Native penicillin versus Modern penicillin in the run up to Indian Independence

The mere thought of putting native penicillin (basically mold slime excrement) into the human bloodstream just to save a life was anathema to most European and North American doctors in the years between 1928 and 1943.

They preferred to wait, wait until (or if) modern synthetic European-made penicillin was available.

Too bad about your mother, though.

And any European or American doctor that dared to inject native penicillin into white veins, was seen as letting down the side ------ going native.

Losing face.


They couldn't be publicly seen as de facto admitting that the smartest, whitest, most European chemists in the universe can't do what the simple little fungus tossed off so nonchalantly - make this new miracle life saver, penicillin.

Not in front of the women, or the darkies, or the dock labourers.

Won't do, old boy, just won't do.

You'd be blackballed down at the Club.

So native penicillin was not allowed to be made in 1944 era India, from its abundant agricultural waste and very cheap hand labour.

Perhaps that is why today native penicillin is mostly made by the darkies, in places like newly independent India - and then sold at a good profit to the white European and American chemists, all who make none of their own.

Native revenge is sweet - or if not sweet, at least a slightly off-white, slightly bitter, naturally-grown powder....

"Going Po" /"Going Native"/"Letting Down the Side"

I have often wondered about why Martin Henry Dawson's legacy was so quickly - and quietly - 'disappeared' after his early death.

I mean Penicillin was very big news, Rheumatic Heart Disease remained the leading killer and crippler of school age kids (well above the numbers affected by polio), DNA was becoming big news.

I think one explanation was that many of his contemporary fellow doctors and scientists felt that he had 'let down the side' or 'gone native' when he 'went Po' and tried so hard to save the lives of people that many of them considered unworthy of much medical attention at the height of Total War.

I think Dawson would argue - but only if he was forced to argue, with a gun at his head ! - that the whole point of that Total War, the whole point of the quarrel with our Japanese and German cousins, really revolved around the question 'were all lives worth saving, or only some ?'

He was sure which side the Axis was on, he thought that the Allies were on the other.

Publicly, they were - they just didn't mean to see it carried out in practise.

When Dawson did so, he exposed their inconsistencies : talk versus walk.

No one ever honors someone who reveals them to be hypocrites.....

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo