Birthing Antibiotics & The Little Red Lighthouse --- their true life unlikely connection in space, time and intent

Antibiotics :

(1) A class of lifesaving drugs  (2) more powerful than anything yet invented by advanced Big Science, made by tiny and primitive microorganisms.

So what on earth is their connection to a beloved children's picture book ???!!!

Let's take that definition apart , separating part 1 from part 2:

Antibiotics needn't be used only as lifesavers, but to the general public it is their use as lifesavers, working when nothing else modern medicine could do to save a life, that so rouses our admiration and wonder.

So, for example, Penicillin can be used - relatively ineffectively - as an external antiseptic.

It was used almost exclusively, for its first twelve wasted years, by Alexander Fleming as a minor laboratory clearing agent in certain throat swab tests.

Lifesaver ('Systemic') : drugs taken internally and spread systemically throughout the entire body

To be a lifesaver, almost all drugs must be taken internally (by pill or needle) and thus distributed throughout the entire body (including the surface skin, from blood vessels below the skin's surface.)

This is because for an infection to kill us, it usually must be in blood stream and spreading to different parts of the body than where it first started.

Because - often - infections can been successfully combated by the body's defences alone, if confined to only one initial spot.

Infections usually kill not by direct action in any one spot, but by overwhelming our defences on multiple fronts : creating too many infectious sites, all happening at once, for even a healthy body - by itself - to stop.

So the antibiotic penicillin first became the ANTIBIOTIC PENICILLIN on October 16th 1940, when it stopped being dabbed on the skin and was first injected, ie used as a systemic, into two patients in at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre in New York City.

Now here is where the beloved classic children's illustrated storybook , The Little Red Lighthouse, comes in - unexpectedly - into the story of Antibiotics.

Two classic 'come from behind underdog stories' of the little guys besting the big guys came from this same site :

Little Red Lighthouse, George Washington Bridge, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre

The doctor who first used penicillin as an antibiotic , Martin Henry Dawson (1896-1945) and the woman who wrote the story of the Little Red Lighthouse , Hildegarde Hoyt Swift (1890-1977) both did so, at about the same time and for much the same reasons.

WWII was a six years long miserable period in history when Big Science invented Big Weapons manufactured by Big Corporations for Big Armed Forces, under orders from the Big Governments of the Big Powers - to use mostly on the lands of the little powers and the little people.

People left like minor cogs in Big Machines - they felt like they were being treated like children.

Children feel that way all the time .

Which is why stories like Hildegarde Swift's 1942 story about the Little Red Lighthouse besting the brand new 'Great Gray Bridge' and its big lights were always popular about the young ones.

(The little red lighthouse still exists, lying just below the real life George Washington Bridge completed in 1931 and just in front of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre.)

The brand new George Washington Bridge's big lights were indeed much brighter than those of the little red lighthouse, but they were also very high above the water and in a fog couldn't be seen by ships as well as the little red lighthouse's light down at sea level.)

Swift, during the darkest days of the war, also wanted to reassure children that 'might wasn't always right' and that the horrible events in Europe (with small nation after small nation being quickly swallowed up by Germany between 1939 and 1941) won't go unaddressed.

Adults read the story to their children but probably didn't absorb its subtle wartime message.

Naturally made penicillin : 'The Little Fungus That Could'

But Dawson suspected - correctly - that war-weary adults might absorb and enjoy the story of how a medicine made naturally by the humble - primitive - little - basement slime fungus was besting the finest medicine made by Big Science in Big Factories.

He hoped his new medicine would save lives but above and beyond that, he hoped it would send a subtle message to the powers to be and their true masters - the public.

Yes, early penicillin did save lives when nothing before it could.

 But don't underestimate slime-made penicillin's appeal, as a classic 'come from behind' story , to a war-weary public simply tired of being pushed around and tired of six years of seeing all the innings going to the big guys....

The light of the littlest red lighthouse can light up the world better than that of the greatest grey bridge

I wonder if Marjorie and Henry Dawson ever read the tale of The Little Red Lighthouse to their youngest child before Henry died in mid-1945 ?

That small and seemingly powerless-feeling child, born in 1941, was of the right age to especially appreciate the special message of the classic children's book, which first came out in 1942.

Particularly considering his father worked daily right beside the real life great grey bridge and the real life little red lighthouse.

If not, I hope the Dawson child eventually absorbed the lesson of that little book more directly, by learning more of his late father's own little Manhattan Project between 1940 and 1945.

Both the example of the book's story and the story of Henry Dawson's tiny Manhattan Project demonstrate to small children the reminder that a determined few, no matter how small in number or in power, can light up the whole world for the better .

And that little children shouldn't give up either, at the first hurdle...

The little Project that Could

Once upon a time there was a little yellow penicillin factory located very near that Great Grey Bridge that connects Fort Lee, New Jersey and Upper Manhattan.

It wasn't a very big operation - particularly not compared to the huge war-dealing projects located all over the world in all the combat nations in those years between 1940 and 1945.

But the long term impact it has had on all of us is far greater than any of its much bigger wartime rivals --- even the one that produced The Bomb and promised us safe perpetually renewable electricity at prices too cheap to meter.

It is only natural for our children and grandchildren, being very small themselves, to feel that a small person or group can never best those much bigger than themselves.

But I think my book on the story of the smallest Manhattan Project can be an object lesson  to our children and grandkids that size isn't everything in matters moral --- that a strong heart and a fierce determination to do right can indeed move mountains.

If I can even move a handful of kids to grow up determined to do the right thing by all the smallest and weakest among us, I will feel that my book efforts will have been worth it....
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