Don't you sometimes wish you could actually meet a "junior" Fellow from one of those long-winded think-tanks?
Or maybe just a hail-fellow-well-met type of fellow?
When everyone is a "Senior", no one is a "Senior", my mom used always say.
Is bluster and bombast just something they mix in the Kool-Aid ?
Anyway, where was I ?
Oh yes, crying crocodile tears over the losses in the all-important self esteem department for those two white guys, Ross McKitrick and Pat Michaels.
There is indeed a "Shattered Consensus", or rather a Shattered Hegemony, as we political science types learned to say once we stopped reading with our fingers and breathing through our mouths.
From about 1975 to about 1965 , by no coincidence about one lifetime for an upper middle class male who never got his hands dirty down on the shop floor, there existed a perfect harmony of hegemonies between those powerful within politics, economics, sciences and the intellectual arts: and they called it "The Cult of Scientism".
Or sometimes : "The Cult of High Modernity".
It didn't end exactly in 1945 with Auschwitz and Hiroshima, as is usually advertised, but it was quite wounded.
Still it gamely hung on until all its generations' Professor Emerituses and Chairman of the Boards finally died - about the same time that all those late Sixties striking grad students got new jobs ----- as 1970s profs.
I have never found any more faithful followers of the cult of Scientism then those who know nothing about 21st century science.
I mean economists ,obviously in that dig - all those nobel prize winners recalling their childhood smatterings of of 19th century science, who believe that we can do very nicely without any natural resources at all. (Shout out to good old Robert !)
It is this longing for the good old days of the untenured giving universal obedience to the dictums of academic Scientism, that I see as the engine behind the Deniers' animus.
We don't step and fetch like the old days and they don't like it - all this guff about denying climate change is just eyewash : these denier boys really do believe the world is doomed - which is why they're backing free enterprise efforts to move the 1% to Mars.
Moving to Mars - Mars Colonies - now that is one crack-potted scheme the Deniers never deny.....
Sunday, August 14, 2022
WWII Starvation Diets of Nurse Lila Coolen and Doctor Valentin Falthauser : can you tell the difference?
Forget Robert "Willie" Pickton, considered to be Canada's most prolific serial killer.
He simply doesn't deserve that title.
I mean , by his own admission, he only killed 49 people - almost invisible people - prostitutes,many of aboriginal descent, who almost no one cared about when they went "missing".
('Missing': aka killed, ground up and used to feed pigs that were later sold as pork, Sweeney Todd fashion...)
No, Canada's and North America's most prolific serial killer was an intimidating mountain of a woman called Lila Coolen.
The infamy of her crimes should rival those of Lise Koch, the real life Shewolf of the SS , but they don't.
In fact ,among many older Nova Scotians,( but never of course on the record), she remains almost a saint, a martyr to the medical establishment.
They continue to feel that she did a lot of good, saved a lot of families and young women a lot of shame, rid the world of a lot of useless trash.
It is unknown how many hundreds of people she had killed --- because these people were well and truly invisible - the invisible of the invisible --- lacking even birth certificates.
Now Coolen is a very rare name in North American overall --- the USA has 1000 times more people than the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia, but there are more Coolens in Halifax than in all of America.
Rare to the point of invisiblity in America, Coolen by contrast is a very old and very common name along the South Shore region ofNova Scotia.
To locals - and until the retirement boom, almost everybody there was a 'local' , she 'was one of us' , not a 'CFA' (Come from Away) ,like her Oregon-born husband William Young.
William was merely an appendage to his domineering wive, whose secret to staying out of prison all her long life was precisely that she operated her own personal vertically-integrated Auschwitz in her hometown area of Fox Point-East Chester along that South Shore region.
The South Shore was never a home to immigrants of any sort ; a place where almost all the local families had intermarried with each other, where everybody was relatives to almost everyone and all knew each other's darkest family secrets.
As a result it was a land of mutual, genteel, blackmail ensuring that everyone's family secrets remains forever secret.
The highly rational and modernist Willie Picton made sure to profit even from 'the squeal of the pig' of his crimes, by turning his victims into pig swill after he had sexually tortured and killed them.
Just as the modernist and rationalist Nazis first worked their victims to the skin and bone on a starvation diet,then
took all their property and valuables , next removing their hair and gold teeth and then using what little fat that was left in their bodies as fuel for their crematoriums.
Lila Coolen didn't miss a trick either.
Auschwitz is famous for neither being a killing camp or a work camp but rather being both - a fully vertically integrated modernist factory.
Lila Coolen aimed to be equally efficient in extracting money from the weak and suffering.
North American families were loath (are loath ?) to see their children raised by people of another faith: which meant that Jewish families, no matter how wealthy ,could rarely hope to get a child by legal adoption.
Well-mannered North American families also would do almost anything rather than admit one of their own had had a child out of wedlock.
Lila Coolen made money on both (all) sides of these social 'problems'.
She made women (and their families) pay a small fortune to have their out of marriage babies in the privacy of her East Chester Maturnity Home.
If the mother was too poor to pay much, she could slave away at the home as almost unpaid staff, till the debt was paid off.
If possible, Lila Coolen would try to have the mother give up the baby - she would then charge the mother money for looking after it for life.
In fact most of the babies, the lucky babies, were auctioned off, mostly to wealthy American Jewish families willing to risk an illegal adoption.
World War Two for Lila Coolen forever remained the happy memory of the fat years : at $6,000 a baby she was raking it in .
Remember, FDR started the process to build the
Atomic Bomb with a $6000 grant ---- that was big money back then.
To get equivalent buying power, 1940 income versus 2012 income, you might trying multiplying that by 30 to 1.
Between 1937 and 1947 ,Lila Coolen banked a cool $3.5 million on the sale of babies alone ---- don't forget she was also raking it from the unfortunate mothers as well.
But those profits were never enough - they never are for your modern modernist are they ?
More profits could be squeezed out of the living ---' there was no pressing need for real medical staff was there? ' , said this Seven Day Adventist missionary.
The rural poor in her community lapped up her digs at the expensive, uppity, urban-educated medical establishment.
Cleaners were rare on site too, --- but the nurseries weren't filthpits said Ms Coolen, 'we're just county basic, not big city fancy' .
But what to do with those babies born 'defective' and 'deficient' as we were wont to say in those happy pre-PC days?
And what about those darkish babies, born out of mixed race breeding?
Well a lot of North Americans thought both should be gassed to death by the State.
But they said so quietly, because most people won't quite go that far in their eugenic fervor.
How far they did go was far enough, in any case.
Lots of people thought that neither defective babies or babies of mixed race ( who they thought had the worse genes from both parents) had long to live anyway - an early death was inevitable.
So, the feeling was that if a defective or mixed breed baby was already dangling at the end of a long rope, what harm could it possibly be if some kindly medical
personnel tugged gently at their tiny ankles to ease them into the next world?
Our Seventh Day Adventist missionary Lila Coolen certainly agreed.
It is rumoured she might have killed a few of the spoiled merchandise outright - by placing a pillow over their tiny heads.
Yes, Lila Coolen did have a wicked temper and she might have occasionally have been merely trying to quiet a squalling/ hungry/ cold /dying/ baby by soothing them with the closest available pillow.
But that was too brutal and too obvious a process to employ en masse --- suffocated people - even babies - tend to show the means of their death upon their faces.
Better to merely 'freshen' the defectives, by putting them in unheated rooms with inadequate clothing and bedding and then feed them only on molasses water.
They'd usually be dead in a week or two - quick enough.
Then, quick as a bunny, into a nice butter box they went
for the brief but decent burial in a big field, right next to the Seventh Day Adventist cemetery in Lila Coolen's hometown of Fox Point a dozen miles away.
If she could the canny Lila, never one to miss a trick, also asked the greiving for money for attending the burial !
Why did Lila never go to jail - and why was she able to end her days gainfully employed by the government teaching the children of Fox Point her twisted,wicked, values ?
There are many, many reasons: none of them flattering to the ordinary, decent, Nova Scotians of her generation.
Most people wanted to know as little as possible about out-of- wedlock pregnancies and illegal adoptions --- her Home solved a messy social problem without forcing people to confront the real issues -- and importantly it kept mom and child off the taxpayer-funded welfare rolls.
Lila did society's dirty work and society was truly grateful.
Sometimes she literally did SOCIETY's dirty work: as in High Society.
A publisher who gets an employee pregnant and then watches as Lila makes the problem 'go away' isn't likely to turn his investigative hounds on Lila is he?
Ditto for politicians or bureaucrats or church fathers.
Like J Edgar Hoover, Lila collected a lot of secrets for both protection and profit.
She also played up her local South Shore working class roots against them there rich smart ass big city doctors.
Her Seventh Day Adventists community also held similar views about the medical community.
Above all, she relied on the quiet support for 'popular eugenics' that existed among almost all of the Protestant population of the world from the 1890s to the 1960s.
Rumours swirled that she was 'quickening' the useless babies by underheating their nursery and underfeeding
them, but this was a traditional practise of baby mills that far predated the rise of formal Eugenics.
Sure, she might be hastening the inevitable deaths of useless babies but so what (insert a Hegelian Shrug here), wasn't their early deaths were going to occur anyway?
So now, when we turn to another part of the Protestant world of the early 1940s and to Nazi doctor Valentin Falthauser, we must ask ourselves, was he in any different from Lila Coolen ?
Similarity number one: like her, he never had to pay for his mass murders.
Similarity number two: he, too, knew how to disguise murder in common local customs : this was a folksy/volksy, downhome, Heimat, sort of murder.
Just as Lila Coolen used the traditional food of rural Nova Scotians, molasses, in her death potions, so too did Dr Valentin advocate the very traditional German peasant foods of potatoes,turnips and cabbage for his 'sure death meals'.
His charges, those institionalized inmates too weak to do enough work to deserve a slightly larger ration (so that they still starved to death but not before putting out some useful work), got only these three vegtables in a watery soup, meal after meal, day after day - until death.
Without protein or fats and without enough trace minerals and vitamins this unrelentling diet usually ensured a death by disease in a few months.
Let the staff gossip to the world outside the Homes - how could Germany's favourite vegetables cause deliberate death ?
The German Aktion T4 program of 1939-1940 was far too industrial for Valentin : all those fatal needles and gassing and the foul-smelling sweet human smoke pouring out of the chimmeys.
Locals complained and gossiped ,until all Germany and all the world knew about it.
It had to be officially stopped but was encouraged to carry on in a decentralized, unofficial basis.
This process which went on even after the Allies ruled Germany, killed far more than the Aktion T4 effort.
Much attention - far too much attention - has focussed on the direct killing aspects of this process.
In a sort of 'Porn of the Holocaust', we learn much about the overdosing of patients with sleeping pills followed up by a big needle-full of morphine if needed.
These deaths were horrible but relatively quick --- much worse were the long slow very painful deaths by starvation on The Falthauser Diet, for two reasons.
I suspect this was the cause of the largest numbers of deaths- and numbers do matter in murder.
More importantly, unlike the relatively uncommon 'death by needle' practiced secretly by some doctors and some
nurses in every county in every time period, inmate death by slow starvation was common throughout all the world in times of war and want, as a more or less deliberate public policy.
The most common way was to issue piously inmates the same inadequate ration that all others in the nation got -- but unlike most other people, the inmates couldn't garden, buy or barter to get the extra calories between inadequate ration and death.
We must never forget that government leaders' deliberate decisions about food distribution (ie food triage) which lead to slow death by starvation for millions was what links war heroes Churchill & Stalin to the war villains Hitler and Tojo (and VALENTIN and LILA) and it is something we all need to talk about.....
WWII caused by Bad Faith Scientists preferring "JOBS,JOBS,JOBS" to "TRUTH,TRUTH,TRUTH"
After 1895, as it gradually became apparent across the entire width of the science and mathematics that Newtonian mechanics was perhaps not the metaphor for the way that Reality worked, individually and collectively scientists faced their biggest ever dilemma.
Up to 1895, the sort of science (Popular Science) that was taught in high schools and to undergraduates and was simplified-down whenever eminent scientists talked to the popular press, at least was the same as all scientists believed it was, whenever they wrote about it in peer-reviewed articles in the best regarded science journals.
(Best be aware that 'peer-reviewed' is a metaphor or a sort of shorthand for reliably-regarded science articles, because in fact, formal peer-review in today's sense of the term was actually quite rare until after 1945.
It was still 'peer-reviewed' before publishing but in a highly informal style - the peer might be the editor and his closest friend with some specialist knowledge in the particular area the paper dealt with.)
There was no moral divide between Published and Popular Science.
Unfortunately after 1895, this happy unity was torn apart and has never been re-sutured.
It was choice made made the scientists themselves.
They were just then (this is more than a hundred years ago, mind you) entertaining strong hopes they could do basic science full time and be both well paid (including tenure and pensions) and well respected for doing so.
Crucially, these would be jobs in other people's employ - they would be well paid well regarded employees - not self-employed entrepreneurs.
They were thus dependent highly on public good will.
Up to 1895, the sort of science (Popular Science) that was taught in high schools and to undergraduates and was simplified-down whenever eminent scientists talked to the popular press, at least was the same as all scientists believed it was, whenever they wrote about it in peer-reviewed articles in the best regarded science journals.
(Best be aware that 'peer-reviewed' is a metaphor or a sort of shorthand for reliably-regarded science articles, because in fact, formal peer-review in today's sense of the term was actually quite rare until after 1945.
It was still 'peer-reviewed' before publishing but in a highly informal style - the peer might be the editor and his closest friend with some specialist knowledge in the particular area the paper dealt with.)
There was no moral divide between Published and Popular Science.
Unfortunately after 1895, this happy unity was torn apart and has never been re-sutured.
It was choice made made the scientists themselves.
They were just then (this is more than a hundred years ago, mind you) entertaining strong hopes they could do basic science full time and be both well paid (including tenure and pensions) and well respected for doing so.
Crucially, these would be jobs in other people's employ - they would be well paid well regarded employees - not self-employed entrepreneurs.
They were thus dependent highly on public good will.
"Houston we have LIFE - a million years away"
When Mariner 4 snapped its pics of Mars in July 1965, the delusion of humans living on other planets should finally have died - but it didn't.
Bad ideas need perpetually teenage boys with bad arithmetic skills - an item never in short supply.
Now some astronomers are willing to bet their primary lens to support their belief that they have discovered an "Earth-like" planet, 100% certain to hold "Life".
I think they are being way way way too conservative - "Life" - if you mean simply bacteria - probably doesn't need anything as human-friendly as Earth to survive upon.
But if in fact - wink, wink/ nudge,nudge you really mean Life=Humans, and I think most of these scientists do mean that but lack the courage to say so, then I think they are dreaming in Technicolor.
Kool-Aid colored Technicolor.
Take GLIESTE 581G, a planet that astrophysicist Steven Vogt of the University of California at Santa Cruz says is 100% certain to contains "Life" and is also "Earth-like".
No taxpayer-elected politician in today's or tomorrow's Congress is going to blew trillions of dollars into the air , simply to see if some invisible bacteria are clinging to grains of sand deep in some gully on Glieste 581G, so the key to this press-announcement of professor Vogt is the really that magic-dust word ,"Earth-like".
We humans being hubris-ridden from birth, we instantly associate "Earth-like" with "humans-will-like-it-there".
Glieste 581G doesn't seem, on closer examination (albeit at a very great distance) to be a near-exact Earth-clone, which is what human-like life probably needs to survive and enjoy itself.
And distance from us ?
Well, its a 400 trillion kilometre trek to get there and back.
At about the fastest speed we have ever put an object into space (not one holding human cargo) that is a million year trip to get there and back.
One million years of deep space cosmic radiation falling upon the lucky human colony inside that Star Trek vehicle ----- won't the DNA in their sperm and eggs be well and truly fried by time they arrive !!
That is why I am an Earthling and why the Skygods are my sworn enemy: they all seem to be scientist-wannabes with too much calculus and not enough arithmetic....
Bad ideas need perpetually teenage boys with bad arithmetic skills - an item never in short supply.
Now some astronomers are willing to bet their primary lens to support their belief that they have discovered an "Earth-like" planet, 100% certain to hold "Life".
I think they are being way way way too conservative - "Life" - if you mean simply bacteria - probably doesn't need anything as human-friendly as Earth to survive upon.
But if in fact - wink, wink/ nudge,nudge you really mean Life=Humans, and I think most of these scientists do mean that but lack the courage to say so, then I think they are dreaming in Technicolor.
Kool-Aid colored Technicolor.
Take GLIESTE 581G, a planet that astrophysicist Steven Vogt of the University of California at Santa Cruz says is 100% certain to contains "Life" and is also "Earth-like".
No taxpayer-elected politician in today's or tomorrow's Congress is going to blew trillions of dollars into the air , simply to see if some invisible bacteria are clinging to grains of sand deep in some gully on Glieste 581G, so the key to this press-announcement of professor Vogt is the really that magic-dust word ,"Earth-like".
We humans being hubris-ridden from birth, we instantly associate "Earth-like" with "humans-will-like-it-there".
Glieste 581G doesn't seem, on closer examination (albeit at a very great distance) to be a near-exact Earth-clone, which is what human-like life probably needs to survive and enjoy itself.
And distance from us ?
Well, its a 400 trillion kilometre trek to get there and back.
At about the fastest speed we have ever put an object into space (not one holding human cargo) that is a million year trip to get there and back.
One million years of deep space cosmic radiation falling upon the lucky human colony inside that Star Trek vehicle ----- won't the DNA in their sperm and eggs be well and truly fried by time they arrive !!
That is why I am an Earthling and why the Skygods are my sworn enemy: they all seem to be scientist-wannabes with too much calculus and not enough arithmetic....
Patient ONE of the Antibiotics Era : how the saving of Charlie Aronson changed our world
During his lifetime, Dr Henry Dawson only gave penicillin to several dozen endocarditis patients, Charlie Aronson first among them ; only saved several dozen lives, Charlie among them.
Dawson's pioneering effort to inject Charlie with penicillin on October 16th and 17th 1940 (Dies Miribilis) certainly didn't directly save many lives.
But the moral fact that Dawson cared enough in the first place about Charlie-the-person, to pioneer in making and to giving him penicillin, has certainly saved tens and tens of millions of lives ever since Dawson's premature death in 1945.
If only the greater cultural milieu surrounding Dawson and Charlie had been as willing - nay as eager - to save Charlie 'the 4F of the 4Fs' as Dawson was, it might also have been as willing - nay eager - to save the Jews of Europe as well.
Immaterial that Charlie was almost certainly Jewish as well : the point to Dawson was that Charlie was a fellow human being, end of story.
Social medicine, Dawson's domain, says that medicine is not just the narrow manipulating of bio-chemical activities to save lives.
It holds instead the view that most people die prematurely, not because their bodies failed or because medicines failed, but because the world around them see them as not worth much, so not worthy of much effort, time and expense to try to save them.
Doctors who challenge these utilitarian views by their voices and their actions indirectly save far more lives than do their equally competent colleagues who may directly save more lives, but who are content to only save the lives their culture deems worthy of saving.
The Allies (rather like the Axis, differing only in degree not in kind) divided the world of World War Two into three parts, like Gaul.
There were the enemy-oriented people and the allies-oriented people : themselves further divided into 1A allies and 4F allies.
Until June 1943, only enough American resources were going to be devoted to penicillin to ensure that the needs of the 1A allies would be met.
Then the American WPB (Wartime Production Board) made its most surprising decision ever : that a considerable portion of America's bomb and bullet making potential would be diverted instead to making lifesavers - penicillin lifesavers enough to save soldier and civilian alike.
This was not a decision followed by Britain , Canada and Australia.
They decided to divert only enough of their country's resources to penicillin-making to fill the needs of their armed forces at a minimal level.
Winston Churchill and his Tory-dominant government took the lead on this decision, by their broad hints and inaction (if nothing else), and the other Commonwealth nations chose to follow his lead rather than that of the WPB.
A single additional Lancaster bomber squadron is about three million pounds in 1943 money,(about a million pounds in planes , plus two million pound more for the 500 members of the squadron , hangers, armaments, fuel etc).
This amount would have paid for enough new penicillin production facilities such that by early 1944 , Britain's could have supplied its civilians as well as its soldiers.
Ie, match the Americans' penicillin output, despite using a lower level of technology.
We know well enough the costs of a Lancaster squadron and the costs of Glaxo's low tech but highly efficiently run bottle-penicillin factories , to be able to make this claim with a great deal of certainty.
Churchill, however, chose 'LANCs over PEN' and paid for it in the surprising election results of June 1945 ; the inequalities of wartime health care provision being the number one reason most people chose the egalitarian Labour Party over the war-winning Tories.
America's super abundance of wartime penicillin allowed it to use penicillin as a tool of diplomacy , replacing British influence with that of the Americans at every turn : replacing Pax Britannica with Pax Americana, again causing Churchill to "win the war but lose the world".
Dawson did not force the WPB to make the decision it did, though certainly his uniquely civilian oriented approach to penicillin treatment, starting way back in September 1940, must have played a part.
But the WPB pledge was just that : a pledge - it was up to industry to carry it out.
Industry was willing - even eager - to build high tech buildings out of extremely scarce materials now suddenly obtainable thanks to top-of-the-drawer allocation quotas for would-be penicillin producers.
Postwar, those buildings would give them an early lead on their competitors.
But they weren't so willing to make biological penicillin in those shiny new buildings, not with rumours than synthetic penicillin was just months away.
Dante Colitti forced their hand.
In August 1943, the junior staffer, a surgical resident at a small hospital a mile from Henry Dawson's hospital, was about to get married and go on a honeymoon. He didn't have to go poke his nose into the affairs of a patient in the non-surgical part of the hospital.
But he did.
He was moved by what he had heard about the dying Henry Dawson a mile away being willing to steal government penicillin to save the weak and the small.
And perhaps because Colitti himself was a lifelong "cripple", suffering from TB of the spine.
Dante decided to risk his own career by intervening over the other more senior doctors' heads on a patient that wasn't even his --- urging the patient's parents to call the Hearst newspaper chain directly, to ask them to help obtain the tightly rationed penicillin needed to save the baby's life.
The resulting day by day heart-rendering accounts and photos of the life-saving efforts for little Patty Malone finally - albeit 15 years late - put a human face on penicillin.
Suddenly the population woke up to the fact that they wanted/ needed penicillin -right now ! - and what was their Congressman doing to see that it happened ?
Doctor Mom, in high dudgeon , can provoke fear even in generals, industrialists and Presidents and soon John L Smith, boss of the biggest potential penicillin producer (Pfizer) got the moral message as well.
The chain reaction : Dawson + Charlie : Dante Colitti and Patty Malone: John L and Mae Smith and memories of their own dead daughter + Pfizer : tons of and tons of penicillin by April 1944, is clear enough .
Also clear enough is an ageless message : one person, even if they are dying, can indeed make a world-quaking difference .....
Dawson's pioneering effort to inject Charlie with penicillin on October 16th and 17th 1940 (Dies Miribilis) certainly didn't directly save many lives.
But the moral fact that Dawson cared enough in the first place about Charlie-the-person, to pioneer in making and to giving him penicillin, has certainly saved tens and tens of millions of lives ever since Dawson's premature death in 1945.
If only the greater cultural milieu surrounding Dawson and Charlie had been as willing - nay as eager - to save Charlie 'the 4F of the 4Fs' as Dawson was, it might also have been as willing - nay eager - to save the Jews of Europe as well.
Immaterial that Charlie was almost certainly Jewish as well : the point to Dawson was that Charlie was a fellow human being, end of story.
Social medicine, Dawson's domain, says that medicine is not just the narrow manipulating of bio-chemical activities to save lives.
It holds instead the view that most people die prematurely, not because their bodies failed or because medicines failed, but because the world around them see them as not worth much, so not worthy of much effort, time and expense to try to save them.
Doctors who challenge these utilitarian views by their voices and their actions indirectly save far more lives than do their equally competent colleagues who may directly save more lives, but who are content to only save the lives their culture deems worthy of saving.
The Allies (rather like the Axis, differing only in degree not in kind) divided the world of World War Two into three parts, like Gaul.
There were the enemy-oriented people and the allies-oriented people : themselves further divided into 1A allies and 4F allies.
Until June 1943, only enough American resources were going to be devoted to penicillin to ensure that the needs of the 1A allies would be met.
Then the American WPB (Wartime Production Board) made its most surprising decision ever : that a considerable portion of America's bomb and bullet making potential would be diverted instead to making lifesavers - penicillin lifesavers enough to save soldier and civilian alike.
This was not a decision followed by Britain , Canada and Australia.
They decided to divert only enough of their country's resources to penicillin-making to fill the needs of their armed forces at a minimal level.
Winston Churchill and his Tory-dominant government took the lead on this decision, by their broad hints and inaction (if nothing else), and the other Commonwealth nations chose to follow his lead rather than that of the WPB.
A single additional Lancaster bomber squadron is about three million pounds in 1943 money,(about a million pounds in planes , plus two million pound more for the 500 members of the squadron , hangers, armaments, fuel etc).
This amount would have paid for enough new penicillin production facilities such that by early 1944 , Britain's could have supplied its civilians as well as its soldiers.
Ie, match the Americans' penicillin output, despite using a lower level of technology.
We know well enough the costs of a Lancaster squadron and the costs of Glaxo's low tech but highly efficiently run bottle-penicillin factories , to be able to make this claim with a great deal of certainty.
Churchill, however, chose 'LANCs over PEN' and paid for it in the surprising election results of June 1945 ; the inequalities of wartime health care provision being the number one reason most people chose the egalitarian Labour Party over the war-winning Tories.
America's super abundance of wartime penicillin allowed it to use penicillin as a tool of diplomacy , replacing British influence with that of the Americans at every turn : replacing Pax Britannica with Pax Americana, again causing Churchill to "win the war but lose the world".
Dawson did not force the WPB to make the decision it did, though certainly his uniquely civilian oriented approach to penicillin treatment, starting way back in September 1940, must have played a part.
But the WPB pledge was just that : a pledge - it was up to industry to carry it out.
Industry was willing - even eager - to build high tech buildings out of extremely scarce materials now suddenly obtainable thanks to top-of-the-drawer allocation quotas for would-be penicillin producers.
Postwar, those buildings would give them an early lead on their competitors.
But they weren't so willing to make biological penicillin in those shiny new buildings, not with rumours than synthetic penicillin was just months away.
Dante Colitti forced their hand.
In August 1943, the junior staffer, a surgical resident at a small hospital a mile from Henry Dawson's hospital, was about to get married and go on a honeymoon. He didn't have to go poke his nose into the affairs of a patient in the non-surgical part of the hospital.
But he did.
He was moved by what he had heard about the dying Henry Dawson a mile away being willing to steal government penicillin to save the weak and the small.
And perhaps because Colitti himself was a lifelong "cripple", suffering from TB of the spine.
Dante decided to risk his own career by intervening over the other more senior doctors' heads on a patient that wasn't even his --- urging the patient's parents to call the Hearst newspaper chain directly, to ask them to help obtain the tightly rationed penicillin needed to save the baby's life.
The resulting day by day heart-rendering accounts and photos of the life-saving efforts for little Patty Malone finally - albeit 15 years late - put a human face on penicillin.
Suddenly the population woke up to the fact that they wanted/ needed penicillin -right now ! - and what was their Congressman doing to see that it happened ?
Doctor Mom, in high dudgeon , can provoke fear even in generals, industrialists and Presidents and soon John L Smith, boss of the biggest potential penicillin producer (Pfizer) got the moral message as well.
The chain reaction : Dawson + Charlie : Dante Colitti and Patty Malone: John L and Mae Smith and memories of their own dead daughter + Pfizer : tons of and tons of penicillin by April 1944, is clear enough .
Also clear enough is an ageless message : one person, even if they are dying, can indeed make a world-quaking difference .....
Lying now almost as common as Not Telling The Truth, U of Western Ontario's new study suggests
 |
| KILLER EGGS ? |
Everyone, please please please trust an email asking for money postmarked Nigeria, before you trust anything a University Public Affairs officer tells you in a press release about the newest gosh-dare wonderful thing coming out their employer's labs.
A shill is a shill is a shill.
Anyway, here more about the whole squalid affair here and here.
But remember : popular science is a process, not an event. Its a big messy, muddy, pool.
The lead scientists, the institutions and friends that support them, their personal opponents and institutional opponents, the divided press and a divided public all are busy jockeying and elbowing trying to define this science story their way.
So-------when I wrote this blog post, I, too, became part of the whole "Spence & Eggs & Overstating-The-Results" popular science process .....
Saturday, August 13, 2022
more HOBBY more PEARLS
GLADYS HOBBY in 1971, chairing the editorial board of the scientific journal she founded
Of course, people wanted more pictures of Gladys Hobby.
Well there is one color one, Hobby with Fleming, but it is all too common on the web already for me to add another copy.
But here are a few more, with pearls, natch.
I haven't put out any photos of Meyer or Hunter or Odlum as they are well represented on the web.
But women always get short shrift, in photographs as well as in life in general.
I would really like to see a photograph of Eleanor Hahnel (of GAF industries in the 1960s) aka Eleanor Chaffee, (grad of the University of Connecticut 1937).
Or a photo of Miriam Olmstead (girlfriend of Robert Goddard of rocket fame), aka Miriam Lipman, spouse of artist Michael Lipman, aka a woman who did much to make Rheumatoid Arthritis and all auto immune diseases more understandable, if not yet much more treatable.
If you can help, leave me a comment below.
Until then, enjoy a few more pictures of Gladys Hobby:
Hobby in a formal pose , age about 75
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| From a picture taken of Hobby with Dr Ethel Florey, the clinician-wife who rode around on her bike in the rain collecting penicillin from patients' urine while her husband ,Howard Florey, played 'find the salami' with his mistress back in his apartment-like office at the DUNN ---- and then got most of the credit for Ethel's clinical penicillin work...ain't it always the way ? |
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