Re-setting the Allies' moral compass : the acid test of penicillin for wartime endocarditis

Please correct me : but in all my research I could find no indication that in his 15 years of medical research before October 16th 1940, (and he was a world-class expert in the area of strep bacteria) Henry Dawson had never written or spoken one peep - not one peep - on the subject of endocarditis, a very common and deadly disease, usually caused then by a variant of strep bacteria.

Henry Dawson puts the Allied treatment of the weak and the strong to the "Acid Test"

This was Henry Dawson's Acid Test : during World War Two, did the treatment of the weak and the strong by the nations that ultimately made up the Allies differ in kind or only in degree from that of the Axis nations?

Any single individual - let alone a single dying individual - could not pose that question across a broad spectrum of issues and expect to force a response.

Most of the penicillin grown in its first 15 years, was wasted on useless attempts at synthesis, not used to save the dying

If my claim be wrong : show me the money !

Dr Martin Henry Dawson and the MORAL INVENTION of 4F penicillin ---- during a 1A war (PART 1)

Thalidomide has had 9 lives...

Is it truly unfair that only Paul Gelmo initially invented Sulfa-the-(useless)-chemical, but is was Gerhard Domagk , 25 years later, who won the Nobel prize for Sulfa?

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...

1941-1950: Friedberg revises SBE deathwatch

In 1950 Dr Charles Friedberg told the readers of JAMA, one of the world's leading medical journals for frontline doctors, not to forget that SBE was now the easiest of the common heart diseases to cure.

They listened.

 Friedberg had quite literally wrote the book on SBE, back in 1941.

The, ahem, old book on SBE.

In that 1941 book, Friedberg and chief co-author Emanuel Libman had carefully surveyed 1200 cases of SBE in detail and said 'no cures' - at least no cures by the efforts of doctors.

 However three percent might expect a spontaneous cure.

Until the next and the next attack -  for SBE was a repeater disease and so really inevitably fatal - over the short medium term period.

Another researcher at the time was even less hopeful - finding  out of 249 of his SBE patients, maybe one had a temporary cure.

But now in 1950,Friedberg's 'invariable fatal SBE' had become Friedberg's 'the most curable common heart disease' !

The reason for this amazing turn about, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, had died a little earlier, back in April 1945.

But these amazing 1950 conclusions were due to his pioneering 1940-1945 efforts to prove up penicillin as an anti-biofilmic agent , able to penetrate SBE vegetations and kill the bacteria without killing the patient.

It was a mission carried on and brought to a spectacular conclusion by his assistant Thomas H Hunter, after the war.

DOCTOR MOM  now had one Sword of Damocles removed from over her head --- thanks to a doctor from Columbia University.

Just in time too.

Because another doctor from Columbia university, Harold Urey, PhD, had just given her a new Sword of Damocles.

During World War II, in one part of Columbia,
the former Lt Dawson,(winner of the Military Cross with Citation),was busy(illegally) curing "4F" SBE patients.

 Meanwhile, in another part of Columbia, Urey-The-Pacifist, with his crew of war-exempt healthy, young "1A" scientists, was busy inventing the Cold War's most fearsome weapon: the gaseous diffusion process for the extraction of uranium for the mass production of nuclear weapons.

As a result, 1950s kids, of which I was one, were the healthiest and the most scared generation of kids ever raised.

Thank you, Columbia.....