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.
Showing posts with label dante colitti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dante colitti. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Was there a Parran-Hearst Telegram ? (You provide the penicillin, I'll provide the pictures)
 |
| "Operator, get me Washington, tell 'em I'm from Hearst..." |
We all know which telegram: the one where Remington is sent out to illustrate the ongoing civil war in Cuba, but finds all is quiet and begs to go home.
Hearst supposedly telegraphs him to stay : "(If) you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."
Politics as the authoritative "prioritizing" of values
 |
| A Canadian (but not Canada) morally defines wartime penicillin |
That consensus says that "prices" are used to come to an informal economic agreement as to the allocating of scarce resources between alternative uses.
But politics authoritatively allocates (rations/triages) scarce resources between alternative uses.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Between Wartime Penicillin's initial failure ( Chemistry) and its final success (Biology) stood a third party : the humanitarians
When I call Henry Dawson "Penicillin's Third Man", I am being more than ordinarily facetious.
Penicilin's problem was chemistry-besotted biologists, the solution was biologically-pragmatic chemists and the connecting threat were a tiny group of humanitarian-minded clinicians.
Penicilin's problem was chemistry-besotted biologists, the solution was biologically-pragmatic chemists and the connecting threat were a tiny group of humanitarian-minded clinicians.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Florey vs Dawson : penicillin to be perfect & a war medicine OR an imperfect but universal medicine ?
 |
| Baby Patty Malone helped the whole world discover penicillin |
Monday, February 20, 2012
NYC medical community , August 1943: Martin Henry Dawson's OPEN SECRET ...
Nothing does more to lower the normally high social prestige of all doctors, than a disease that is 100% incurably fatal.
You could argue that no disease is 100% incurable, technically ----
but you would be wrong. Wrong, wrong: dead wrong.
Yes, there is always a tiny number of people who survive even the worst diseases -- but they not 'cured' --- these people survived even if they never saw a hospital or a doctor.
They survived , yes.
But they were not 'cured' by human agency.
Give the credit to God or Mother Nature instead.
No doctor or nurse likes to have to tell patients and their families that there is nothing medically one can do and they should prepare for a tragic death.
Death is painful for all of us - but for medical professionals to have to admit to others that they are powerless and useless adds an extra sting to the unpleasant task.
Normally they get to say "Its Stage Four - the prognosis is very guarded but we will try radiation."
The patient still dies but the family respects the doctor for at least trying.
SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis) was one such invariably fatal and uncurable disease during the war years.
In fact, it was the most common invariably fatal disease in the western world in those years - the invariably fatal form of brain tumors ran a very distant second.
It could hit anyone: anyone can get strep throat anytime in their life, and get it over and over --- from that they could get RF ((Rheumatic Fever) at any time in their life, and get it over and over.
That greatly increased, in turn, their chances of getting SBE, at any time in their life, - and get it over and over, if by some real Miracle, they survived the first bout.
Every medical single doctor came across cases of fatal SBE in their career in those days --- they hated it for what it did to patients and families ( particularly because SBE patients were on the younger side of life usually) and because it made doctors feel powerless.
Now: cue August 1943, and the medical community of greater New York City.
Throw in SBE researchers, ordinary ward nurses, SBE patients, their families and friends, - heck throw in all the patients and families of people with past bouts of RF, just waiting to be told they now have SBE.
On one hand, the government - your government - has publicly and officially said that regrettably Penicillin does not cure SBE.
But this is wartime - who totally trusts the government and media?
The wartime medical slash patient grapevine throughout greater New York City area is alive with a different story: a doctor named Martin Henry Dawson has gotten half a dozen cures off of penicillin for SBE .
"One patient got his SBE back in August 1940, that's three long years ago. And he's still alive !!!!"
Dawson's success, he tells all who ask, is only limited by the tiny amount of penicillin he can steal - that's right - STEAL from the government supplies, to give to his SBE patients.
Doctors from all over the area are visiting him, asking him to help with their SBE patients, promising to steal additional penicillin if he will only help.
Heavens ! One of them is even the President's personal doctor, yes FDR himself !!!!!
Mysterious bottles of bootleg penicillin keep on turning up at doctors' doors, provided by ladies in white --- taken presumably from the city's one pharma plant that is producing penicillin.
None of this is being reported in the local or national media ---strangely a cone of silence has descended on this good news story in the wartime media, which could use a little relief from having to report years of bad news stories.
That is until a young hunchback doctor named Dante Colitti and the purple-paged Hearst flagship newspaper decide to blow the story wide open.
In theory, its just a local NYC story --- but there is an old,old saying in the music biz : "In NYC, there is no such thing as a regional breakout: if a song is breaking in New York, its breaking wide stateside...."
Within days the story is all over North America - and then all over the world - even into wartime Germany and Japan.
I have always been very interested in the differences between knowledge that is private, that which is public and that which is popular.
For example, the Nazi Hunger Plan to kill 30 million Slavs during WWII to free up food was private during the war , the killing of 3 million Polish jews was publicly known during the war while the Nazi killing of 300 people in the little Czech village of Lidice was popularly known during the war.
Open Secrets are an unusual hybrid of the private and the popular - bypassing the public (aka the official/conventional/ mainstream media).
Lots of Nova Scotians (my estimate was 5%) knew, from gossip, the private knowledge that a high public official in Nova Scotia 'couldn't keep his pecker in his pants' when it came to women (particularly young women, unwilling young women).
About one person in twenty could tell me detailed details of the crime when I asked.
That may not sound like much, but I bet fewer than 5% of any given population could tell you much about the top news story in the land, despite it receiving wall to wall coverage in the conventional media.
So it was private, yet popular, yet not public - none of the semi-official media in Nova Scotia (aka the CBC, CTV and the Herald newspaper) had reported anything on it.
The stones may have cried out over the injustice, but no opposition politician, or theologian, professor of ethics, feminist group or police department had gotten exercised over the scandal.
This had a corrosive effect on how ordinary Nova Scotians viewed their supposed moral leadership when the population knew a crime but their leaders did nothing.
I often wonder what led young Dante Colitti to do what he did ---I can't help feeling he wanted to prick this cone of official secrecy as much as he wanted to help save the life of the baby girl in his care...
You could argue that no disease is 100% incurable, technically ----
but you would be wrong. Wrong, wrong: dead wrong.
Yes, there is always a tiny number of people who survive even the worst diseases -- but they not 'cured' --- these people survived even if they never saw a hospital or a doctor.
They survived , yes.
But they were not 'cured' by human agency.
Give the credit to God or Mother Nature instead.
No doctor or nurse likes to have to tell patients and their families that there is nothing medically one can do and they should prepare for a tragic death.
Death is painful for all of us - but for medical professionals to have to admit to others that they are powerless and useless adds an extra sting to the unpleasant task.
Normally they get to say "Its Stage Four - the prognosis is very guarded but we will try radiation."
The patient still dies but the family respects the doctor for at least trying.
SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis) was one such invariably fatal and uncurable disease during the war years.
In fact, it was the most common invariably fatal disease in the western world in those years - the invariably fatal form of brain tumors ran a very distant second.
It could hit anyone: anyone can get strep throat anytime in their life, and get it over and over --- from that they could get RF ((Rheumatic Fever) at any time in their life, and get it over and over.
That greatly increased, in turn, their chances of getting SBE, at any time in their life, - and get it over and over, if by some real Miracle, they survived the first bout.
Every medical single doctor came across cases of fatal SBE in their career in those days --- they hated it for what it did to patients and families ( particularly because SBE patients were on the younger side of life usually) and because it made doctors feel powerless.
Now: cue August 1943, and the medical community of greater New York City.
Throw in SBE researchers, ordinary ward nurses, SBE patients, their families and friends, - heck throw in all the patients and families of people with past bouts of RF, just waiting to be told they now have SBE.
On one hand, the government - your government - has publicly and officially said that regrettably Penicillin does not cure SBE.
But this is wartime - who totally trusts the government and media?
The wartime medical slash patient grapevine throughout greater New York City area is alive with a different story: a doctor named Martin Henry Dawson has gotten half a dozen cures off of penicillin for SBE .
"One patient got his SBE back in August 1940, that's three long years ago. And he's still alive !!!!"
Dawson's success, he tells all who ask, is only limited by the tiny amount of penicillin he can steal - that's right - STEAL from the government supplies, to give to his SBE patients.
Doctors from all over the area are visiting him, asking him to help with their SBE patients, promising to steal additional penicillin if he will only help.
Heavens ! One of them is even the President's personal doctor, yes FDR himself !!!!!
Mysterious bottles of bootleg penicillin keep on turning up at doctors' doors, provided by ladies in white --- taken presumably from the city's one pharma plant that is producing penicillin.
None of this is being reported in the local or national media ---strangely a cone of silence has descended on this good news story in the wartime media, which could use a little relief from having to report years of bad news stories.
That is until a young hunchback doctor named Dante Colitti and the purple-paged Hearst flagship newspaper decide to blow the story wide open.
In theory, its just a local NYC story --- but there is an old,old saying in the music biz : "In NYC, there is no such thing as a regional breakout: if a song is breaking in New York, its breaking wide stateside...."
Within days the story is all over North America - and then all over the world - even into wartime Germany and Japan.
I have always been very interested in the differences between knowledge that is private, that which is public and that which is popular.
For example, the Nazi Hunger Plan to kill 30 million Slavs during WWII to free up food was private during the war , the killing of 3 million Polish jews was publicly known during the war while the Nazi killing of 300 people in the little Czech village of Lidice was popularly known during the war.
Open Secrets are an unusual hybrid of the private and the popular - bypassing the public (aka the official/conventional/ mainstream media).
Lots of Nova Scotians (my estimate was 5%) knew, from gossip, the private knowledge that a high public official in Nova Scotia 'couldn't keep his pecker in his pants' when it came to women (particularly young women, unwilling young women).
About one person in twenty could tell me detailed details of the crime when I asked.
That may not sound like much, but I bet fewer than 5% of any given population could tell you much about the top news story in the land, despite it receiving wall to wall coverage in the conventional media.
So it was private, yet popular, yet not public - none of the semi-official media in Nova Scotia (aka the CBC, CTV and the Herald newspaper) had reported anything on it.
The stones may have cried out over the injustice, but no opposition politician, or theologian, professor of ethics, feminist group or police department had gotten exercised over the scandal.
This had a corrosive effect on how ordinary Nova Scotians viewed their supposed moral leadership when the population knew a crime but their leaders did nothing.
I often wonder what led young Dante Colitti to do what he did ---I can't help feeling he wanted to prick this cone of official secrecy as much as he wanted to help save the life of the baby girl in his care...
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Pearl Harbour Saves Florey?
As long as America was at peace ,America's businesses could compete against each other relatively freely without the ability of the "dollar a year men" in Washington to make use of " the emergency " to misuse government's wartime muscle to restrain competition, so as to favor the firms they represented in peacetime.
If Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour hadn't happened, America would have probably remained a neutral at least throughout the first half of 1942 - long enough for Pfizer and Dawson to be free to fully publicize the life-saving powers of naturally-brewed penicillin in the national media.
This would have been enough, in peacetime, to create an overwhelming public demand for its immediate mass production.
Penicillin would then become just another in a series of remarkable drug discoveries that first emerged as a small but notable success and just kept on growing in importance.
Sulfa drugs started that way - they really had no immediate or dramatic success to introduce themselves to the world.
Rather it was a series of notable successes, among a number of different years and a number of different continents that gradually made them famous.
Newer and newer sulfa variants kept on being discovered and were then put to work curing additional diseases.
Likewise,Penicillin's initial success would have focused attention on the possibility of ever more drugs from molds and bacteria - as of course happened from about 1947 onwards to today, but in a non-dramatic ,and above all, industry-directed fashion .
85 years after sulfa and penicillin first emerged in the lab (around 1928), only one drug has got any kind of universal dramatic legend attached to it and this is penicillin.
The deleterious effect of the American declaration of war on what should have been its normal emergence from lab to drug company to its acceptance by GP and patient is the reason why.
Without Pearl Harbour happening in December 1941, Florey and Merck would have been free to pursue their synthetic penicillin mirage while Dawson and Pfizer would have been equaly free to introduce natural penicillin - first grown in large trays and then from deep tanks.
The winner would have been the same (Pfizer) but they just might have emerged in May 1942 rather than be delayed until May 1944.
Ie, it would be as if the dramatic events of May 1941 to May 1944 never ever happened.
Let us go to a concrete example:
If Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour hadn't happened, America would have probably remained a neutral at least throughout the first half of 1942 - long enough for Pfizer and Dawson to be free to fully publicize the life-saving powers of naturally-brewed penicillin in the national media.
This would have been enough, in peacetime, to create an overwhelming public demand for its immediate mass production.
Penicillin would then become just another in a series of remarkable drug discoveries that first emerged as a small but notable success and just kept on growing in importance.
Sulfa drugs started that way - they really had no immediate or dramatic success to introduce themselves to the world.
Rather it was a series of notable successes, among a number of different years and a number of different continents that gradually made them famous.
Newer and newer sulfa variants kept on being discovered and were then put to work curing additional diseases.
Likewise,Penicillin's initial success would have focused attention on the possibility of ever more drugs from molds and bacteria - as of course happened from about 1947 onwards to today, but in a non-dramatic ,and above all, industry-directed fashion .
85 years after sulfa and penicillin first emerged in the lab (around 1928), only one drug has got any kind of universal dramatic legend attached to it and this is penicillin.
The deleterious effect of the American declaration of war on what should have been its normal emergence from lab to drug company to its acceptance by GP and patient is the reason why.
Without Pearl Harbour happening in December 1941, Florey and Merck would have been free to pursue their synthetic penicillin mirage while Dawson and Pfizer would have been equaly free to introduce natural penicillin - first grown in large trays and then from deep tanks.
The winner would have been the same (Pfizer) but they just might have emerged in May 1942 rather than be delayed until May 1944.
Ie, it would be as if the dramatic events of May 1941 to May 1944 never ever happened.
Let us go to a concrete example:
DOI: 10.1021/ed018p552.2
Publication Date: December 1941
This is a monthly publication of the American Chemical Society.
In 1941, when the public heard the word scientist, they thought only of chemists - chemistry was the Queen of the Sciences back then to an extent we can't begin to imagine ,unless we were living back then.... before 1945 (Physics) and 1953 (Biology).
In 1941, when the public heard the word scientist, they thought only of chemists - chemistry was the Queen of the Sciences back then to an extent we can't begin to imagine ,unless we were living back then.... before 1945 (Physics) and 1953 (Biology).
This journal was directed towards chemistry teachers and undergraduates in North America's high schools and universities--- a huge audience well beyond more prominent chemistry journals with a select but tiny audience.
This particular column was a monthly roundup of news from the popular press that had a chemical industry aspect to them.
Just reading the column in its entirety makes it clear that "WHAT"S BEEN GOING ON" for December 1941 was written and released before Pearl Harbour.
Using language from The New York Times's description of Dawson's work on penicillin back in May of 1941, the paragraph seems a little out of date to fit this speedy "up to the minute" news digest column's style.
It credits Fleming with discovering penicillin in 1929, but says nothing happened to it until Dawson at Columbia proved it up.
I admit it - I love it !!!
I admit it - I love it !!!
No mention of Oxford nor Florey no Merck no OSRD nor of the NRRL and COC.
I think it reflects a little quiet PR spin that Pfizer put behind on its corporate decision to seriously help Dawson use Pfizer-brewed NATURAL penicillin on clinical cases.
That brewing, and that corporate decision, happened in mid October 1941, a date much closer to the date the column would normally have been researched and written --- rather than about events from way back on May 5th 1941.
A Merck-oriented paragraph on penicillin in this same time period would have credited Florey and ignored Dawson totally.
Merck never had to do that media-spinning, not after Pearl Harbour.
One wartime government agency,the OSRD-CMR, run by Merck men, now controlled almost all of the news on penicillin and they spun it to focus exclusively on Florey and hence indirectly on Merck.
But they forgot to put a muzzle on Dante Colitti (and Doctor Mom) and penicillin became a legend despite the best efforts of OSRD,Merck and Florey....
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Baby Patricia & Penicillin in Comic Book
In 1944, True Heroes Comic Books featured the inspiring story of Dr Dante Colitti saving the life of two year old baby Patricia Malone, August 11th 1943, with some penicillin that he, the child's father and the Hearst media empire had wheedled out of a hard-nosed American medical establishment.
This was the event that made penicillin known world wide, virtually over night after 15 years of being ignored.
Colitti's hospital and Dr Dawson's hospital shared the same catchment area for patients, being only a mile apart.
News of Dawson's cures, that Spring, of a number of women with the incurable disease of SBE had spread like wildfire among the patients and staff of both hospitals , leading to Colitti trying the stuff on his dying young patient...
This was the event that made penicillin known world wide, virtually over night after 15 years of being ignored.
Colitti's hospital and Dr Dawson's hospital shared the same catchment area for patients, being only a mile apart.
News of Dawson's cures, that Spring, of a number of women with the incurable disease of SBE had spread like wildfire among the patients and staff of both hospitals , leading to Colitti trying the stuff on his dying young patient...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)