By 1945, Martin Henry Dawson's 1940 war aim had become OUR war aim too

Baby, dank Harry Lime, werden nicht neeeding Teddy

In September 1940 , at the height of the Battle of Britain, war hero Martin Henry Dawson decided against rejoining the Canadian Army to help fight Hitler.

He would fight Hitler instead by saving the lives of the very people that Hitler (and a lot of Dawson's medical colleagues) judged to be "lives unworthy of life" --- particularly in wartime.

In five short weeks, he grew and then injected penicillin into two working class youths, a Negro and a Jew , both dying of invariably fatal SBE.

 In many eyes, they were judged to be the 4Fs of the 4Fs, and definitely not a priority for life-saving during a Total War.

But Dawson instinctively felt that this was something that would definitely separate the Allies from the Axis , proving that the Allies believed in saving all lives - in particular even the smallest and the weakest, "the least of these", as it were.

The Allied government-scientific-military-commercial establishment disagreed, saving penicillin only for the 1As of the 1As, the frontline combat soldiers away from the killing zone due to a non-fatal dose of the clap they had picked up.

They banned the use of penicillin to save SBEs , sentencing them to a certain death.

Dawson, himself dying from a terminal disease, defied the authorities and stole some government-issued penicillin to give to the SBEs , later getting secret supplies from a sympathetic CEO at a Big Pharma corporation.

His misdeeds inspired others, the story broke, Doctor Mom sided with Dawson's ideas and the males in the establishment reluctantly fell in line.

But very soon they saw the virtue in Dawson's ideas, and warplanes were soon flying about, dropping not bombs but penicillin for dying children in both Allied countries and in Neutral nations.

Penicillin-the-lifesaver-of-all-civilian-lives had become a very public weapon in the battle to win the hearts and minds of the world for the Allied cause.

So much so, in fact, that by 1949 erstwhile 'citizen of an Allied nation' Harry Lime was judged one of fiction's all time villains mostly because he had dared to water down the penicillin intended for dying children.  Dying Axis children.

It is this viewpoint, only 4 years after the war, that I thinks allows us to claim "The Third Man" as one of the first postmodern films.

Dawson was four years dead by that point, but I think he would have be proud to think how far his war aims had become our war aims.....

For Howard Florey's mausoleum of an institute, penicillin's therapeutic value was incidental to putting paying bums on seats

Howard Florey's discovery that impure natural penicillin could cure experimentally induced infections in mice was incidental to his number one concern : getting enough paying guests in his mausoleum of an institute, to pay its annual heating bills.


And also accidental , in the sense that Chain only poured all of the penicillin hitherto made by Chain' own methods into two healthy mice in March 1940, out of spite.

Florey had just told him the day earlier, during a very heated argument, that Norman Heatley would be making the crude penicillin from now on and by Heatley's method.

Chain was determined to establish his (or any) penicillin was in fact very non-toxic , though he should have put his brew into infected mice as he then would have really made his mark in history for sure.

But, Chain's spite at least jumped the gun on whatever decade Florey was originally planning to interrupt his precious personal research long enough to test penicillin on infected lab animals. (If that was even ever to come about in the original project -- mice cost money.)

He had at least forced Florey to put penicillin into some infected mice (the next stage in the process) or risk forever losing a claim to be the first to ever do it in history ----- and Florey liked nothing better than getting the glory of doing something first, even if his minions had to do all the hard work forever afterwards.

Much to Florey's surprise, the mice lived !

Florey - to his dying day - hated clinicians and clinical work : hated patients in fact

Now Florey was almost forced to try it on humans in an attempt to save their lives ---- which he did , almost exactly twelve months after the first mouse experiments  ----------never one to rush into clinical, live-saving, work was our Dr Florey,MD.....

How doctors rationalize "uncomfortable" successes : natural penicillin and others

Vaccines, Salvarsan, natural penicillin

Obviously, injecting live germs into someone's bloodstream can be potentially very dangerous.



But if done right (injecting only a small number of bacteria, and using bacteria in a very weakened state) it leads to a powerful immune response.

And that prevents that person from catching the actual disease when the really large numbers of fully virulent bacteria drop by for a visit.

No mid-19th century doctor liked the thought of injecting hostile bacteria into a person's personal, private, bloodstream.

This was because the Modernist Era was also very much an aristocratic era, one that earnestly believed that one's precious genetic inheritance and the family's 'good name' was contained within the bloodstream.

However, because vaccination worked and saved lives, they had to accept it as a given but still find a way to rationalize its existence into a place in their Modernist mental universe.

They did so, I argue, by claiming the vaccine "merely" stimulated the human body's latent immune system, that marvelous marvel that God and/or Evolution had given to Man and Man alone.

All glory then to Man and precious little glory to those deadly bacteria in the vaccine.

When toxic dangerous Salvarsan came along , a compound of arsenic poison injected into straight into the bloodstream but able to cure syphilis , doctors had to accept its success.

But again, they still had to fit the idea of injecting of deadly chemicals into humans,  somewhere in their Modernist mental universe.

It wasn't too hard : the drug was totally man-made, the invention of chemistry (then the Queen of the Sciences) --- in fact, invented by German chemists when German chemists were near the top of the intellectual food chain.

Again : all glory to man !

That made Salvarsan all right, and no one asked if the Salvarsan was free of dangerous chemical byproducts or anything probing like that : it was made in a chemical factory and that was all right, then.

(They'd all seen the medical journal ads with photos of gleaming white tile walls and grave men in white labcoats standing about and no one asked if this matched the reality of real chemistry labs and real chemistry plants. Watching real drugs being made back then was rather like watching real sausages being made : not for the faint of heart.)

So in 1941, doctors received the news that Sulfa drugs were being made in instantly converted paint factories with aplomb but balked at the idea of using natural penicillin, made in hospital labs.

Now recall Paul Ehrlich's justification for using toxic Salvarsan, which by extension applies to potentially dangerous vaccines as well.

He said it had registered a positive value on his Chemo-Therapeutic Index , which measured the minimum effective dose needed for a cure, versus the maximum dose tolerated by the patient before the drug killed them as well as  - or instead of - the germ.

Penicillin is virtually unique in having no meaningful amount of toxicity ; it is practically more toxic to inject sterile water into the blood than it is to inject free acid penicillin into it.

Penicillin, the safest drug in the world, should be have been the easiest-ever medication for doctors to accept for injection purposes.

In fact it was one they opposed using - almost to a man - for 15 long, lost,  years.

Why ?

Natural penicillin's biggest problem was that it was made by lowly basement slime - and by women

Hospital labs filled with young women, with high school diplomas, handling milk bottles of  smellymold (for God's Sake !) , growing it like a crop, like down on the farm ; so rural, so old fashioned, so Victorian and so very yesterday.

Natural penicillin only became acceptable to most male doctors in early 1944, when popular magazines showed it being 'manufactured' in huge gleaming stainless steel tanks many stories high.

 'Manufactured' in factories that looked like small oil refineries, with lots of knobs, dials and grave men (men - thank God !) standing about in white lab coats.

I use scare quotes on the manufactured because behind those opaque metal walls, it was still the incredibly tiny, invisible, fungus factories that were doing the real chemical heavy lifting, not Man-the-Chemist.

Penicillin was a molecule that all the world's best chemists, working in tandem, with unlimited funds, had failed to synthesize , but the tiny weak fungus could do it in their sleep.

The fungus could do it as easy as they could make beer.

 And that is just what Jim Duhig and the fungus did in Brisbane in the Fall of 1943, making penicillin as easily as one makes homemade beer.

He then injected it straight into his patients as is, totally unprocessed any further.

 And it worked - using technology cruder than what Fleming had in 1928, 15 years earlier. It saved Duhig's patients from certain death.

It was a job so easy that Duhig said any general hospital with a lab could do it,  just using a technician.

He didn't say the lab tech would probably be a young girl with a high school diploma but you got his drift.

And you caught his contempt for his fellow Aussie scientist , Howard Florey.

Florey's 1941 paper on producing penicillin had made it seem an extremely difficult activity, somewhere between between rocket science and brain surgery, with a good doze of elaborate Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg technology thrown in.

(Florey, who tended to put efforts to re-burnish his family's tarnished name even above aiding the war effort and above saving the lives of other doctors' dying patients, deliberately tried to scare off competitors by this method on many occasions.)

Nevertheless, those huge gleaming steel tanks made producing natural penicillin a sort of honorary chemical activity, a sort of pseudo human-synthesized drug and made a lot of Modernist doctors a lot more comfortable about using it systemically.

But after 1945 and their failure to 'make' penicillin, I think it is fair to say that modernity and chemistry started a slow sad decline into
the back pages of life....

Medicine's all dominant "anthropocentricity", before the unexpected triumph of NATURAL penicillin

The world's best loved, most important medication lay "hidden in plain sight" for 15 wasted years because of medicine's unconscious anthropocentric biases.

Only when Dr Martin Henry Dawson came upon slime-produced penicillin fresh from his explorations of "The Triumphs of the Weak" among oral commensal Strep bacteria, did a doctor see no problems of using impure natural products of a weak species (fungus) in the blood stream of that most superior species known as (Man).




The ideology of Modernity, all powerful from about the 1860s to the 1960s , basically denied the existence of overwhelming Acts of God and of Natural Catastrophes.

Nature and Reality was but a neutral Backdrop to a stage where Man - for good and for bad - was the only actor.

Injecting tiny amounts of weakened live or  very dead (dangerous) germs into the human blood stream was perfectly acceptable because it merely stimulated that most marvelous work of Man : the human immune system.

Injecting  (highly toxic) chemicals like arsenic-based Salvarsan into the human blood stream was also perfectly acceptable, because this medication that fought VD was totally man-made, a marvel of Man's intellect.

But injecting a non toxic, highly effective, highly selective anti bacterial like natural penicillin into the human blood stream to save lives was unacceptable, for 15 wasted years.

Why ?

I venture it was because all its marvels were the work of the smallest, weakest, "stupidest" beings on Earth - it was as odious to 1930s western culture as the idea of crediting negroes with intellects equal to that of whites.

Dawson's investigations of the "Survival of the Weakest" among the oral commensal Strep, how they 'twisted their shapes" constantly to evade the all powerful human immune system , made him see Life's "weakest' beings in a new light.

The rest is history, or rather, the rest is the dawning of the new Era of Post Modernity and Global Commensality.....

1945 : it was the best of times and the worst of times for the Modern Age

In 1945, the Allied forces of Modernity were celebrated by contemporary (1945) academic opinion for turning back the anti modern efforts of the Nazis and the Axis.

But today's academic opinion also credits 1945 as the beginning of the new  Post Modern Age ( in effect signalling the start of the decline of Modernity.)


So which is it ?

It is almost as if Modernity was marched out front and centre , given lots of medals and many heartfelt votes of thanks and then told " you're fired."

Almost exactly what happened to Winston Churchill, that archetypal Modern, in 1945 in point of fact.

The Modern Age, that heady mixture of science,technology and nationalism that some also call the second industrial revolution,
began in the 1840s and was still powerful until at least the late 1960s but was in its heyday between the 1870s and the 1940s.

WWII was its only totally 'modern' war - it shared wars like WWI and Vietnam with pre and post modernity values.

And it totally, totally, lost that war -  at least on its own terms - to Mother Nature, to Reality, to life outside the cloistered laboratory.

The three memes that signal the shift from Modernity to Post Modernity...

The two words, memes really, always attached to the idea that 1945 mark a definite shift from Modernity to Post Modernity are Auschwitz and Hiroshima : I wish to add a third, Penicillin, in particular the unexpected (Plan B) success of natural penicillin.

The revenge killing of six million Jews marked a signal failure in Darwinian/eugenic biology, a Plan B for the failure of Germany's Plan A : to quickly conquer the weak species Russia and then to starve 30 million of its citizens to death so as to be able to fill their empty but fertile farms with new German settlers.

Hiroshima' death of an entire city by fire was a Plan B to the Allies' failure of their original Plan A, targeting only a city's key factories by precision bombing using Norden bombsights and Newtonian physics ( aka ballastics).

Natural penicillin, Martin Henry Dawson's contribution to the war, was also a last minute Plan B, because the Allied's original Plan A was to let patented, totally synthesised, Sulfa win the side war against bacteria - failing that , to let the chemists synthesise totally artificial, patentable, analogs of natural penicillin. But Daltonian chemistry failed the test and like the other two, never recovered.....

Seventy Five years later, has Death and Il-Health finally allowed a post-Modernist look at WWII to receive a fair hearing ?

Does Hamburg '43 still sizzle ?

All the grownup men who made the decisions to send tens of thousands of teenage boys off to die on German city bombing runs have long since gone to their rewards.


But the teenager bomber crew members still alive today seem resolute to go on defending the decisions of people like Bomber Harris, if only in order to preserve their own role in the bombing as something history and their grandchildren will still judge as honourable and worthy.

But every week more fall silent , due to death or il-health and one can hope a person can begin to ask probing questions without powerful media publishers and loud political senators baying for one's hide.

In Canada ,in 1982 and 1992, major controversies broke out over histories that questioned the received version of the roles of WWII Canadian war ace Billy Bishop and of Canada's bombing efforts over German cities, such as Hamburg in 1943.

 These protests were led in 1982 by WWI veterans in their eighties and in 1992 by WWII veterans in their seventies and eighties.

Now very few civilian children are left anywhere in the world who can remember anything of WWI firsthand.

Soon protest over the Allied actions at Hamburg will have to be led by a handful of surviving veterans of the raid in their frail nineties.

Eight years worth of 75th anniversaries of WWII...

The 75th anniversaries of the Munich Agreement , of Kristallnacht and of all the tense months leading up to WWII are coming up in a few months and a lot of modernist histories will be newly published, basically ringing variations on a theme that has been playing steadily since September 1945.

But I think it it is long past due time that a post Modernist take on both the least contested and the most controversial events of WWII
receive some publishing space.

I plan to publish some myself  in the years between September 2013 and September 2020 , as the 75th anniversary of WWII events slowly unfolds over the next 8 years.......

For Alexander Fleming's business firm, discovery of penicillin was incidental, as well as accidental

Penicillin the life-saving antibiotic ( Penicillin-the-systemic) was more of a threat than an opportunity to Alexander Fleming's main activity, which was making money from dodgy vaccines not making new science , which is why he always preferred to promote penicillin (weakly) as an antiseptic and (strongly) as an aid to vaccine production.


He did consciously (briefly) study penicillin as a possible systemic life saver and threat to replace his profitable vaccine business, but I argue that subconsciously, his heart really wasn't into a through attempt to make penicillin work as a systemic.

Fleming hardly had a personal lab , because he was hardly ever there : spending his days running a large medical business , just as his other brothers did.

His brothers' eye glass business is more a model to his behavior than the Lives of the Saints, despite the best efforts of the Jim-Savile loving British Establishment to turn Fleming into a saint.

Fleming's saving grace was that he carefully saved and stored his accidental penicillin visitor (as well as investigating it to a certain extent and published that work) giving it out freely to all who asked.

Because some who asked for his unique fungus, had more of a heart of the dying and for systemic medicines than Fleming and they brought it into general use as the world's best known, best loved, medication - ever.

If his attitude had been more like the evil (I use the word carefully) penicillin czar Dr Richards in the USA, penicillin would have died on the vine : so we still have a lot to thank him for....