When the possibility of your nation joining a world wide war looms, getting your first ever draft registration card must feel just like getting the kiss of death, to a young man on the campus of Columbia University.
But when you are a young man on another part of Columbia's campus who has been written off 'as soon to die from an invariably fatal disease', getting instead History's first ever needle of antibiotics, must feel just like getting the kiss of life.
Hence the spooky Janus-like nature of Dies Mirabilis , October 16th 1940.....
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Majority of Americans remain silent as Woodrow Wilson's legacy is brutally destroyed : 1938-1941
Thank God Almighty that Adolf Hitler declared war on America, because without it, would America have ever gone to war against the greatest evil the world has ever known ?
The fact remains that between September 1938 and December 1941, the majority of Americans had stood silent as the legacy of their own president Woodrow Wilson was brutally dismembered by the twin 'evil empires' of Hitler and Stalin.
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Yugoslavia were all creations of Wilson's direct efforts at Versailles.
The larger spirit of Wilson's efforts : that small nations should be allowed to live without being swallowing up by their larger neighbour's brutal might had , until 1938-1941, kept countries like Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Albania, Norway, Holland and Greece independent.
Now that too was all gone.
Still the majority of Americans kept silent and indifferent ; they wanted to keep out of the "conflict between the nations" of Europe.
Conflict between nations ???!!!
When I learn that a high school senior and football star has walloped the hell out of a primary toddler his girlfriend was supposed to be minding, I do not call it a "conflict between school students" though that is technically and legalistically correct.
I call it child abuse and deadly assault : the 5 year old didn't start this "conflict" , the 17 year old went to war on it.
So it was when Russia invaded Estonia or Germany invaded Denmark , without any cause besides sheer evil greed.
Morally the excuses most Americans gave then for not going to the defence of the weak against the strong would not stand up in a court today, if they were accused of just standing by while a 17 year old football star beat the crap out of a 5 year old child.
And in a higher - moral - court , they did not stand up then.
This was the sort of moral cesspool that Henry Dawson was swimming against when he defiantly decided to introduce the Age of Antibiotics by treating the "weakest of the weak", the "4Fs of the 4Fs" with his crude penicillin, on the very day America choose to celebrate its "1As of the 1As" : Draft Registration day, October 16th 1940...
The fact remains that between September 1938 and December 1941, the majority of Americans had stood silent as the legacy of their own president Woodrow Wilson was brutally dismembered by the twin 'evil empires' of Hitler and Stalin.
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Yugoslavia were all creations of Wilson's direct efforts at Versailles.
The larger spirit of Wilson's efforts : that small nations should be allowed to live without being swallowing up by their larger neighbour's brutal might had , until 1938-1941, kept countries like Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Albania, Norway, Holland and Greece independent.
Now that too was all gone.
Still the majority of Americans kept silent and indifferent ; they wanted to keep out of the "conflict between the nations" of Europe.
Conflict between nations ???!!!
When I learn that a high school senior and football star has walloped the hell out of a primary toddler his girlfriend was supposed to be minding, I do not call it a "conflict between school students" though that is technically and legalistically correct.
I call it child abuse and deadly assault : the 5 year old didn't start this "conflict" , the 17 year old went to war on it.
So it was when Russia invaded Estonia or Germany invaded Denmark , without any cause besides sheer evil greed.
Morally the excuses most Americans gave then for not going to the defence of the weak against the strong would not stand up in a court today, if they were accused of just standing by while a 17 year old football star beat the crap out of a 5 year old child.
And in a higher - moral - court , they did not stand up then.
This was the sort of moral cesspool that Henry Dawson was swimming against when he defiantly decided to introduce the Age of Antibiotics by treating the "weakest of the weak", the "4Fs of the 4Fs" with his crude penicillin, on the very day America choose to celebrate its "1As of the 1As" : Draft Registration day, October 16th 1940...
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Resetting the Allied moral compass so that it diverged from the Nazis, not merely followed a muted parallel course
It remains unknown whether Henry Dawson expected his quixotic wartime efforts (to "waste" weaponized penicillin on 'useless' SBEs ) to go as far as they ultimately did.
He certainly was extremely unhappy that America was treating its wartime 'SBE lives unworthy of life' in almost as bad a fashion as Nazi Germany was known to be doing to its SBEs and others seen as "useless mouths".
But did he suspect his assault on weaponizing penicillin would extend beyond the Allies' horrific wartime neglect of the poorer chronically ill ?
He probably couldn't have foreseen just how quickly the pipeline of ever-newer ever-better sulfa drugs would dry up or just how quickly so many strains of deadly bacteria would become resistant to any sulfa drug , leaving penicillin as the only wartime lifesaver between disease and death.
This meant de-weaponizing penicillin had consequences far beyond those people suffering from SBE and denied their only chance at life.
If weaponized penicillin had remained throughout the war successfully censored and had remained denied to the civilian world (as weaponized DDT successfully was, never let us forget) , it would have ranked as one of WWII's major war crimes, like Katyn Forest or Auschwitz.
Millions of people around the world during WWII would have died needlessly from massive infections that only penicillin alone could have stopped.
Penicillin in 1943 was not as it is today, just one among dozens of antibiotics - it was the only one - and in addition, no new anti-bacterial sulfa drugs were coming along to replace the ones that bacteria had so rapidly grown resistant to.
Refusing to divert a tiny amount of war resources to make penicillin available to civilians - anywhere and everywhere - was to refuse them Life itself.
Worse, there was no trade-off to debate ; penicillin, like sulfa before it, was no war-winning secret medical weapon, at least in its intended war-winning use at the front .
Brand new (front line) wounds either contain abundant alternative bacteria foods to the deadly sulfa 'food' (the Fildes theory, known since 1940) or contain abundant proteins to bind to penicillin and render it useless.
However penicillin, and sulfa, were very useful a little further back in the military hospital system, as a life-saving systemic in cases of possible blood poisoning.
The case against secret weaponized penicillin gets even worse.
As an impure natural drug, penicillin would have taken the Germans at least a year or two or three to successfully mass produce it , even if its virtues had been sung from the heavens by the American media in 1942.
But as a pure synthetic penicillin in supposedly cheap abundant mass production (an event that in fact as not yet ever occurred) the chemistry-minded Germans would have rapidly back-engineered the drug and synthesized it rapidly themselves.
Because remember it took 15 years of hard effort to purify natural penicillin enough to determine its structure - but only months thereafter to 'synthesize' it artificially.
Back-engineering that synthesis would also only have taken months.
Penicillin's real secret was just how difficult the mass production of natural penicillin could be if you set your mind on doing everything the hard way ---- not the OSRD-Merck-Oxford fantasy of secret synthesis.
Dawson certainly set up the stage for the Allies re-setting of their moral compass , from his endocarditis efforts from September 1940 to September 1943 : but it was the immediate outcry resulting from the Patty Malone and Marie Barker cases that forced them to actually do something concrete.
His gut instinct in 1940 ,that not treating the otherwise fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis would prove the acid test for the Allies' pernicious morality, certainly was correct.
But while he couldn't have foreseen how far his actions would impact, he wouldn't have been unhappy that they did so......
He certainly was extremely unhappy that America was treating its wartime 'SBE lives unworthy of life' in almost as bad a fashion as Nazi Germany was known to be doing to its SBEs and others seen as "useless mouths".
But did he suspect his assault on weaponizing penicillin would extend beyond the Allies' horrific wartime neglect of the poorer chronically ill ?
He probably couldn't have foreseen just how quickly the pipeline of ever-newer ever-better sulfa drugs would dry up or just how quickly so many strains of deadly bacteria would become resistant to any sulfa drug , leaving penicillin as the only wartime lifesaver between disease and death.
This meant de-weaponizing penicillin had consequences far beyond those people suffering from SBE and denied their only chance at life.
If weaponized penicillin had remained throughout the war successfully censored and had remained denied to the civilian world (as weaponized DDT successfully was, never let us forget) , it would have ranked as one of WWII's major war crimes, like Katyn Forest or Auschwitz.
Millions of people around the world during WWII would have died needlessly from massive infections that only penicillin alone could have stopped.
Penicillin in 1943 was not as it is today, just one among dozens of antibiotics - it was the only one - and in addition, no new anti-bacterial sulfa drugs were coming along to replace the ones that bacteria had so rapidly grown resistant to.
Refusing to divert a tiny amount of war resources to make penicillin available to civilians - anywhere and everywhere - was to refuse them Life itself.
Worse, there was no trade-off to debate ; penicillin, like sulfa before it, was no war-winning secret medical weapon, at least in its intended war-winning use at the front .
Brand new (front line) wounds either contain abundant alternative bacteria foods to the deadly sulfa 'food' (the Fildes theory, known since 1940) or contain abundant proteins to bind to penicillin and render it useless.
However penicillin, and sulfa, were very useful a little further back in the military hospital system, as a life-saving systemic in cases of possible blood poisoning.
The case against secret weaponized penicillin gets even worse.
As an impure natural drug, penicillin would have taken the Germans at least a year or two or three to successfully mass produce it , even if its virtues had been sung from the heavens by the American media in 1942.
But as a pure synthetic penicillin in supposedly cheap abundant mass production (an event that in fact as not yet ever occurred) the chemistry-minded Germans would have rapidly back-engineered the drug and synthesized it rapidly themselves.
Because remember it took 15 years of hard effort to purify natural penicillin enough to determine its structure - but only months thereafter to 'synthesize' it artificially.
Back-engineering that synthesis would also only have taken months.
Penicillin's real secret was just how difficult the mass production of natural penicillin could be if you set your mind on doing everything the hard way ---- not the OSRD-Merck-Oxford fantasy of secret synthesis.
Dawson certainly set up the stage for the Allies re-setting of their moral compass , from his endocarditis efforts from September 1940 to September 1943 : but it was the immediate outcry resulting from the Patty Malone and Marie Barker cases that forced them to actually do something concrete.
His gut instinct in 1940 ,that not treating the otherwise fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis would prove the acid test for the Allies' pernicious morality, certainly was correct.
But while he couldn't have foreseen how far his actions would impact, he wouldn't have been unhappy that they did so......
The Cure for Auschwitz Disease : "Dawson's Crude" : .56% penicillin ...and 99 and 44/100ths pure love
Pray there comes a day when most premature deaths really are 'Acts of God', when even the best of money and the best of medical care could not result in a happy ending.
But until that happier day, most premature deaths in the world - in peace as in war - are 'Acts of Humanity' , or rather 'Acts of Lack of Humanity'.
Sins of Omission : premature death caused because the people dying are not judged (by others more fortunate) as worthy of devoting much money or effort towards saving.
In war, comparatively few people die as soldiers dying of mortal wounds gained in combat.
The Nazis' behavior provides a particularly clear example of this.
They fed and cared for the captured POWs and enemy civilians of some nations (the Dutch for example) but for other (Russians and Poles for example) many or most of these people were shot after battle or left to starve and die of disease from lack of food, medical care and shelter.
The food and fuel saved as a result meant that no German citizen went hungry or cold.
The right kind of German civilian anyway.
Using the war as excuse, the Nazis killed many German civilians, those judged 'life unworthy of life' , to free up food and hospitals for other Germans.
In another well known example of WWII's Sins of Omission, Winston Churchill ignored the pleas of his top British officials in India and let four million poor Bengali civilians needlessly starve to death in 1943-1944 ,rather than divert some food and some shipping from Allied peoples he judged more worthy of receiving them.
Even the different death rates from wounds gained in combat , among the so called "modern" nations engaged in World War Two is revealing.
The Americans and British generally devoted more resources to saving their wounded compared to the Germans, Japanese, Russians and Italians.
As a result,more western Allied troops survived the same severity of wound as experienced by troops of these other nations.
'Of course', I hear you say, 'they were richer nations, it was easy for them !'
But no : they had a choice, because the extra money devoted to this extraordinary care of the wounded could have been allocated elsewhere: to more and better anti-tank artillery, for example.
An extraordinary effort to produce the best anti-tank artillery ever made was , in fact, probably the cheapest way for the Western Allies to have ended the war against Germany at least a year earlier than it did, saving millions of lives all around.
I raise the genuine issue of better earlier anti-tank artillery versus the best possible military health care to remind us that even total war still leaves us with genuine moral choices.
More Lancaster bombers versus more 17 pounder anti-tank guns versus raising everyone's morale by generously providing penicillin enough for all people were some of the choices - part political, part moral, part economical - that leaders had to make in WWII.
Making the wrong ones meant the war dragged on longer than it had to, costing more lives lost.
It is not enough to say Churchill won the war in 1945 ; better to ask, could he have won the war in 1943 ?
In 1940, Henry Dawson was battling a near universal mindset among the world's research-oriented doctors of that time : that a medical researcher's only task was to determine that disease A was caused by bug B and that bug B was killed by compound C.
Then, like sleeping under a bridge, the researchers considered that the cure for disease A was open to rich and poor alike : pay for three weeks of needles at $10 a shot: together with doctors fees, say $250 in total.
When the annual wages of the working poor, if they found work, was very lucky to be $750 in 1940, that was a cure well beyond their reach.
Besides the fact that their disease might be far harder to cure than that of someone well off, due to the cumulative affect of their lack of good nutritious food for years and years.
Or that fact that living, as they did, in poor and crowded housing, disease A was more likely to come back again, even after an impossibly expensive cure.
Now what if disease A is something one gets from having open wounds - such as the open wounds all civilian mothers have after childbirth, or the open wounds that soldiers get after exposure to shell fire in battle.
How do we judge western Allied governments unwilling to provide the only life saver for disease A , either to any civilian moms (except those personally known to lead disease A researchers) or to any soldiers with wounds so severe they will be discharged and pensioned off, if they live ?
And how do we judge these governments when at the same time, they are gladly willing to provide live-saving compound C (totally free !) to men who had either very high and very low peacetime incomes, just as long as their war wounds (by sheer luck) are only moderately severe and they can be expected to return soon to combat duty ?
Is this attitude not different in kind from that of the Nazis, but merely different in degree ?
Dawson had no realistic expectations that a few small injections of a very crude penicillin powder, hastily made in a few weeks, would cure such an incurable invariably fatal disease as subacute bacterial endocarditis, (SBE), then as now the acid test of all infectious diseases.
His powder had only about 8 to 9 units of penicillin per mg in it ; ie it was only about .56% pure.
The rest (the remaining 99 and 44/100ths worth),was in many researchers' minds, "junk".
Rather as they later described most of our DNA : "junk".
I believe Dawson considered his little bit of brown powder to be .56% penicillin and 99.44% pure love.
99.44% pure care, concern, caring.
For Dawson was judging his attempt to save Aaron Alston and Charlie Aronson by a much different - and much more moral - acid test.
To Dawson, SBE in the Fall of 1940 was not the acid test of infectious disease, but rather the acid test of pernicious morality.
These SBE patients were be judged to be 1940 America's "4Fs of the 4Fs", suffering from the militarily most useless disease on earth and not worthy of wasting any precious medical resources upon.
Now a doctor named Francis Peabody that Dawson had hoped to train with (but who died of cancer before that could occur) had earlier and famously said that the care of the patient begins (only begins in fact ) if the doctor first cares about the patient.
A single doctor can't hope to directly save everyone dying in a big war.
But by setting a very public example about caring for the least of these, those judged "unworthy of life", even in the midst of a war , they can hope to begin to still the trigger fingers of those all too willing to kill prisoners just because 'it is too much bother to bring them back to our own lines'.
Only when the world is willing to care about "useless" others, even in the midst of wars, can we expect to begin to see war deaths reduced to combat mortal wounds, and then to ultimately see lesser and shorter and less brutal wars.
Only in a world where ordinary people care about others judged "useless", can we expect to still the hand that dropped the pellets at Auschwitz .
Which is why I earnestly claim that Dawson's Crude was the best and only cure for the Auschwitz Disease ....
But until that happier day, most premature deaths in the world - in peace as in war - are 'Acts of Humanity' , or rather 'Acts of Lack of Humanity'.
Sins of Omission : premature death caused because the people dying are not judged (by others more fortunate) as worthy of devoting much money or effort towards saving.
In war, comparatively few people die as soldiers dying of mortal wounds gained in combat.
The Nazis' behavior provides a particularly clear example of this.
They fed and cared for the captured POWs and enemy civilians of some nations (the Dutch for example) but for other (Russians and Poles for example) many or most of these people were shot after battle or left to starve and die of disease from lack of food, medical care and shelter.
The food and fuel saved as a result meant that no German citizen went hungry or cold.
The right kind of German civilian anyway.
Using the war as excuse, the Nazis killed many German civilians, those judged 'life unworthy of life' , to free up food and hospitals for other Germans.
In another well known example of WWII's Sins of Omission, Winston Churchill ignored the pleas of his top British officials in India and let four million poor Bengali civilians needlessly starve to death in 1943-1944 ,rather than divert some food and some shipping from Allied peoples he judged more worthy of receiving them.
Even the different death rates from wounds gained in combat , among the so called "modern" nations engaged in World War Two is revealing.
The Americans and British generally devoted more resources to saving their wounded compared to the Germans, Japanese, Russians and Italians.
As a result,more western Allied troops survived the same severity of wound as experienced by troops of these other nations.
'Of course', I hear you say, 'they were richer nations, it was easy for them !'
But no : they had a choice, because the extra money devoted to this extraordinary care of the wounded could have been allocated elsewhere: to more and better anti-tank artillery, for example.
An extraordinary effort to produce the best anti-tank artillery ever made was , in fact, probably the cheapest way for the Western Allies to have ended the war against Germany at least a year earlier than it did, saving millions of lives all around.
I raise the genuine issue of better earlier anti-tank artillery versus the best possible military health care to remind us that even total war still leaves us with genuine moral choices.
More Lancaster bombers versus more 17 pounder anti-tank guns versus raising everyone's morale by generously providing penicillin enough for all people were some of the choices - part political, part moral, part economical - that leaders had to make in WWII.
Making the wrong ones meant the war dragged on longer than it had to, costing more lives lost.
It is not enough to say Churchill won the war in 1945 ; better to ask, could he have won the war in 1943 ?
In 1940, Henry Dawson was battling a near universal mindset among the world's research-oriented doctors of that time : that a medical researcher's only task was to determine that disease A was caused by bug B and that bug B was killed by compound C.
Then, like sleeping under a bridge, the researchers considered that the cure for disease A was open to rich and poor alike : pay for three weeks of needles at $10 a shot: together with doctors fees, say $250 in total.
When the annual wages of the working poor, if they found work, was very lucky to be $750 in 1940, that was a cure well beyond their reach.
Besides the fact that their disease might be far harder to cure than that of someone well off, due to the cumulative affect of their lack of good nutritious food for years and years.
Or that fact that living, as they did, in poor and crowded housing, disease A was more likely to come back again, even after an impossibly expensive cure.
Now what if disease A is something one gets from having open wounds - such as the open wounds all civilian mothers have after childbirth, or the open wounds that soldiers get after exposure to shell fire in battle.
How do we judge western Allied governments unwilling to provide the only life saver for disease A , either to any civilian moms (except those personally known to lead disease A researchers) or to any soldiers with wounds so severe they will be discharged and pensioned off, if they live ?
And how do we judge these governments when at the same time, they are gladly willing to provide live-saving compound C (totally free !) to men who had either very high and very low peacetime incomes, just as long as their war wounds (by sheer luck) are only moderately severe and they can be expected to return soon to combat duty ?
Is this attitude not different in kind from that of the Nazis, but merely different in degree ?
Dawson had no realistic expectations that a few small injections of a very crude penicillin powder, hastily made in a few weeks, would cure such an incurable invariably fatal disease as subacute bacterial endocarditis, (SBE), then as now the acid test of all infectious diseases.
His powder had only about 8 to 9 units of penicillin per mg in it ; ie it was only about .56% pure.
The rest (the remaining 99 and 44/100ths worth),was in many researchers' minds, "junk".
Rather as they later described most of our DNA : "junk".
I believe Dawson considered his little bit of brown powder to be .56% penicillin and 99.44% pure love.
99.44% pure care, concern, caring.
For Dawson was judging his attempt to save Aaron Alston and Charlie Aronson by a much different - and much more moral - acid test.
To Dawson, SBE in the Fall of 1940 was not the acid test of infectious disease, but rather the acid test of pernicious morality.
These SBE patients were be judged to be 1940 America's "4Fs of the 4Fs", suffering from the militarily most useless disease on earth and not worthy of wasting any precious medical resources upon.
Now a doctor named Francis Peabody that Dawson had hoped to train with (but who died of cancer before that could occur) had earlier and famously said that the care of the patient begins (only begins in fact ) if the doctor first cares about the patient.
A single doctor can't hope to directly save everyone dying in a big war.
But by setting a very public example about caring for the least of these, those judged "unworthy of life", even in the midst of a war , they can hope to begin to still the trigger fingers of those all too willing to kill prisoners just because 'it is too much bother to bring them back to our own lines'.
Only when the world is willing to care about "useless" others, even in the midst of wars, can we expect to begin to see war deaths reduced to combat mortal wounds, and then to ultimately see lesser and shorter and less brutal wars.
Only in a world where ordinary people care about others judged "useless", can we expect to still the hand that dropped the pellets at Auschwitz .
Which is why I earnestly claim that Dawson's Crude was the best and only cure for the Auschwitz Disease ....
"Pax Penicillia" : how Churchill's Britain won the war and lost the peace
The decision by Winston Churchill's (Tory) Minister of Supply (MoS) not to divert the money for one additional Lancaster squadron, used to bomb civilians in Europe, towards providing enough penicillin for British (and European) civilians resulted in Churchill's Tories winning the war for Britain --- but at the cost of losing the peace.
By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.
Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.
And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...
By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.
Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.
And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Penicillin's "Bengali Famine Years" : 1943-1944
It was not America and Britain, it was not even the British and American governments ,that made the momentous decision, between late 1942 and early 1943, not to divert tax money just a little away from bombs and towards penicillin production instead.
This decision led, over the period of 1943-1944, to a Bengali Famine-like situation among the Allies over shortages of live-saving drugs for civilians.
It was only one government agency in each country that made that decision ; albeit all-powerful agencies in the middle of a war.
But I do not believe they acted contrary to the informally expressed sentiments of their country's war cabinets.
Let the record note their names : Vannevar Bush's weapon-developing agency known as the OSRD in America and the Ministry of (Army) Supply (MoS) in Britain, with the common link urging them into this course being Sir Howard Florey.
By contrast, diverting even a tiny tiny amount of the government's war resources to the issuing of firm standing orders for penicillin purchases could have provided adequate semi-purified natural penicillin to treat all cases (civilian and military) of patients dying from blood poisoning that were resistant to the only life-saving alternative, the sulpha drugs.
Let me make it perfectly, morally, clear : the fundamental issue was not that penicillin was in short supply : it was that any method of saving those dying of sulpha-resistant blood poisoning was in desperately short supply.
These diverted resources , expressed as firm government orders for penicillin at currently profitably prices ,would have stimulated private capital to make good use of current technology and of idle rural factories that had closed because of the war , as well as unskilled rural labour also left idle because of the war.
As models that this could have and in fact did work in practise, one only needs, in the case of Britain, to point to Glaxo's first low tech but efficient penicillin factories cobbled out of bits of unused space in other people's factories.
And in the American case, to point to an enterprising rural mushroom farmer called Raymond Rettew who briefly became the world's biggest penicillin producer, in the late spring of 1943.
FDR's party did not lose the 1944 election over this issue , because another part of his American government (the WPB, War Production Board) chose to totally reversed this decision, and in spades.
But Churchill's party did ultimately pay the full price for this decision made by the MoS (led by his fellow Tory, Sir Andrew Duncan) not to push for enough penicillin production resources to help civilian as well as soldier, later in the war.
That was when his party overwhelmingly lost the general election it was supposed to romp home in, July 2nd 1945 .
Churchill's equally callous decision not to stop the wartime Bengali Famine in which four million people died ( "If there really is a famine, why hasn't Gandhi died?" he sneered) probably also sealed the chances of Churchill's Britain holding onto the Indian Empire.
If Florey had been even moderately left wing rather than very right wing, he might have gone to other more left wing oriented agencies of the British and American governments and the wartime penicillin story could have been very different .
If the wartime history of Civil War Era America was written as historians write the Pollyanna story of wartime penicillin, there would be only one America and one government ,with no sense at all of conflict between different parts of America.
My work on wartime penicillin will make it very clear that two agencies of the American government, the OSRD and the WPB were not in agreement on penicillin production levels and methods but in conflict.
Just as in the UK, Howard Florey/MoS and Harry Jephcott/Glaxo were not in agreement on these same issues but in conflict.
And I will make it clear that there were no technical reasons why civilians could not have penicillin in 1943-1944 , rather it was the result of a political and moral decision not to produce one less bomber squadron if that was the cost of bring penicillin to dying civilians.
For these were penicillin famines by government fiat : Bengal-on-the-Potomac and Bengal-on-the-Thames.....
This decision led, over the period of 1943-1944, to a Bengali Famine-like situation among the Allies over shortages of live-saving drugs for civilians.
It was only one government agency in each country that made that decision ; albeit all-powerful agencies in the middle of a war.
But I do not believe they acted contrary to the informally expressed sentiments of their country's war cabinets.
Let the record note their names : Vannevar Bush's weapon-developing agency known as the OSRD in America and the Ministry of (Army) Supply (MoS) in Britain, with the common link urging them into this course being Sir Howard Florey.
By contrast, diverting even a tiny tiny amount of the government's war resources to the issuing of firm standing orders for penicillin purchases could have provided adequate semi-purified natural penicillin to treat all cases (civilian and military) of patients dying from blood poisoning that were resistant to the only life-saving alternative, the sulpha drugs.
Let me make it perfectly, morally, clear : the fundamental issue was not that penicillin was in short supply : it was that any method of saving those dying of sulpha-resistant blood poisoning was in desperately short supply.
These diverted resources , expressed as firm government orders for penicillin at currently profitably prices ,would have stimulated private capital to make good use of current technology and of idle rural factories that had closed because of the war , as well as unskilled rural labour also left idle because of the war.
As models that this could have and in fact did work in practise, one only needs, in the case of Britain, to point to Glaxo's first low tech but efficient penicillin factories cobbled out of bits of unused space in other people's factories.
And in the American case, to point to an enterprising rural mushroom farmer called Raymond Rettew who briefly became the world's biggest penicillin producer, in the late spring of 1943.
FDR's party did not lose the 1944 election over this issue , because another part of his American government (the WPB, War Production Board) chose to totally reversed this decision, and in spades.
But Churchill's party did ultimately pay the full price for this decision made by the MoS (led by his fellow Tory, Sir Andrew Duncan) not to push for enough penicillin production resources to help civilian as well as soldier, later in the war.
That was when his party overwhelmingly lost the general election it was supposed to romp home in, July 2nd 1945 .
Churchill's equally callous decision not to stop the wartime Bengali Famine in which four million people died ( "If there really is a famine, why hasn't Gandhi died?" he sneered) probably also sealed the chances of Churchill's Britain holding onto the Indian Empire.
If Florey had been even moderately left wing rather than very right wing, he might have gone to other more left wing oriented agencies of the British and American governments and the wartime penicillin story could have been very different .
If the wartime history of Civil War Era America was written as historians write the Pollyanna story of wartime penicillin, there would be only one America and one government ,with no sense at all of conflict between different parts of America.
My work on wartime penicillin will make it very clear that two agencies of the American government, the OSRD and the WPB were not in agreement on penicillin production levels and methods but in conflict.
Just as in the UK, Howard Florey/MoS and Harry Jephcott/Glaxo were not in agreement on these same issues but in conflict.
And I will make it clear that there were no technical reasons why civilians could not have penicillin in 1943-1944 , rather it was the result of a political and moral decision not to produce one less bomber squadron if that was the cost of bring penicillin to dying civilians.
For these were penicillin famines by government fiat : Bengal-on-the-Potomac and Bengal-on-the-Thames.....
Friday, February 15, 2013
"Weaponized" penicillin to be a frontline Army wound powder and hence the needs of the Navy, Air Force and Civilians are not relevant...
One of the most historic of meetings and dates in the whole extended penicillin saga occurred on September 25 1942 at Portland House in London England .
In fact one key participant at the meeting sensed this so greatly that he even whispered that history was going to view it that way, into the ear of the chairman as the meeting broke up.
In many ways, this meeting was very odd as well as being very historic.
Mostly because who called it and who it asked to attend.
It was called by one of the powerful of the many British wartime Ministries, the Ministry of Supply (MoS), which actually only supplied the Army (and perhaps in few things , the other two armed services as well) - but never ever supplied civilian needs.
Ronald Clark in his biography of Ernst Chain says this meeting was proceeded by the Ministers of (army) Supply and (civilian) Health, Sir Andrew Duncan and Ernest Brown, jointly "taking the idea of the immediate mass production of penicillin to the War Cabinet".
If so, it was possibly informally done via a Ministry "Minute" to the War Cabinet as neither gentlemen were ever members of the small War Cabinet : even in peacetime many many British politicians become ministers, without ever being becoming cabinet ministers.
And significantly, no one from Brown's civilian-oriented department was at this historical meeting.
This is a very important matter to resolve definitely, in part because the peculiar nature of this crucial meeting spelt the doom of Winston Churchill and his party in the election of June-July 1945.
How on earth did penicillin the universal lifesaver ever come be re-jigged as something only useful to the combat needs of the British Army ?
None of the drug firms summoned to this meeting (which did NOT include the very politically powerful firm of ICI ) had any real political or military influence - they didn't push for the meeting to take place but merely came when they were called.
But two of the four scientists had the meeting certainly did have good credentials with the Army ( but not Navy or Air Force) medical authorities and were of the correct Tory stamp: Howard Florey and Alec Fleming.
They had pushed for this meeting with the Army's supply department.
So, the army-oriented MoS was there in full force with six top officials along with two top officials from the Army Medical Branch charged with drug procurement for frontline casualties.
Missing in action at this meeting - by design - was the Navy, Air Force and any officials representing the Civilian interest in penicillin production.
Florey and Fleming both strongly saw penicillin as basically a useful supplement to the cheap abundant and systemically-oriented oral sulfas, with penicillin to be used primarily as in "local applications" for frontline combat wounds.
True, the Navy and Air force casualties were more often treated at large hospitals (and more often simply died in action) than in the case of the Army.
The Army had to deal with the fact that more of its casualties emerged as alive but wounded ,compared to the other services, which was the good news ---- but the bad news was that their wounds were usually about to get badly infected as a result of the primitive conditions at the front line.
A highly concentrated anti-bacterial drug with a long storage life and stable under almost any conditions as a dry powder (ie highly pure as well as highly concentrated) seemed essential.
Then and only then could it be suitable to sprinkle on open wounds immediately as they occurred on the front lines by barely trained medics or ordinary soldiers themselves.
Or for a busy front line doctor in am ambulance tent to inject, with a little sterile water, in or around those open wounds, within hours of the wounding.
Chemically, sulfa was born fulfilling these requirements - but penicillin didn't really meet them until after the six years of war was long over.
But unfortunately, no thorough controlled clinical trials of this claim that a frontline local application anti-bacterial medication would be essential for wounded survival was ever done.
At war's end, the general assessment was that, in fact, the frontline powders and needlefuls of these "local" penicillin and sulfa (ie applied directly into the wound) were not essential.
Instead, the wonderfully low rate of death from wounds (versus either the much worse record of WWI or of WWII Germany) was felt to be more due to the Allies' quick thorough debridement (removal) of dead wounded flesh , front line blood transfusions and policy of rapid evacuations of wounded soldiers to clean, quiet ,well equipped base hospitals .
That ---- and the general good health of wounded Allied troops, because they had been kept well fed and lived in warm sanitary conditions in the months before being wounded.
In the military base hospitals and civilian general hospitals, wartime sulfas and penicillin did prove to be reliable life savers when given as a systemic, if and when blood poisoning was suspected.
In fact, "crude" liquid penicillin (totally un-concentrated and totally un-purified) injected by needle and prepared in the hospital daily by Dr Duhig, saved lives as a systemic at a Brisbane general hospital --- and could have done so in the military equivalent.
Ooops ! It did do so, at Cairo's largest military hospital, where Dr Pulvertaft treated patients with liquid systemic crude penicillin he made daily in the hospital.
How did the Navy, RAF and the public, along with those politicians sworn to protect these groups of humans beings, react to the idea that penicillin was to be made under the control of the Army and for war casualties only ?
Seemingly with initial indifference - though by the Spring of 1943, a freelancing Navy Surgeon Commander had converted the Admiralty's under-producing vaccine operation to a huge penicillin factory supplying all of the Royal Navy's penicillin needs.
The Admiralty had always 'looked after its own', had always produced its own vaccines and serums so it didn't take long before the Navy medical brass had a look around at the penicillin factory and beam approval.
(Unlike the Army and Air Force, they had won the battle to retain the supplying of their needs by a naval units controlled directly by the Admiralty itself.)
For some rather sad reasons, the Air Force had relatively few wounded, for its size, and for other reasons, the treating of the wounded and returning them to battle was not an operational priority.
Over the course of the whole war, each of the British armed service got about one third of the money spent on the war. But in terms of manpower, of five people in uniform there were three in the army versus one in the RAF and one in the Navy/Merchant Marine.
This is because the RAF and RN/Merchant Marine had lots of big expensive machines that if "taken out of action" usually resulted in a 100% loss (aka "sunk" or "crashed"), while except in disastrous retreats, this rarely happened to the Army and its smaller cheaper machines.
The Allied Armies proved very much better, for example, at recovering even badly damaged tanks , as compared to the Germans.
In terms of personnel killed, the story is more complex.
Most of the RAF were never in real danger of dying but among those that flew, rather than maintained aircraft on the ground, the death rate was very high -often as much from operational accidents as enemy fire.
In Bomber Command, 55 of 100 fliers died before finishing their tour of duty.
Again there were relatively few wounded fliers versus a high rate of deaths - with the relatively few that survived their plane being hit only doing so by remaining out of the war, as German POWS.
People losses anyway and quite frankly , were not a big concern to the RAF : it never had a shortage of qualified recruits.
The RAF was seen as very glamorous to those determined to be very brave and seen a very secure place to spend the war to those with peacetime technical and engineering skills and no urge to be brave.
Manpower sustaining by speeding the recovery of the wounded was never a critical issue for any of WWII's air forces.
Replacing lost machines ( and frequently the training of new flier recruits) was always their obsession instead.
The world's navies were almost as attractive as the air forces, and rarely suffered from manpower worries and wounded recovery worries.
Instead, the sudden loss of entire town-sized machines (battleships or aircraft carriers) with all two thousand on board dead at one stroke, from a single torpedo or bomb, was their admirals more realistic nightmare.
In addition, while the Merchant Marine had particularly high losses of lives, against the relatively small number of its personnel, the merchant marine crews' relatively high pay and lack of onerous military discipline kept manpower replacement issues at bay.
When all factors are combined, at a gross figure level, the three armed services all lost about the same percentage of dead against the total number enlisted in each service, though as I have shown, the chance of death in service fell very unevenly.
In the case of the Army, it fell hardest on the infantry, followed by the tank crews and often the combat engineers.
Because almost no one wanted to join the infantry, it had few volunteers and generally the infantry got those conscripted recruits so totally lacking in useful education and technical skills that no other section of the Army wanted them.
To combine metaphors : incredibly enough, in all the Allied military , the very pointy end of the offensive stick came from the very bottom of the barrel.
In a nutshell, this is why the Germans and Japanese proved so very hard to defeat.
Over the whole war, the death rate varied greatly among the three services - the Navy death rate actually went down as the war progressed, the RAF's deaths peaked in 1943-1944, while in the case of the Army it was expected to rise suddenly and sharply to WWI Western Front levels, following the invasion of Europe.
The Army faced a short sharp period of potentially huge casualties - most wounded and infected but in Allied hands, not POWS.
If they weren't too badly wounded and the right anti-bacterial medication was at hand, the Army might be able to get most of the wounded back into battle formations before the war ended.
Just as well ,as there were no new men hustling to enter the infantry replacement pipeline at the other end.
At the very least, the thought that if and when they got wounded, the Army could heal most of them, would make the infantry less reluctant to rise up and advance against deadly Mortar and Machine Gun fire.
Or so the Army brass fondly believed.
I have tried to make the Fall of 1942 case for the British Army making penicillin just for itself seem as sensible as possible.
But in fact, it was a case going around with its nose full of Coke and Ecstasy.
In the fall of 1942, the really big medical story wasn't the rise of penicillin ; it was the decline of the previous wonder slash miracle drug : the Sulfas.
After five years of ever newer, better sulfas coming on market, that pipeline had died.
It was a double whammy of disaster, because now the current sulfas were proving less useful as more and more bacteria were becoming resistant to them.
Either a disease's bacteria totally failed to respond to sulfa and the patient died, or so large a dose need to be given that some patients again died from sulfa's toxicity at high dose levels.
This was not some sort of a Army front line versus RAF or Navy base hospital versus civilian home GP issue --- the stuff just didn't work as well as it used to ---- anywhere : in the UK , in battlefields world wide, in Germany and in Russia.
Full stop.
Sulfa's improved replacement - and it might be penicillin, who can tell ? - would face immense pressure to made in sufficient quantities to fulfill all needs all over the world, in civilian systemic use as well as front line local antiseptic use.
This was Florey and Fleming's greatest intellectual failure : the inability to see this.
Now neither of them were conceptual thinkers, as even their most ardent supporters admit in print - they were uniquely tied to the concrete and conventional here and now rather than to abstract speculation.
By contrast, Rene Dubos didn't have their success in finding a useful anti-bacterial medicine from microbes, (his luck was bad) but he could clearly see the Big Picture issues in ways those two could never hope to.
I do not know where Dawson stood for sure on this conceptual versus concrete issue since we have no personal papers of his - but the fact that Dubos always felt highly of him suggests a hint.
Certainly if deeds are better than mere words, Dawson never acted at all as if penicillin had to be first weaponized before it could become useful to humanity.
He was the first to give the world a patient successfully treated by a life-saving antibiotic because he saw semi-crude penicillin as more than good enough to inject safely into a human being : Dies Mirabilis, October 16th 1940.....
In fact one key participant at the meeting sensed this so greatly that he even whispered that history was going to view it that way, into the ear of the chairman as the meeting broke up.
In many ways, this meeting was very odd as well as being very historic.
Mostly because who called it and who it asked to attend.
It was called by one of the powerful of the many British wartime Ministries, the Ministry of Supply (MoS), which actually only supplied the Army (and perhaps in few things , the other two armed services as well) - but never ever supplied civilian needs.
Ronald Clark in his biography of Ernst Chain says this meeting was proceeded by the Ministers of (army) Supply and (civilian) Health, Sir Andrew Duncan and Ernest Brown, jointly "taking the idea of the immediate mass production of penicillin to the War Cabinet".
If so, it was possibly informally done via a Ministry "Minute" to the War Cabinet as neither gentlemen were ever members of the small War Cabinet : even in peacetime many many British politicians become ministers, without ever being becoming cabinet ministers.
And significantly, no one from Brown's civilian-oriented department was at this historical meeting.
This is a very important matter to resolve definitely, in part because the peculiar nature of this crucial meeting spelt the doom of Winston Churchill and his party in the election of June-July 1945.
How on earth did penicillin the universal lifesaver ever come be re-jigged as something only useful to the combat needs of the British Army ?
None of the drug firms summoned to this meeting (which did NOT include the very politically powerful firm of ICI ) had any real political or military influence - they didn't push for the meeting to take place but merely came when they were called.
But two of the four scientists had the meeting certainly did have good credentials with the Army ( but not Navy or Air Force) medical authorities and were of the correct Tory stamp: Howard Florey and Alec Fleming.
They had pushed for this meeting with the Army's supply department.
So, the army-oriented MoS was there in full force with six top officials along with two top officials from the Army Medical Branch charged with drug procurement for frontline casualties.
Missing in action at this meeting - by design - was the Navy, Air Force and any officials representing the Civilian interest in penicillin production.
Florey and Fleming both strongly saw penicillin as basically a useful supplement to the cheap abundant and systemically-oriented oral sulfas, with penicillin to be used primarily as in "local applications" for frontline combat wounds.
True, the Navy and Air force casualties were more often treated at large hospitals (and more often simply died in action) than in the case of the Army.
The Army had to deal with the fact that more of its casualties emerged as alive but wounded ,compared to the other services, which was the good news ---- but the bad news was that their wounds were usually about to get badly infected as a result of the primitive conditions at the front line.
A highly concentrated anti-bacterial drug with a long storage life and stable under almost any conditions as a dry powder (ie highly pure as well as highly concentrated) seemed essential.
Then and only then could it be suitable to sprinkle on open wounds immediately as they occurred on the front lines by barely trained medics or ordinary soldiers themselves.
Or for a busy front line doctor in am ambulance tent to inject, with a little sterile water, in or around those open wounds, within hours of the wounding.
Chemically, sulfa was born fulfilling these requirements - but penicillin didn't really meet them until after the six years of war was long over.
But unfortunately, no thorough controlled clinical trials of this claim that a frontline local application anti-bacterial medication would be essential for wounded survival was ever done.
At war's end, the general assessment was that, in fact, the frontline powders and needlefuls of these "local" penicillin and sulfa (ie applied directly into the wound) were not essential.
Instead, the wonderfully low rate of death from wounds (versus either the much worse record of WWI or of WWII Germany) was felt to be more due to the Allies' quick thorough debridement (removal) of dead wounded flesh , front line blood transfusions and policy of rapid evacuations of wounded soldiers to clean, quiet ,well equipped base hospitals .
That ---- and the general good health of wounded Allied troops, because they had been kept well fed and lived in warm sanitary conditions in the months before being wounded.
In the military base hospitals and civilian general hospitals, wartime sulfas and penicillin did prove to be reliable life savers when given as a systemic, if and when blood poisoning was suspected.
In fact, "crude" liquid penicillin (totally un-concentrated and totally un-purified) injected by needle and prepared in the hospital daily by Dr Duhig, saved lives as a systemic at a Brisbane general hospital --- and could have done so in the military equivalent.
Ooops ! It did do so, at Cairo's largest military hospital, where Dr Pulvertaft treated patients with liquid systemic crude penicillin he made daily in the hospital.
How did the Navy, RAF and the public, along with those politicians sworn to protect these groups of humans beings, react to the idea that penicillin was to be made under the control of the Army and for war casualties only ?
Seemingly with initial indifference - though by the Spring of 1943, a freelancing Navy Surgeon Commander had converted the Admiralty's under-producing vaccine operation to a huge penicillin factory supplying all of the Royal Navy's penicillin needs.
The Admiralty had always 'looked after its own', had always produced its own vaccines and serums so it didn't take long before the Navy medical brass had a look around at the penicillin factory and beam approval.
(Unlike the Army and Air Force, they had won the battle to retain the supplying of their needs by a naval units controlled directly by the Admiralty itself.)
For some rather sad reasons, the Air Force had relatively few wounded, for its size, and for other reasons, the treating of the wounded and returning them to battle was not an operational priority.
Over the course of the whole war, each of the British armed service got about one third of the money spent on the war. But in terms of manpower, of five people in uniform there were three in the army versus one in the RAF and one in the Navy/Merchant Marine.
This is because the RAF and RN/Merchant Marine had lots of big expensive machines that if "taken out of action" usually resulted in a 100% loss (aka "sunk" or "crashed"), while except in disastrous retreats, this rarely happened to the Army and its smaller cheaper machines.
The Allied Armies proved very much better, for example, at recovering even badly damaged tanks , as compared to the Germans.
In terms of personnel killed, the story is more complex.
Most of the RAF were never in real danger of dying but among those that flew, rather than maintained aircraft on the ground, the death rate was very high -often as much from operational accidents as enemy fire.
In Bomber Command, 55 of 100 fliers died before finishing their tour of duty.
Again there were relatively few wounded fliers versus a high rate of deaths - with the relatively few that survived their plane being hit only doing so by remaining out of the war, as German POWS.
People losses anyway and quite frankly , were not a big concern to the RAF : it never had a shortage of qualified recruits.
The RAF was seen as very glamorous to those determined to be very brave and seen a very secure place to spend the war to those with peacetime technical and engineering skills and no urge to be brave.
Manpower sustaining by speeding the recovery of the wounded was never a critical issue for any of WWII's air forces.
Replacing lost machines ( and frequently the training of new flier recruits) was always their obsession instead.
The world's navies were almost as attractive as the air forces, and rarely suffered from manpower worries and wounded recovery worries.
Instead, the sudden loss of entire town-sized machines (battleships or aircraft carriers) with all two thousand on board dead at one stroke, from a single torpedo or bomb, was their admirals more realistic nightmare.
In addition, while the Merchant Marine had particularly high losses of lives, against the relatively small number of its personnel, the merchant marine crews' relatively high pay and lack of onerous military discipline kept manpower replacement issues at bay.
When all factors are combined, at a gross figure level, the three armed services all lost about the same percentage of dead against the total number enlisted in each service, though as I have shown, the chance of death in service fell very unevenly.
In the case of the Army, it fell hardest on the infantry, followed by the tank crews and often the combat engineers.
Because almost no one wanted to join the infantry, it had few volunteers and generally the infantry got those conscripted recruits so totally lacking in useful education and technical skills that no other section of the Army wanted them.
To combine metaphors : incredibly enough, in all the Allied military , the very pointy end of the offensive stick came from the very bottom of the barrel.
In a nutshell, this is why the Germans and Japanese proved so very hard to defeat.
Over the whole war, the death rate varied greatly among the three services - the Navy death rate actually went down as the war progressed, the RAF's deaths peaked in 1943-1944, while in the case of the Army it was expected to rise suddenly and sharply to WWI Western Front levels, following the invasion of Europe.
The Army faced a short sharp period of potentially huge casualties - most wounded and infected but in Allied hands, not POWS.
If they weren't too badly wounded and the right anti-bacterial medication was at hand, the Army might be able to get most of the wounded back into battle formations before the war ended.
Just as well ,as there were no new men hustling to enter the infantry replacement pipeline at the other end.
At the very least, the thought that if and when they got wounded, the Army could heal most of them, would make the infantry less reluctant to rise up and advance against deadly Mortar and Machine Gun fire.
Or so the Army brass fondly believed.
I have tried to make the Fall of 1942 case for the British Army making penicillin just for itself seem as sensible as possible.
But in fact, it was a case going around with its nose full of Coke and Ecstasy.
In the fall of 1942, the really big medical story wasn't the rise of penicillin ; it was the decline of the previous wonder slash miracle drug : the Sulfas.
After five years of ever newer, better sulfas coming on market, that pipeline had died.
It was a double whammy of disaster, because now the current sulfas were proving less useful as more and more bacteria were becoming resistant to them.
Either a disease's bacteria totally failed to respond to sulfa and the patient died, or so large a dose need to be given that some patients again died from sulfa's toxicity at high dose levels.
This was not some sort of a Army front line versus RAF or Navy base hospital versus civilian home GP issue --- the stuff just didn't work as well as it used to ---- anywhere : in the UK , in battlefields world wide, in Germany and in Russia.
Full stop.
Sulfa's improved replacement - and it might be penicillin, who can tell ? - would face immense pressure to made in sufficient quantities to fulfill all needs all over the world, in civilian systemic use as well as front line local antiseptic use.
This was Florey and Fleming's greatest intellectual failure : the inability to see this.
Now neither of them were conceptual thinkers, as even their most ardent supporters admit in print - they were uniquely tied to the concrete and conventional here and now rather than to abstract speculation.
By contrast, Rene Dubos didn't have their success in finding a useful anti-bacterial medicine from microbes, (his luck was bad) but he could clearly see the Big Picture issues in ways those two could never hope to.
I do not know where Dawson stood for sure on this conceptual versus concrete issue since we have no personal papers of his - but the fact that Dubos always felt highly of him suggests a hint.
Certainly if deeds are better than mere words, Dawson never acted at all as if penicillin had to be first weaponized before it could become useful to humanity.
He was the first to give the world a patient successfully treated by a life-saving antibiotic because he saw semi-crude penicillin as more than good enough to inject safely into a human being : Dies Mirabilis, October 16th 1940.....
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