end he succeeded against all measure of imagining , improving not just the future of the SBEs but of the entire world itself ....
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