If wartime penicillin was a wah pedal ....

Imagine the Nobel prize winner for medicine , Baron Howard Florey, being pulled off his efforts to discover new antibiotics in the late 1940s by an impatient Leo Fender.

Leo pleads, "Howard,make me a wah pedal, and make it quick ; I need something unique for my new guitar and amp line".

Howard takes his time, and delivers the pedal years late. But it is beautiful finished and has a high fidelity electronic circuit that is so pure that it delivers vanishingly small amounts of harmonic distortion (albeit at the cost of an anemic output).

I can already hear guitar players going "Oh, goody !"

Luckily for humanity, Leo has also telepathed the spirit of penicillin pioneer Henry Dawson back to earth and given him the same assignment.

Early next morning, Henry has the job all done : a crude but workable bread-board design, with screamingly high distortion impurities, but with a low battery drain design and the effect level preset on 11 on a scale of one to ten (aka ("stun").

It is very basic looking , with just one big button, set in the very middle of the sturdy front panel of the wah pedal.

Henry's genius is that this button simply says one word : MORE !

And that my friends, is the essential kernel of the conflict between these two giants of wartime penicillin....

That 'ever-climbing' Aussie Howard Florey: year by year his listed degrees got longer and longer

While we all know the differences between a BA, MA and PhD , few of us can fathom the distinctions between a BM/MB, and DM/M.D. in the field of medicine --- even when our life literally depends on it.

Wartime Penicillin was a race between a Tortoise and a Hare,unexpectedly the Tortoise won but the Hare got to phone-in the results...

People invariably find the story of wartime penicillin fascinating because 75 years after the earliest events, it still remains a real puzzler with lots of inexplicables and unanswered questions.

The story of wartime penicillin is actually quite clear.... but it is its history that seems so full of holes and silences.

A forgotten meme from "The Golden Age of Mysteries" held sway over wartime penicillin : to the detriment of the dying

The grey-haired teenagers of the 1870s to 1890s, the guys who actually ran World War Two, grew up on the stories of the Golden Age of Mysteries and Detectives, starting with Sherlock Holmes' Study in Scarlet in 1887.

And one thing you quickly learned in all those thousands of books in dozens of languages was that the formula that the spy had stolen from the safe - the formula upon which the fate of the Empire ( or perhaps even the world) hung - was never a formula in physics or biology or geology or astronomy.

It was always a formula in Chemistry : always a formula for the synthesis of some extremely powerful explosive or fuel or drug.

For female pioneers of wartime penicillin, 1910 was a very good year ...

Dorothy Crowfoot , Gladys Hobby and Nancy Atkinson were about the only women who played an independent role in the development of wartime penicillin.

Penicillin : from Modern to ante-Modern in six bloody years

The biggest battle of WWII was NOT Stalingrad ( physically huge but intellectually a mere bun fight between History's worst dictators) but rather the battle over wartime penicillin : who makes it and who receives it.

For WWII definitely had a 'war within a war' aspect to it .

America sure loves its minutemen and riflemen - except during wartime

MOS 745 (circa 1780)

Do you accept - or do you deny - gun control and climate change?

Do you think that wartime penicillin should just be for healthy young  scallywags who cheat on their wives but are still fully combat-ready or do you think it should be "wasted" on the dying of all nations, races and creeds ?

Some things never change and the skygods and earthlings still mix it up to oppose each other as much today on gun control and climate change as they did back almost 75 years ago on the best uses for wartime penicillin.

For a medicine Modernity reserved for the military, penicillin sure missed a lot of battles ...

The USSR had at least 3 million life-threatening cases of bacterial infection between August 1940 and August 1945 that penicillin could have successfully treated.

It is not well known that Russia did make it its own penicillin and did treat some serious infections with it and saved some lives as a result during those five war years.

Sort of.

Soviet doctors treated 300 cases with their penicillin over those five years : out of at least 3 million life-threatening cases.

Not surprisingly, the Miracle of Penicillin does not loom highly in Russian historical accounts of the Great Patriotic War.

This too might easily have been the fate of wartime penicillin in the Allied West as well.

Raymond Chandler biographers' alert : his entire war records posted online

Sgt Ray Chandler, SIR !!

Perhaps a fan of Raymond Chandler at the Public Archives of Canada, exasperated beyond measure by all the bosh written by Chandler biographers about his war record in the Canadian Army in WWI, has decided to set the record straight by posting all his military records online, free for the downloading.

Since "1940s Chivalry" (what an oxymoron !) is the most important meme in my book de-bunking the current myth of wartime penicillin, I am deeply interested myself in Chandler's WWI experiences in the Canadian infantry.