Why was Marie Barker's actual death sentence praised while Harry Lime's fictional murders so condemned : a story of two Teddy Bears ...

The 1943 real life Allied decision to deny penicillin to Marie Barker (the only medicine that could save the life of this young teenager and SBE patient) on the (unstated) grounds that her disease was 'not a military priority', has generally been praised by historians of science - then and now.

It was also acquiesced in - at the very least - by most lay people back then.

Even when that public saw newspaper photos of still just a teenager Marie breaking into a smile of delight at the sight of one of her 'stuffies' (a teddy bear) that her Canadian-born mother Hermance had brought to her bedside.

By contrast the needless, painful but fictional deaths caused by Harry Lime denying penicillin to children in 1949 Vienna only six years later has been strongly condemned by most of those same academics and by the public generally.

Okay ---- perhaps the professors did not condemn it in actual peer reviewed articles, but almost certainly, like the public, they did so in casual water cooler talk and during post-movie-watching 'pillow talk' between spouses.

I can claim this with some certainty because it is known that countless audience members discussing the moral issues raised by Harry Lime's unspeakable actions around helpless children and penicillin was what helped lift THE THIRD MAN from being just another run of the mill B&W 'quota flick' to among the top films of all time.

How the casual upending of a child's teddy bear helped change us for good

In just six short years, we went from praising the decision to cold bloodedly and publicly kill Marie Barker & her teddy bear by baneful neglect ------- to blanching at the mere fleeting sight of a nurse silently putting the teddy bear of of one of Harry Lime's victims upside down on a waste basin.

I hold that to be a hugely momentous moral upending, as dramatic in its own way as was the totally unexpected upending of the best in civilized technology by primitive penicillin...

A perfect Zionist utopia ---- that most European Jews would never get to live in, with or without Hitler

There were to be no Fiddlers on no Roofs in the original Zionist paradise.

That is what I take away from David S Wyman and Rafael Medoff's book "A Race Against Death".

It is a collection of postwar interviews with key members of the still unknown Peter Bergson group (a medium sized organization run by Jews but including many Non-Jewish Americans) ---- and the only Jewish-run organization in North America who did anything effective to help, not hurt, the wartime Jews of Europe.

The reason you likely don't know any of this is because, the old adage to the contrary, until very recently the moral losers among North America's Jews wrote all the history books.

These moral losers were gradualist Zionists, Jews who believed that the solution to all the slights Jews got in the western European world and all the deadly pogroms that received in the eastern European world was a particular form of an sovereign Jewish nation in Palestine.

They did not believe in bold dramatic public actions to win Palestine by military force or by swaying world public opinion.

Instead as the Bergson Group's second in command, Samuel Merlin explains in the book, they thought a slow but steady stream of elite Jews --- young, fit, healthy, courageous, dedicated, entrepreneurial, socialist --- would gradually build up an economical vibrant Jewish community in British run but Arab majority populated Palestine and so control it in de facto fashion.

Chaim Weizmann, the head of the worldwide Zionists, told the British Peel commission in 1936 that he certainly didn't want six million Jews coming to Palestine all at once.

No, 'the old ones will pass, dust in a cruel world ---- only a branch will survive'.

This echoed Weizmann's earlier view of 1918 that if war forced all the miserable refugee Jews out of Eastern Europe and into Palestine,the Zion would be paradise will be swamped and the gradualist reformists could never set up a community worth having.

Eugenics , here code-named "selective immigration" by the socialist gradualist Zionists, was the key to understanding the minds of Weizmann and his American counterpart Samuel Wise and all of their generation born circa 1885.

They were well-off, westernized, secularized, Germany-oriented Jews.

The rural small town Jews of Eastern Europe, all those beards and Orthodox rituals, their determinedly backward ways, their poverty - they repulsed these gradualist Zionists, not as intensely as it did most Gentiles (let alone most anti-semites) but certainly a great deal.

Rescuing only 'the best' of them was always the gradualist Zionists' pre-war and wartime aim.

Bergson and his crew were Zionists too, but willing to put that dream on the far far backburner when it became clear that Hitler was determined to kill all the Jews in Europe - starting with those backward East Europeans.

Bergson saw them all as individuals, as fellow humans, all worth saving, a concern to all humanity - Christian, agnostic and Jewish alike.

Bergson didn't want to rescue any of these Jews "to" (Zion or the West) he wanted to rescue them "from" Nazi death, leaving them to remain in situ in Eastern Europe.

He wanted the Allies to publicly warn the German public they'd mass gas bomb Germany if it didn't immediately stop mass gassing the Jews.

Berg pointedly asked why focus wartime Jewish efforts on a wonderful future postwar Zion when the Jews in the 1940s most interested in living there (the Jews of Eastern Europe) would all be dead ?

For me, Bergson's heroic motives and fevered actions were the actions of a man who grasped the full moral dimensions of all the pious western liberal democracy talk of "winning the war first".

Recall the western liberal democracies were - in the same breath - also refusing to put in a Second Front, at least not until the Nazis and Communists had warred each other to a pulp and the Nazis had solved the West's Eastern European Jewish Problem.

The mainstream Jewish organizations, led by Weizmann and Samuel Wise, bought into this scam - that was their number one sin.

But their number two sin was forgetting the millions dying overseas in their petty jealous anger over the (new) (poor) (small) foreign-led Bergson Group besting the moral worth of the rich big and well established American led Zionist organizations.

In all of this, Peter Bergson reminds me so much of Henry Dawson.

Dawson had never been involved in the researching the cure for invariably fatal SBE, the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the deadliest disease for school age kids in those days.

He had 'no skins in the game'.

But when he saw that penicillin had two unique attributes that made it likely to finally defeat SBE and suddenly leaped in with both feet, his early successes made the oldtimers in the SBE research field (Chester Keefer above all others) insanely jealous.

The response of Dr Keefer (the Samuel Wise of wartime penicillin) and others was to say that SBE was not a war priority and the penicillin for its patients would have to await the perfect world coming after the war was won first.

Knowing full well - just like Samuel Wise, FDR and Churchill had known about Europe's Jews - that the SBEs (like American Jew Charles Aronson) would be long dead before that wonderful day.

Jam Tomorrow for the dead Jews but never Jam Today for living Jews.

Bergson bucked them with all his might for three years - Dawson ditto for four years  until he died worn out by his efforts.

Bergson lived  a long filling life but the East European Jews died despite his all out efforts - Dawson died young but the SBEs lived thanks to his all out efforts.

I don't doubt Bergson would have readily exchanged his long life for Dawson's shorter life - if only he could see some of Dawson's success....

Was WWII's battle over Penicillin a microcosm or a macrocosm of that horrific war ?

WWII was far too big for one mind to encompass and far too horrific for one stomach to handle.

The even longer but much smaller battle over penicillin production and delivery seems easier to handle and to stomach.

But just like the war itself, many, many people died because of decisions taken over the course of the twenty year long battle over just how penicillin should be made and to whom it should be given to.

True : all these people were deadly ill, by definition.

So possibly many would died anyway, with or without penicillin, though probability suggests that in fact most would have lived, if given enough penicillin early enough.

Unfair premature death is still unfair premature death, but their slow deaths from disease, caused by not so benign neglect, lacks the visceral horror of thinking about mothers and babies being murdered in a field with a bullet to the face, Einsatzgruppen style.

Preventable death due to lack of should-have-been-readily-available penicillin was still death on a massive scale.

But it remains deniable because it is only viewable, faintly and through the softest of gauze*.

Guilty

So yes, I plead guilty - I want to have it both ways.

I want to discuss the biggest, most horrific, issues of the war but also to sugar coat them.

To reduce them to closeups of the lives of a mere handful of individuals, most who don't die and even of those few who did die, didn't die violently.

But I also want readers to think back, back behind these few representatives.

To think of the literally tens of millions of people, unnamed and un-described, who died needlessly throughout the world because cheap abundant penicillin-for-all was delayed so long.

(Delayed for up to fifteen years for a few lucky ones and up to twenty five years for many, depending on your class, race, gender and where you lived.)

That is a death toll that approaches that of WWII itself.

So it really should never have been so casually dismissed, as it has been, all these years....

* I know of only one death among those tens of millions - that of Marie Barker of Chicago in September 1943 - that happened with enough detail provided day by relentless day to the reading public as to still bruise our collective conscience.

Mostly poor people ALL OVER THE WORLD denied life --- by wartime's Republican-dominated NAS death panel

American doctor-run death panels did exist and they did sentence people to an inevitable death based on mostly eugenic driven considerations.

It happened during WWII.

The patients denied access to penicillin (that was the only thing that could save their lives) were all suffering from subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) that was then a leading cause of death for poor, minority and immigrant youths - the final deadly stage of childhood attacks of rheumatic fever.

Actually the entire spectrum of possible ways to die from rheumatic fever (known as Rheumatic Heart Disease or RHD) was the leading cause of death for school age children and youths in all of the industrialized world - far far more than polio for example - and would remain so till the 1960s.

But you won't know this unless you were very poor ; it wasn't a middle class disease.

Now this story of the wartime bureaucratic denial of penicillin to SBE patients isn't totally unknown to students of the history of wartime penicillin - but most think that this diktat was limited to American patients only.

But I have been tracing how the same American-originated list of diseases to be treated (or not) by GPs using this new penicillin kept re-appearing world wide, always with virtually the same wording.

So far I have traced the publication of this diktat (intended to apply to all GPs) in journals or newspapers in Canada, Britain, Australia , and now New Zealand.

The New Zealand newspaper report in June 1944 was franker than most - the nation wasn't making its own penicillin but was wholly dependent on penicillin given to it (via Australia) by America.

But the report indicated that the penicillin gift came with strings - the Kiwis had to agree to refrain from using the medication on diseases that were being ignored in America and in all the other Allied nations.

The disease the Kiwis and all the others were specifically told to ignore was SBE.

The NAS panel headed up by Dr Chester Keefer - himself an expert on SBE - was in a dispute with Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his supporters who was insistent their numerous patient cures indicated that penicillin and only penicillin could cure SBE and do so completely.

(Dawson and his supporters were 100% right by the way !)

If news came to American SBE patient families that in New Zealand SBEs were being treated and cured by penicillin, Dawson would have a further ammunition to inadvertently embarrass Keefer.

Inadvertent because while Dawson was a rank amateur on SBE until he started in with penicillin (and was anyone never one to be mean to fellow scientists),  Keefer had made SBE's cure his life's work.

But Keefer had backed the wrong horse as to the best drug to cure SBE and wasn't willingly to publicly back down and grant that Dawson was right.

Keefer had other more public excuses for his denying penicillin to SBEs , but this was the real reason ...

When (and why) Toronto's famed Hospital for Sick Children DIDN'T report a miracle

Miracles and Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children are mostly associated with Nobel winner Fred Banting, eleven year old Elsie Needham and insulin back in the 1920s.

Unfortunately ,they are NOT associated with July 1942, penicillin and a dying nine year old boy (possibly still alive today) known only as R. V.

Much against the will of the anglo-american medical establishment, both insulin and sulfa had their very public miracles (as in "worldwide newspaper headlines") involving saving the lives of dying children.

Banting himself pushed insulin baby miracle cures into the popular media - it seems ordinary hospital doctors in Britain did the same in the case of sulfa.

The medical research establishment didn't really fear the effect of such news headlines upon the patients and their families.

Instead, they feared its affect upon their colleagues who were not as 'measured' , 'level headed','rational' and 'scientific' as themselves.

In their minds anyway.

Because , in fact , when it comes to trying new treatments for dying patients, GPs can be faulted for being too slow off the mark, not too fast.

First the average GP trys all the conventional treatments, in a descending order of unconventionality.

Then when the patient is visibly 'decomposed' as they say in medical articles - hours from the grave  - they try sulfa or insulin or penicillin and when the patient - despite all this delay - survives and quickly goes home fully healed, it truly does seem a miracle.

Now imagine a penicillin that - by and large - doesn't work , despite the bold initial claims made for it.

The GP seeing a nearly dead patient before them , despite all the current conventional and even unconventional treatments tried upon them.

Desperate they even try this here 'pen-i-cill-in' - and it fails.

The patient dies - as seemingly they were about to anyway.

Morally,who has been harmed by all this ?

The patient and their family knows that the doctors did everything - even went the extra four miles - to try and save someone with a limited likelihood of survival.

So they failed - but at least they tried and tried hard.

No, what the medical research community chiefs fear is not failure but success.

Because then there would be big headlines celebrating drug X when drug X is still in low supply , because the drug companies are patiently waiting for the researchers' results from long term, large scale, double blind studies, before deciding whether to invest large sums in scaling up production.

Forgotten in all this long term 'research leisureliness' is that there are many real people dying needlessly and families hurting needlessly.

Because nothing speeds up mass production like the spur of real competition - and competition can come out of the woodwork whenever front page headlines scream "medical miracle -new drug - short supply".

Not every investor reads medical journals but all can translate that bit of headlinese into plain old business English : dollars, lots and lots of potential dollars, to the firm that supplies Doctor Mom first.

WWII's penicillin almost never became a miracle drug.

The first few years of penicillin miracle cures in North America deliberately went unreported in the medical media --- let alone the popular media.

In Britain, one series was published in a medical journal but the popular press was successfully avoided by its lead author, Howard Florey.

Somehow, all the British daily newspapers' science cum medical journalists normally assigned to read medical journals for potential stories were charmed into staying mum on this big headline story.

Even in wartime, Fleet Street is highly competitive - it must have been a hell of a scientific "D" notice to silence the lot of them.

The reason was that the anglo american medical research leadership was hoping to turn penicillin-the-universal-lifesaver into penicillin-the-Allies-secret-weapon-of-war.

 And - to their eternal shame - anglo american science slash medical specialist reporters matched them into forgetting their sacred professional vows.

That these medical researchers - all men - were smart there can be no doubt.

Perhaps the smartest thing they ever did was to successfully evade the front line trenches in WWI , despite being fit enough.

Now that they were all fat and all over forty, they had become positively warrior fierce.

They would help win the war by denying lifesaving penicillin to dying Allied , Neutral, Occupied and Enemy civilians - despite that oath thingy they all swore when they first became doctors .

That same ancient oath was incorporated into the requirement to give equal treatment too all the sick and wounded, under the Geneva Convention on warfare.

They would even deny giving penicillin to Allied POWs in enemy hands - and to Allied wounded judged too damaged to ever likely see combat again.

Just for a few years ,you understand - just a few years of keeping news of penicillin miracles out of the Allied popular media read by neutral officials friendly to Nazi Germany.

So it could give a big medical advantage to the Allies when casualties got really heavy after D-Day.

Canadians went along too of course - there can't be many American or British asses we won't lick , if asked politely enough.

So back to the Hospital for Sick Children and poor little R.V.

He appeared deadly ill upon arrival at the hospital from blood poisoning brought on by a (botched ?) effort to remove a mildly diseased tooth.

Sixteen days of sulfa drugs had still left the boy in dire state - never conscious , high fever, high bacterial colony blood count , etc.

His health then took a turn from very very bad to 'death is near'.

The American doctor charged with controlling the limited supplies of penicillin being made (for clinical testing), Chester Keefer in Boston, was contacted.

Perhaps a personal contact between this very well known research doctor and someone big in research in Toronto, who knows for sure ?

Keefer gets Squibb Drugs in New Jersey to send up some of the badly filtered penicillin that Squibb was famous for turning out.

After some more filtering in the Toronto hospital, the penicillin is injected into R.V. and quickly claws him back from the grave and soon sends him on his way home.

This miracle was not reported in the medical or popular media despite July 1942 being perhaps the lowest point of the war for British Commonwealth morale (the fall of the Tobruk fortress) - such a severe morale crisis that even Churchill himself thought he might be forced to resign).

A Commonwealth lad saved by British medicine might seem to be the very morale tonic needed to pick up everyone's spirits - but it was not to be.

It was finally reported in December 1943 by Dr Nelles Silverthorne in the Canadian Medical Journal, CMJ.

Or should I say Silverthorne was allowed (or encouraged) to publish a crucial four months after Dr Dante Colitti took revenge on New York's medical elite and spilled all about penicillin, babies and miracle cures to Citizen Hearst's vast media empire ---- and ultimately to the whole world.

Dante's miracle baby ultimately died but not before his apparent early success with Baby Patty Malone touched so many mothers' hearts that the mass production of penicillin-for-all was assured from that point on.

But Canada, Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children ?

They all just blew it ....

Dying life unworthy of wartime penicillin was Life unworthy of Life

"all Life is worthy of Penicillin"

The infamous term "Life unworthy of Life", created by a German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche in the 1920s , is generally thought of as bring used exclusively by the Nazis.

Used by them during a Total War to justify killing everyone from working class Aryan babies with developmental issues to the entire Jewish population of Europe.

But the term had a much greater transnational appeal than that .

Prominent American psychiatrist Foster Kennedy thought , in 1941 and 1942, during that same Total War, that the USA would be justified in killing its little Aryan babies with developmental issues.

Shamefully, America's leading psychiatric journal actually agreed with him and only one psychiatrist disputed his thesis.

And the Allies' medical establishment, led by Dr Chester Keefer and his NAS committee, used this idea to justify denying SBE-curing penicillin to young people dying of SBE all over the Allied world,  because they felt that even a cured SBE patient was still useless to the Total War effort.

("Life judged unworthy of Penicillin.")

By contrast, Henry Dawson and a handful of other doctors worldwide supported, and fought for, the notion that "All Life is worthy of Penicillin" - even in , particularly in , a Total War supposedly  fought precisely against the evil idea that some Life was, ipso facto, unworthy of Life.....