On October 16th 1940, it is said, Dr Martin Henry Dawson gave history's first ever antibiotic injections to a black man, Aaron Leroy Alston and to a Jew, Charles Aronson.
"And" : not "and then to".
But how ? How on earth do you give two injections at the same time ?
I struggled recently with the actual mechanics while thinking how to present this event as a single painted image.
Eventually I realized that a painting of this athletically double-jointed historic event might also symbolize the ambiguous "Double V victory" of Manhattan's two biggest war projects : the autarkical A-Bomb and Dawson's openly commensal natural penicillin.
My proposed image for the first volume of my book Janus Manhattan's Children ?
It shows the soon-to-be-injected arm of Alston (to the left) and Aronson (to the right) joined at their hands, making one natural "V".
Above them, the limitations of human anatomy ensures that the arms of Dr Dawson (preparing to inject the penicillin into each patient's arm at the same time) would also form another natural "V" above and inside the patients' "V".
As anyone struggling to emulate Dawson's twin effort soon realizes, it is probably easiest and most natural to let their left hand inject rightward and their right hand inject leftward --- the twin hypo needles crisscrossing at the hands.
The criss crossing also helps emphasize Dawson secondary goal.
On that October 16th, he particularly wanted to exalt the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the smallest, sickest and weakest ("The Last") among 1940 America's minorities.
Because on this day, set aside in law for the first ever peacetime draft registration, the rest of America was otherwise exalting the biggest and the strongest (the 1As) among its population.
True, the 1As might do all the actual military fighting overseas to end Nazi mistreatment of minorities.
But Dawson and others realized that all the 1As' deaths and the eventual victory would be useless, if at home the values of the Nazis continued in America's treatment of its own minorities.
To really put paid to Hitler, we needed to defeat his thinking, abroad and at home.
But instead, American medical conservatives
were moving to emulate Hitler even more !
They had long been hostile to 1930s liberals and their efforts to try and save all of the dying even if they couldn't pay for their treatment (Social Medicine).
Hitler's Aktion T4 program had begun in September 1939, deliberately using the cover of war efforts to begin the killing off all of Germany's handicapped.
So too, these American conservatives were actually using the medical preparations for a possible war with Hitler (War Medicine) as an excuse to cut off medical efforts towards the poorest minorities !
So with 'enemies' like the AMA's Morris Fishbein leading the charge, Hitler hardly needed friends.
Instead, on this day, he got a moral enemy in Dr Dawson ...
Showing posts with label double v victory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label double v victory. Show all posts
Friday, March 20, 2015
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Wartime Manhattan's "Double V" triumphs
Synthetic plutonium ( in the world's biggest killing machine) and non-synthetic penicillin (in the world's smallest lifesaver) were the twin - and Janus-like - triumphs of wartime's two Manhattan Projects.
A "Double V" triumph indeed : one a victory by humanity against Nature and the other a victory of humanity with Nature.
And they were victories by the Allied world alone - unlike radar and jets, scientific and technological breakthroughs that the Allies shared with the Nazi war machine.
As a school kid of the postwar era (and in tandem with every other schoolchild of my generation), I was educated to illogically savour that conflicted Double V triumph.
To share both in the victory of the big and powerful against the small and weak atom ----- and in the victory of the big and the powerful together with the small and weak microbe.
But the illogic of that yoked Double V couldn't hold together forever and by the time of my young adult years , it had begun to give way.
For what academics call the eras of Modernity or of Postmodernity can be better - more succinctly - described as synthetic autarky against Nature or non-synthetic commensality with Nature.
The inconsistent character of the Double V triumph over the last global disaster (WWII) explains the inconsistent response of my generation , the counterculture generation, as it leads the world and faces the current global disaster , The Sixth Extinction.
A generation convinced it should never trust anyone over thirty , never trust "The Man", is itself well over thirty and is itself "The Man".
Because the children born between 1941 and 1966 are now the ones within the dominant voting years - those citizens most likely to vote, the voters between the ages of 50 and 75.
This age group will now determine elections all over the world by dominating the numbers of the relatively few voters who consistently bother to get out and vote.
And we simply don't know how this generation of voters and leaders - my generation - will react on the question of preventing The Sixth Extinction.
For the generation that marched for civil rights for minorities, gays, women, the handicapped and marched against nuclear war has - by and large - not marched to defend the Earth against the rapacity of advanced human civilization.
Over the years, as a political and environmental activist, I have puzzled , read and researched over this inconsistent failure within my generation.
I was eventually driven back to my earliest school years and beyond, in seeking an answer.
For I am fully a child of wartime Janus Manhattan.
Someone who grew up totally in awe of the synthetic atomic power from massive power plants that would soon power my future but also totally in awe of the life-saving antibiotics derived form Nature's smallest and weakest, medicines that had repeatedly saved the Strep-afflicted lives of my family and I .
Janus Manhattan's Children, the book and the blog , thus is as much a private memoir as a public history .
The first volume will take in the years 1940 to 1946 and will be a history of wartime's Janus-headed Manhattan Projects--- a period of time when I wasn't even born to be an eye witness but one that shaped decisively my postwar upbringing.
The second volume will cover from July 1957, when my first childhood memories of public events began to September 1961 when I began reading adult-oriented news magazines and adult-oriented books, becoming rather adult-like, virtually overnight.
It will centre around a simply fabulous B&W* telethon for Rheumatic Heart Disease I saw one night in those years and never forgot.
(In both senses of that term !)
And don't ask me exactly where or when - I can't remember with any certainty but the fact that I thought, at the time, that the filmed people might be dead ghosts suggests Victoria BC ,between 1957 and 1959,when I was very little - only between the ages of five to eight.
My family just caught the telethon one evening when the weather was iffy but just right --- so we could get American TV from across the border loud and clear.
It was a new-to-me mix.
First, working class - minority - teenage rheumatic heart victims cum musical singers, very much alive and lively, testifying emotionally at the front of the stage.
In between singing a heady mix of gospel or blues or rock and rock or country.
As a middle class kid living in a middle class neighbourhood, these were not (yet) 'my kind of people'.
Awkwardly 'assisting' them were some upper middle class doctors and head nurses.
Directly behind and above them was ghostly-silent historic film footage of when they were very sick teenagers in hospital, dressed all in scary white garments like their doctors and nurses.
Figures I have said that the small me wasn't certain were not actual dead ghosts with the people up front these ghosts brought back one night to assist this charity telethon.
Meanwhile the on-stage band nosily riffed away, like a congregation at a Pentecostal church, commenting on both the silent film action and the emoting singers.
Altogether, it simply blew me away -- I was never a big fan of music as a small kid but this oratorio like blend of fact-based talk and emotional singing and playing was much more my cuppa.
The first early - miracle years - of antibiotics, kiddies, wartime suddenly stopped being something remote and distant that my parents and teachers had often talked about without ever exciting me - to something very real, very close, very scary and yet very hopeful.
In a sense the telethon simply retold the events of Volume I, but from a child's mind view rather than from the viewpoint of an adult author.
Volume two will thus be more of a personal - childhood - memoir, reflecting upon the impact public events had on the awaking of my pro-commensality conscience.
Both are works that I am driven to research and write.
Driven as much by my own private attempts to understand my own generation's upbringing as by shared public concerns over our fate - concerns held by many before and after my own generation ...
A "Double V" triumph indeed : one a victory by humanity against Nature and the other a victory of humanity with Nature.
And they were victories by the Allied world alone - unlike radar and jets, scientific and technological breakthroughs that the Allies shared with the Nazi war machine.
a Janus-headed Victory
As a school kid of the postwar era (and in tandem with every other schoolchild of my generation), I was educated to illogically savour that conflicted Double V triumph.
To share both in the victory of the big and powerful against the small and weak atom ----- and in the victory of the big and the powerful together with the small and weak microbe.
But the illogic of that yoked Double V couldn't hold together forever and by the time of my young adult years , it had begun to give way.
For what academics call the eras of Modernity or of Postmodernity can be better - more succinctly - described as synthetic autarky against Nature or non-synthetic commensality with Nature.
The inconsistent character of the Double V triumph over the last global disaster (WWII) explains the inconsistent response of my generation , the counterculture generation, as it leads the world and faces the current global disaster , The Sixth Extinction.
A counter culture well over thirty and that has become "The Man"
A generation convinced it should never trust anyone over thirty , never trust "The Man", is itself well over thirty and is itself "The Man".
Because the children born between 1941 and 1966 are now the ones within the dominant voting years - those citizens most likely to vote, the voters between the ages of 50 and 75.
This age group will now determine elections all over the world by dominating the numbers of the relatively few voters who consistently bother to get out and vote.
And we simply don't know how this generation of voters and leaders - my generation - will react on the question of preventing The Sixth Extinction.
For the generation that marched for civil rights for minorities, gays, women, the handicapped and marched against nuclear war has - by and large - not marched to defend the Earth against the rapacity of advanced human civilization.
The personal is political, is public
Over the years, as a political and environmental activist, I have puzzled , read and researched over this inconsistent failure within my generation.
I was eventually driven back to my earliest school years and beyond, in seeking an answer.
For I am fully a child of wartime Janus Manhattan.
Someone who grew up totally in awe of the synthetic atomic power from massive power plants that would soon power my future but also totally in awe of the life-saving antibiotics derived form Nature's smallest and weakest, medicines that had repeatedly saved the Strep-afflicted lives of my family and I .
Janus Manhattan's Children, the book and the blog , thus is as much a private memoir as a public history .
The first volume will take in the years 1940 to 1946 and will be a history of wartime's Janus-headed Manhattan Projects--- a period of time when I wasn't even born to be an eye witness but one that shaped decisively my postwar upbringing.
The telethon that changed my life
The second volume will cover from July 1957, when my first childhood memories of public events began to September 1961 when I began reading adult-oriented news magazines and adult-oriented books, becoming rather adult-like, virtually overnight.
It will centre around a simply fabulous B&W* telethon for Rheumatic Heart Disease I saw one night in those years and never forgot.
(In both senses of that term !)
And don't ask me exactly where or when - I can't remember with any certainty but the fact that I thought, at the time, that the filmed people might be dead ghosts suggests Victoria BC ,between 1957 and 1959,when I was very little - only between the ages of five to eight.
My family just caught the telethon one evening when the weather was iffy but just right --- so we could get American TV from across the border loud and clear.
It was a new-to-me mix.
First, working class - minority - teenage rheumatic heart victims cum musical singers, very much alive and lively, testifying emotionally at the front of the stage.
In between singing a heady mix of gospel or blues or rock and rock or country.
As a middle class kid living in a middle class neighbourhood, these were not (yet) 'my kind of people'.
Awkwardly 'assisting' them were some upper middle class doctors and head nurses.
Directly behind and above them was ghostly-silent historic film footage of when they were very sick teenagers in hospital, dressed all in scary white garments like their doctors and nurses.
Figures I have said that the small me wasn't certain were not actual dead ghosts with the people up front these ghosts brought back one night to assist this charity telethon.
Meanwhile the on-stage band nosily riffed away, like a congregation at a Pentecostal church, commenting on both the silent film action and the emoting singers.
Altogether, it simply blew me away -- I was never a big fan of music as a small kid but this oratorio like blend of fact-based talk and emotional singing and playing was much more my cuppa.
The first early - miracle years - of antibiotics, kiddies, wartime suddenly stopped being something remote and distant that my parents and teachers had often talked about without ever exciting me - to something very real, very close, very scary and yet very hopeful.
In a sense the telethon simply retold the events of Volume I, but from a child's mind view rather than from the viewpoint of an adult author.
Volume two will thus be more of a personal - childhood - memoir, reflecting upon the impact public events had on the awaking of my pro-commensality conscience.
Both are works that I am driven to research and write.
Driven as much by my own private attempts to understand my own generation's upbringing as by shared public concerns over our fate - concerns held by many before and after my own generation ...
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