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 ....

Charlie and Miss "H" : The lazarus SBE patients of New York who beat the odds time and again to go on surviving

"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 ....

Manhattan gives world's first penicillin shots Oct 16 1940 : celebrating 75 years of natural penicillin live-saving !

Dr Dawson as "the Donald McKay of Medicine" 

It all happened in a blindingly fast five weeks leading up to October 16th 1940.

 Dr Martin Henry Dawson went from reading vague hints about the clinical possibilities of natural penicillium juice to find its spores to inventing ways to quickly grow and concentrate the substance.

He then gave a needle of it to himself , for signs of human toxicity - and survived.

The very next day, October 16th 1940, Manhattan was the site of the world's first penicillin shots - as Dr Dawson injected his team's 'crude' natural penicillin into two 4F patients (a black and a Jew).

Seventy five years ago next year !

On the very day the rest of America began its 75 year old practise of registering all their 1A males.

And 25 years to the day when New York and North America first heard of the execution of nurse Edith Cavell in Belgium.

This news had galvanized Dawson to drop university and join a hospital unit to help poor bleeding Belgium.

Social medicine - the type that helps the 4Fs of this world - was being dropped that Fall to focus on War medicine for the 1As of the world .

Dawson saw this 'eugenic triage' as the civilized world doing exactly what the Axis already advocated - when they should be instead opposing it with every breath and every bone in their bodies.

The world's 4Fs were now his new poor bleeding Belgium.

If the Allied world won't move - then he would. And he did - changing our world for the better forever - until his dying breath four and a half years later.

Dawson was a man with a prominent broad jaw - he simply looked like the sort of person who when he got a bone between his teeth won't let go and would really run with it.

That was a sight an earlier Nova Scotia immigrant to New York , Donald McKay, (who had also set records for speedy results as the builder of the world's fastest ever clipper ships) would know full well.

For when his clippers had a full head of sail they too moved really really fast , with 'a bone in their teeth' as the old salts used to say :

If you want something to really move , hire a Bluenoser !

Why Charlie ? Why Miss "H" ?

Between September 1940 and April 1945, pioneering penicillin doctor Martin Henry Dawson treated about three dozen patients with subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) or acute bacterial endocarditis (ABE).

So out of those three dozen patients , why on earth did I decide to focus on just two - one young man (Charles Aronson) and one young woman (Miss H H) ?

One reason was to simply add continuity and coherence to my narrative, particularly my libretto narrative.

Charlie was there, on-site, in Dawson's ward at the very beginning and at the very end of the narrative arc - something you just invent in a work of fiction but something you rarely find in real life.

(Charlie had the extremely rare good luck to survive his first bout of SBE and the extremely bad luck to get a second bout of SBE and then to survive a severe stroke while recovering from that second bout .)

The arrival of Miss "H" provoked the crucial turning point in the narrative arc and her prolonged recovery from the side effects of her SBE ensured she was in many scenes - including the climatic one , along with Charlie.

Again a real life boon rarely granted the author of narrative non-fiction !

But my main reason for including these two in Dawson's team of seven key 'unfits' is because I sense these two , out of all the three dozen patients, were more 'actors' than 'acted upon' (which is the normal role for patients in such doctor-oriented stories).

The first period of extensive penicillium growing and penicillin extraction was originally planned to occur at the end of the first term (December) at Dawson and co-team leader Meyer's medical school.

But Dawson suddenly decided to give the first (tiny) historic injections of penicillin just 5 weeks into the 16 week process - seemingly right after Charlie unexpectedly joined the team's first SBE patient, Aaron Alston.

Dawson did write Ernst Chain at that time that he had a patient of whom he was unusually interested in - and admittedly that could have been either Aaron or Charlie.

But Charlie, he later noted, had an unusually complicated medical history - all revolving around surviving repeated brushes of death with oral commensal strep.

And nothing in life - nothing - interested Dawson more than oral commensal strep .

And Charlie was a repeated 'survivor' , probably with the characteristic survivor's buoyancy.

This alone might have inspired Dawson onward to also do his very best.

Much the same for Miss "H" - after all, for her, the very honest and modest Dawson 'stole' incredibly scarce government-controlled penicillin in the middle of an all-out Total War  !

Her earlier medical history indicated she had survived a life-threatening bout of Rheumatic Fever with 'endocarditis' involvement (probably actually severe pancarditis) .

 She went on to survive her SBE thanks to Dawson's penicillin (the first case in history ever cured by penicillin) and then to endure years of serious infections caused by infected matter from her damaged heart valve infecting other parts of her body - she lost one eye and her womb in the process.

But like Charlie, she survived them all - she was a born survivor , probably with a similar characteristic buoyancy.

So : two real-life 'larger-than-life' characters just crying out to be portrayed on stage by first class actors yearning to stretch their craft .

What's there not to like ???!!!!

"Unfit valour" : They defied Allied & Axis eugenics (and their own physical failings) to bring us "Penicillin-for-All"

What would penicillin look like today if Hitler, Stalin or Churchill had delivered it - instead of Dawson ?

In 1943 , Hitler, Stalin or Anglo-American Big Pharma could have delivered penicillin to us - delivered us penicillin either as expensive as Avastin or only to be given to the truly deserving Proletarian or Aryan.

But against the eugenic-mad world of 1943 , perhaps only a bunch of misfits and unfits could have delivered us inexpensive, abundant ,un-patented, un-encumbered Penicillin-for-All...

Oct 16 '40 : Dies Mirabilis , marking 75 years of Antibiotics and Draft registration

I might just do an Erik Larson and interweave Jack Kerouac and Martin Henry Dawson's experiences of that Dies Mirabilis, October 16th 1940, together in one book - and not separately as two books ...

Draft Registration, October 16th 1940 : 75 years Young !

Due out in early 2015 is my book about the origins of America's 75 year old peacetime draft registration process.

It is another in my series of books on "Agape Penicillin".

If my book about the 'Dawning of Antibiotics' on October 16 1940 focuses on the 4Fs among America's youth, this book will focus instead on the 1As among her youth.

But I do not think it is odd or a coincidence that both events share the exact same 75th anniversary, right down to the day.

I believe that Dr Martin Henry Dawson began his antibiotics crusade on that crucial date, October 16th 1940 , as a deliberate and provocative counterpoise.

A counterpoise to 1940s America's undue emphasis on only valuing its children to the extent that they are fit enough to kill other children.

He felt all children - as well as all people - are worthy of the best possible health care simply because they are our fellow human beings.....

* Dawson had the freedom to experiment with penicllin that October day only because the very pro-war President of Columbia university had suspended classes to ensure a perfect registration drive.

After football scholarship undergrad Jack Kerouac dutifully registered that day, he went forth to play his second football game for the university.

He broke his leg and his career in football was over - its loss and literature and the Beats' gain ....

"Antibiotics, October 16th 1940 : 75 Years Young !"

My first book on "Agape Penicillin" ,  due out early in 2015 , is all about the brave Scottish Presbyterian doctor (Dawson) who first gave us penicillin the antibiotic.

It is not at all about the Scottish Presbyterian doctor (Fleming) who discovered penicillin --- but then only used it indolently, for twelve wasted years , as an useless antiseptic.

I have entitled it '75 years young' rather than '75 years old' to emphasize that the real miracle of antibiotics has mostly been for in its effects on younger rather than older patients.

Because, just as in the earlier miracle with Lazarus , people who get life-saving antibiotics still die - the miracle simply consists in moving the goalposts further along , to a point closer to Life's natural ending.

Before 1940, few large upper class families - let alone poorer families - did not know the terror of a healthy five year old child being here today and in an premature grave a few days later.

Those of us of a certain generation know well the difference between an antiseptic and an antibiotic.

Antiseptics were when we scrapped our knee falling off our tricycle - it was part of a ritual involving a cookie, "a kiss to make it better" and some orange liquid from a little bottle.

The orange stuff hurt like hell, hindered healing and promoted scarring but it was all part of the ritual back then.

But antibiotics !

You'll alway remember that fast as the ambulance was , your old family doctor (who usually moved with slow dignity) was much faster.

His car came around the corner on two wheels and he took the steps three at a time - no word of greeting - simply hauled a big needle out of his black bag and plunged it into your baby sister.

You were too young to know exactly why the room was so still and tense - a neighbour had whispered 'meningitis' but that tension suddenly broke with the doctor's next and unexpected act.

He cuddled up to your mother , put an arm familiarly around her shoulders and said "Marge , where's that cuppa ?"

Marge !?  Not even your father called her that.

She looked up startled and then happily bustled off , saying "oh , where my manners."

And your father - for the first and only time in your young life - starting crying - big sobs - but smiling to beat the band all the time.

Your little sister is now a grandmother as old as the doctor was then, with grandchildren of her own.

That's what an antibiotic is - and that is why it is so worth celebrating ...

Aaron Alston , penicillin's first SBE patient but second to get the historical injection

The known published facts are few

All the contemporary (1945 era) newspaper and book accounts - written by (or coming second hand from) participant eyewitnesses to the events themselves - make it clear that Martin Henry Dawson's first SBE/penicillin patient was a "negro" "man".

And that his name was"Aaron Alston" and that he subsequently "died".

The available record of the amounts and dates that Aaron received Dawson's penicillin - as published by key Dawson team member Dr Gladys L Hobby in her 1985 book on penicillin , Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge , ceases near the end of January 1941.

And that is all the published accounts show.

But now for new research and reasoned suppositions...

We can say that 1940s medical statistics indicate that Alston was a more likely than not a young adult when he entered the hospital with SBE .

It is clear from the census that the names Aaron and Alston is a combination found in a fair number of men in America in the first half century of the 29th century.

However , the censuses generally indicates they are usually negro and that their residences seem centred in the South - from rural Carolina into urban black centres like Washington and Baltimore.

But in the critical 1940 census , there is no Aaron Alston recorded in New York City or in nearby New Jersey and Connecticut.

Now the first SBE patients that Dawson dealt with in the public wards of his upper Manhattan Columbia University Presbyterian Hospital were simply there because they were poor and his hospital happened to be close to where their family lived or close to where they lived when they took ill.

They were not drawn there from great distances because Dawson was then a famous and successful expert in this nearly 100% invariably fatal disease.

Far from it , he hadn't in fact handled any SBE cases up to then as the lead doctor.

Alston almost certainly had to be residing within a three or four miles circle of the Presbyterian hospital, at most , at the time he took ill. But the census does not show this.

He may have moved to New York City after April 1940 and before September 1940 : because southern blacks were still coming north to the unofficial American black capital of Harlem , though there was rarely gold for them at the end of its tattered rainbow.

Harlem is well within the catchment area for the Presbyterian's public wards.

We seemed to have failed to find out anything more about Mr Alston.

But as it happens, the New York City individual death records up to 1948 have been hand indexed on computer by many volunteers and made available via Ancestry.com.

They show an Aaron Alston , born about 1911 , (that is about age 29 on date of his admission to the hospital in September-October 1940) has having died on Jan 25th 1941 in Manhattan.

I am not sure that the original  death record will reveal more more - but perhaps a last address in New York and the name of next of kin and their home town , but I feel 100% certain this is our Mr Alston.

All we have really confirmed so far is that he was indeed a young man at time of his admission , as expected.

Why first patient but second to get the historic penicillin injection

Now while I am certain that Mr Alston was first SBE patient Dawson intended to treat with penicillin, I think he got it moments after Charles Aronson , the other SBE patient to get the historic penicillin injections on October 16th 1940.

Dawson's first major paper on penicillin and SBE was significantly the first penicillin paper not written by him with the help of the very reticent (as he himself was !) Dr Gladys Hobby, his lab chief.

Co-written instead with young Dr Thomas H Hunter, it positively gushes - for Dawson anyway - in giving forth the ages, initials of their name, gender, ethnicity,  dates of treatment, medical condition etc of all the SBE patients that Dawson had treated.

This was a style that Dawson had never shown before in 20 years of writing many, many medical articles.

Some doctors ("clinicians") simply tend to write articles that minutely detail the very 'grain' of  one (person's) case - while others ("researchers") prefer to report on the general conclusions drawn from treating one hundred similar cases.

(Both are valuable to doctors and scientists - but biographers won't be human if they didn't prefer the intimate details of the first type of articles !)

Dawson gets a chance in mid April 1944 to treat Charles Aronson a second time with penicillin for SBE .

This was because the little penicillin Charles had gotten in October 1940 had helped him survive his first bout of SBE.

He thus became that rare successful SBE case (about one in a hundred) that did so , back then.

Dawson indicates  in 1945 , that Charles had first entered the Presbyterian three and a half years earlier - ie mid October 1940 , confirming the common assumption that he was a very late addition to Dawson's Penicillin SBE program.

(Dawson knew he had too little penicillin to even treat Alston adequately, but he kind-heartedly treated both.

He was hoping perhaps that any small sign of a clinical response from either one of them might move Big Pharma to step up to the plate and mass produce the stuff --- for Aaron, Charlie and everyone else.)

Literally : the last shall be first 

But did Dawson really add Charlie at the last minute out of kind-heartedness alone ?

I believe the real reason was because Charlie was such a late addition to his ward's SBE patients.

When a new patient arrived with suspected SBE - a relatively slow killer, first a number of blood tests over a number of days must show the continued and not merely transitory presence of green strep in the blood stream to match all the other classic clinical signs of SBE,.

Then the ethical response is to immediately start treatment with the newest miracle drug , sulfa, and pray.

This is what happened to Aaron, who had been in the ward about a month when he first got his penicillin.

But because Charlie was such a late addition, there hadn't been time to start treatment with sulfa drugs .

So if Charles was treated with penicillin alone and did show a clinical improvement, Dawson's sulfa worshipping naysayers (and their lineup began around the block) could not say it was all due to their established sulfa , not his new penicillin.

(Remember that a lot of middle-aged doctors , the same age as Dawson , had first made their mark as early sulfa drug pioneers - any new miracle drug meant their acclaim was over. )

Behind the polite rancour of academic/scientific 'critiques' is often a lot of half-hidden ego and income concerns.

Dawson recalled, in his 1945 article , that the 1940 Charles was treated with penicillin on October 16 and 17th and then immediately (first) "started" on sulfa on October 22 and that he responded so well that he was released in December and was illness free for three plus years.

Ethically, Dawson would never have wasted half of his tiny amount of penicillin he intended for Aaron on Charles --- if he was already responding well to sulfa.

I think the reason it became so urgent to treat Aaron in mid-October (well in advance of the Dawson team's own original timetable for starting clinical trials) was because he had already been treated with sulfa and it had failed.

And maybe even made him extremely sick  because allergies to sulfa are common and serious.

But treating Aaron alone risked having any penicillin success disputed by the pro-sulfa lobby and this would only forestall drug company involvement - hurting Aaron as well as all others.

Hence Charlie not only getting treatment but getting treated ahead of Aaron , if only by moments.

Ask anyone : nothing starts off a (soon to be citation classic) medical article quite like an opening sentence like this one ---

"The first patient  ever treated with systemic penicillin had (then invariably fatal) SBE , but had not yet had time to start a sulfa treatment, however he responded so well to the penicillin that he has now been home fully recovered for over six months months."

In fact Dawson saw no clinical response at all between cases of endocarditis and penicillin for one and a half long years and he didn't save anyone with the disease purely on penicillin alone until two years later.

But Charles's recovery might have been helped by the morale uplifting affect of simply knowing that he was Patient One of a touted new Miracle drug .

I can only hope that my research efforts eventually help Aaron Alston's relatives to gain some comfort from his short life.

They will learn that he helped bring penicillin into this world and that while it didn't help him personally, it has directly and indirectly helped ten billion of us in the seventy five years since he first received it.....

Moral Courage --- this doctor tested on himself first - not on some helpless dying woman ...

First to receive penicillin needle : Henry Dawson, October 15 1940, Columbia Presbyterian medical center, New York

Despite this, Canadian-born (Martin) Henry Dawson wasn't actually a patient.

He was instead the lead investigator of this particular American penicillin research team.

He was merely following an old tradition that says a truly caring doctor doesn't first test a potentially dangerous new therapy upon his patients , but rather upon himself.

It is a tradition that Dawson's main penicillin rival, Australian Howard Florey - entirely in character with his self-serving nature - declined to follow.

Just one of many reasons why Hollywood producers find the idea of a penicillin drama featuring Florey as the lead to be box office poison for the women viewers who form the bulk of the audiences for medical dramas.

Dawson's other penicillin rival, Britain's Alex Fleming , like Florey was consistently unwilling to do anything that might risk his own neck - like fight in the Boer War - and he too never gave himself a needle of his own penicillin to test its safety.

Dawson, by contrast, was a decorated front line war hero and equally heroic in the front lines of peacetime medical laboratories.

The first patient to receive a penicillin needle in an effort to save their life was Charles Aronson, at the same hospital, one day after Dawson survived that very first needle of antibiotics....

Finally ---- a penicillin movie with a genuine hero - a North American hero to boot !

My book series will be the first books - ever - about the dramatic events of wartime penicillin that will feature a North American, Canadian-American Martin Henry Dawson, as its chief protagonist.

And it will thus be the first ever to feature a genuine hero as its chief protagonist.

Give credit to your typical cigar-chomping Hollywood producer - they have consistently seen what 75 years of academics have failed to see : that the proposed 'heroes' of an wartime penicillin film, Alec Fleming and Howard Florey, are in fact pure box office poison to the women who form the bulk of the audience for any medical drama.

By contrast, Henry Dawson looks like the self-less medical hero from classic Hollywood central casting -  but on steroids : this truth being stranger and stronger than any possible fiction....

why Henry Dawson rather than Henry Alline

The revisionist's temperament

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thin books or fat journals ? Hard to tell !

For a time I thought my Dawson series of books would come out in parts of a periodical magazine :

Triumph of the NATURAL

"The Mills of Nature" will start up its longer (6000 word) articles with a series that puts together a natural world oriented account of WWII.

If that all sounds very Olympian , rest assured it will be instantly sharply brought down to earth.

That is because the series will be told through the eyes of just a single individual,  who himself barely got out of town during all of WWII.

You will read of the wartime experiences of New York City based Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

Dawson was a decorated Canadian WWI hero and the leading DNA and Penicillin pioneer.

But Dawson couldn't re-join the military in WWII ,as he had hoped , because he was slowly dying of an auto immune disease throughout the war.

But even if he had gone overseas he couldn't have told this big a story.

Because oddly enough , no frontline military general or overly-busy national leader ever had as intimate an overview of the entire war as a well connected and media-hungry New Yorker.

New York city was the world's biggest , richest city and its biggest port.

It was thusthe war's biggest transfer point for both cargo and both in and outbound troops (not to mention all the just-passing-though VIPs).

This alone made it home to the war's best informed and most varied gossip.

New York was also a wartime city with the world's most varied and freest media.

But that isn't enough to pick out Dawson.

Many equally well-read among the eight million New Yorkers would also seem qualified to tell this tale.

However, in what turned out to be an unexpectedly long war of attrition, the question of sustaining manpower numbers and morale became the paramount question above all others - on both sides.

And so as it happened, the very contrary minded and penicillin-pioneering Dawson ended up becoming very close to the turning point of this vital issue.

This chance of fate , combined with his unusually wide WWI war experiences and his endless curiosity as a reader and listener makes him a wonderful subject to tell Nature's side of the war through.

Admittedly, it is a risk to use the eyes of a homebound dying man to tell the story of a war spread over all the world.

But few military events of WWII could have had a bigger impact on our own post war world than the penicillin events personally initiated by this hometown-bound and dying doctor.

His story over that six year period will be told in about sixty vignettes , collected into six series parts , all determined by six decisive breaks in Dawson's actual WWII experience.

Major parts' titles and their individual time periods :

I : Discarding the Small : roughly from the Fall of 1939 to the Fall of 1940

II : Exalting the Small :  roughly from the Fall of 1940 to the Fall of 1941

III : Betraying the Small : roughly from the Fall of 1941 to the Fall of 1942

IV : Agitating the Small : roughly from the Fall of 1942 to the Fall of 1943

V : Denying the Small : roughly from the Fall of 1943 to the Fall of 1944

VI : Triumph of the Natural : roughly from the Fall of 1944 to the Fall of 1945

the mysterious ways of Martin Henry Dawson ...

God Only Knows why Henry Dawson did what he did - because no one else does ... probably not even himself 

Next year will be ten years that I have been at it, trying to figure out why Henry Dawson did what he did and I am still no further ahead.
Consider this :

In late December 1940, Dawson got both some very good news and some very bad news from the doctors.

At age 45, he would be a father for the third time : Hurray !

Albeit his wife was in her forties , was physically handicapped and earns only a small salary.

This matters, because Henry had also just been told he has Myasthenia Gravis, a very serious auto immune disease that in the early 1940s generally killed within four and half years.

However, if he kept shorter hours, cut back on his stressful activities, stopped working around strong chemicals and ate and slept healthier, he might eke it out until better treatments came along.

Instead, Dr Dawson chose to plunge in ever harder into his self-chosen war task: bad chemicals, lots of stress and all.

He was trying desperately to save the lives of "The 4Fs of the 4Fs" : young people needlessly dying of the disease SBE,  because they were judged by the powerful to be only a burden in a time of Allied Total War.

Dying because the medicine that could save them (penicillin) was being reserved instead to use as a weapon of war.

If this sounds eerily like a more subtle version of Hitler's infamous T4 Aktion, you won't be far off.

Dawson's tiny little project was a sort of Aktion 4F, a moral counterblast at both the Allies and the Axis.

Now Dawson had a great moral right to do what he did with penicillin (including stealing scarce government-issued penicillin in a time of war !) because he was the first person in history to use it to try and save a life ( actually two : two SBE patients) - penicillin he had grown and processed himself.

This happened before America was at war, but at a time when the nation's medical and scientific leadership was hardening its heart in preparation to be as ruthless as Hitler, when and if Congress ever chose to fight him.

I believe Dawson reacted against this moral hardening of the arteries, seeing it as the absolutely worst way to win the "hearts and minds" battle against Hitler's ideas.

 Dawson was cautious, modest and retiring - his High School yearbook would have voted him "The Least Likely to Rebel".

His own field of expertise was miles and miles and miles away from SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis - a then invariably fatal heart disease).

He had never before ventured into making and purifying a brand new unknown drug.

He was regarded as a bit of a cracked pot by his colleagues with regard to his own personal research projects, which tended to limit his ability to draw in people into this Aktion 4F project.

This project of altruism literally killed him in the end - but he was not a religious believer so the basis for his extreme act of alturism is hard to find.

So why did he do it ?

I don't know.

But I do know he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

SBE became one of the most curable of fatal diseases, thanks to Dawson's pioneering efforts.

But he did far more than that.

His project forced the Allies to change their War Aims - to stop treating penicillin as a weapon, kept in short supply only for curable Allied frontline troops.

Instead he forced them to seriously mass produce it and to start treating it as something that should be available for all, regardless of race, color or war status.

By late 1944, penicillin had become the ultimate symbol of that highly elusive "good" the Allies had been promising would surely come about , if only all the neutrals of the world got off the fence and helped defeat Hitler.

One explanation on why Dawson did it and how he did it, is  that God sometimes picks cracked pots and non-believers ,together with the weak and the foolish, to do big things and confound the Mighty and the Wise.

Dawson seems to fit all four categories.

And certainly the Age of Modernity, the Age of WWII, was the most hubris-bound age ever ; if any age ever needed confounding it was that one.

Dawson and God and penicillin and 4Fs : it just sounds like a Match made in Heaven to me ....

Agape Love as "brave compassion"

It is unusually difficult to be compassionate when one is also under attack.

I mean not just when enemy bullets are winging your way but also when your entire society, including all your friends and family around you, is seemingly opposing your compassion.

Being brave and compassionate under fire , when your nation expects all soldiers to be so , certainly requires a lot of physical bravery (after all , most VC recipients died while earning it).

But it rarely requires any real moral courage.

By contrast , opposing your own society to display compassion doesn't always require physical bravery - but it certainly requires a great deal of moral courage.

Henry Dawson's wartime compassion meant both having the physical courage to accept that his actions would only hasten his death from Myasthenia Gravis and the moral courage to deal with hostility from his colleagues, employer and national government.

This is why I think it useful to contrast Dawson's WWII Agape valour with the Agape valour he and fellow Nova Scotian Philip Bent VC displayed in WWI...

Scandal : Writers Union of Canada rejects BLOCKHEAD

Great news !

The Writers' Union of Canada has changed its membership requirements and I am still not allowed in.

For a few weeks there , I feared I might be.


I am still not allowed in , but it is not because I am female or black or gay  --- writers' organizations have never been accused of arresting anyone for DWB (driving while black) .

No, it is because I have committed the ultimate taboo in the Union's eyes : I try to do good, as a writer, for others without expecting a reward in return.

I write without commercial intent.

WWCI : 'writing without commercial intent'

Oh , the horror of it all !

As a writer, I am , as Samuel Johnson famously noted , a blockhead : I do not write for money.

I do not copyright my writing (I release it fully into the Public Domain without any sort of reservations) and I give my works away as either e-books or as downloadable print books.

Tractarian ?

Regard my comparatively short works as Tracts or Pamphlets and thus not real books - call me a Tractarian or Pamphleteer - as Eva Tanguay sang , "I don't care, I don't care, I don't care !"

How could I even think about selling my work for self gain when my books (Tracts/Pamphlets) are all about Agape selflessness ?

Did Dr Martin Henry Dawson or Philip Bent VC give up their lives, just for the money ?

So why should I write about their selflessness, for my selfish gain ?

The Writers' Union decision was widely reported and commented upon, in Canada and abroad.

But not once so far have I come across a negative comment on the Union's continued need for their potential members to want to make money off their writing.

Negative comments aplenty for sure from many independent authors.

But only over the Union deciding it had to vet the self published for quality control while letting in those published with someone else's money without any need to meet quality standards.

No one seems to think that working hard and skillfully at your occupation without expecting financial gain - much like the medical professionals in 'Doctors Without Borders' - is a worthy human activity.

Indeed since very few people these days agree to head up a 'professional' charity without being very well paid for doing good , why should professional writers feel any different ?

Right then - as an amateur (someone who does something out of  love ) - it seems only appropriate that I call myself a proud amateur writer - and a 'blockhead writer' to boot ...

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 ...