1940s medical reformers' views on Indie PEN ("crude" penicillin) : 'about as safe as mother's milk ---- and equally unfashionable'

The aesthetic objections to live-saving Indie PEN

The medical reformers controlling the (glacial) pace of the mass introduction of penicillin (from 1928 to 1944) viewed the idea of saving the lives of dying patients with crude (Indie PEN) penicillin with the same sort of distaste they held towards mothers who still breastfed.

They all wanted penicillin that was first of all was pure and stable.

Some further wanted to wait until it was chemically synthesized (patentable) and many others wanted to keep it secret and limit it only for Allied wounded soldiers while the war raged.

And if countless patients died needlessly while they polished the turd - so be it .

The medical phobia against fresh bread

It was an age when all the best educated (with urban medical researchers often in the vanguard) sincerely believed that mothers who made biscuits on the kitchen stove right before her waiting children and then immediately fed it to them were endangering their health.

Much better to feed them factory made biscuits made two thousand miles away and stored for weeks in a warehouse, smothered in chemical preservatives.

For only the old fashioned rural poor still made 'fresh from the oven' home made bread and biscuits.

And all the best educated used baby formula - only country yokels would be so gauche as to breastfed a baby in public.

The less you needed to buy artificial vitamins , the more you bought of them

The best fed and best educated  - who could actually easily afford fresh oranges even when they were most expensive - prided themselves on not getting their daily vitamin C from impure fruit.

For mixed in with the pure vitamin C (that they preferred to get from synthetic pills) natural fruits contained all sorts of impurities.

(Impurities such as tasty juicy fruit sugar water, fibre and  traces of minerals and other vitamins.)

We today who are well educated - we who pride ourselves on our 'advanced thinking' - should view this all as a cautionary tale against the hubris of the well educated who don't realize the sharp limits to their very expensive educations.

But it does help explain the irrational phobias held by well educated doctors had so hampered the mass production of wartime's 'safe enough' penicillin .

Because even in 1944 and the introduction of mass penicillin - high quality commercial penicillin was still at best 85% dross and 15% pure penicillin.

Vincent Duhig, unsung hero of Indie PEN movement

Again, as late as 1944, Vincent Duhig , one of the least known heroes of the Indie PEN movement, was still saving lives with injections of penicillin that were 99.99% dross and one part in a ten thousand pure penicillin.

That is food grade medicine - some cooked fruits and vegetables deliver vitamin C in those same (extraordinarily low) ratios.

But we don't inject those foods directly into a patient's bloodstream via an IV drip.

But that is what Duhig dared to do - plucking a dozen lives back from the grave - patients considered so far gone that all the other doctors permitted Duhig's 'mad' scheme , as a sort of a patient's faint hope clause.

"Heroic medicine" they call it.

But heroic or merely canny ?

Because while Duhig used techniques more primitive than those that Alexander Fleming had rejected 15 years earlier in 1928, he judged them safe enough to use to save the dying who had no other hope and he was proved right, over and over.

Like Martin Henry Dawson, Robert Pulvertaft and some pioneering Russian penicillin doctors, Duhig was near enough to the hospital ward floor and far enough away from the ivory towers of basic research labs to recognize some obvious medical facts of life.

He knew penicillin itself was the most non toxic lifesaver even seen (still true today) and that by great good luck, the impurities in crude natural penicillin juice (like the impurities in crude orange juice) were 'safe enough'.

By contrast, the conventional treatment for most deadly bacterial infections were the all new , all dancing , all synthetic sulfa drugs - the darlings of that era's chemistry-mad medical reformers.

They were cheap, plentiful and often worked without incident.

But for a growing percentage of patients - a figure that rose rapidly as bacterial resistance grew to the sulfas and doses had to get dangerously high to remain effective - sulfas could make the patient painfully sick or damage their kidneys permanently - sometimes even kill them.

Doctors used them because the alternative often was an equally painful death.

The crude compromises of the busy hospital ward

Life on the busy ward floor - unlike inside the lab's pristine porcelain white walls - is always full of tricky compromises.

After all , ultimately doctors gets paid the big bucks above all for their skill in juggling between a drug's dosage being too safe to be effective and a drug's dosage being so high as to kill patient as well as germ.

As it happened, the crude penicillin of Duhig - being totally untreated by any chemical solvents etc - was probably less toxic to patients than the so called purified penicillins were .

That is because all the chemicals used in the purification process often added new impurities in the mix !

Yes ,wartime indie PEN , like wartime breast milk, was crude and impure - but unlike most wartime medical researchers, it was never brain-dead stupid....

"Irish Jimmy" Duhig and his Uisce Beatha : Penicillin as Orange Juice

I woke up the middle of last night to find I had a bad cold and so naturally got to thinking about its prevention and cure.

Its natural and unnatural cure and what all this had to do with the unknown history of wartime's crude penicillin.

Naturally, one avoids respiratory colds and worse by eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables , drinking lots of liquids, getting plenty of rest, and living a secure existence in a well ventilated sizeable home.

One gets more and deadlier respiratory diseases living stressed lives in cramped, il-ventilated homes without adequate fresh fruit and vegetables.

The other way to avoid colds and such is to daily pop a lot of synthetic vitamin pills for your entire life.

You will then have become that most sought after client of Big Pharma : someone from (A) a sizeable group of people who have a (B) 'chronic' 'disease' and (C)  who can afford to buy the moderately expensive solution to the disease, daily, from a drug company for the rest of their lives.

Insulin for middle class diabetics was a big money spinner for Big Pharma , starting in the 1920s, for just those reasons ---- just as the mania for vitamin pills for the middle class was in the 1930s.

No mind that the middle class were hardly needing any vitamins, based on their adequate and varied diets based on the more expensive fresh products of Nature.

They may not have needed any tiny white synthetic vitamin pills .

But they did have enough money to buy them and they did have the necessary ingrained faith in "Science" that helped them swallow Big Pharma's claims regarding the need for daily synthetic vitamin supplements to succeed in this "busy, complex, Modern Age."

Now adequate Vitamin C is regarded as vital to prevent and limit colds.

We can get enough simply eating enough fresh vegetables but most  of us like to supplement this with a tasty morning glass of golden orange juice rather than dash down a tasteless dry little white pill of 100% pure synthetic Vitamin C.

Horrors ! said 1930s Big Pharma and its tame pill-pushing scientific "consultants".

That glass of orange juice or the even more basic orange or lime itself is so impure - containing merely a tiny fraction of one percent pure Vitamin C.

Who knows what bad toxins lurk within it ?

Well we now agree that the orange or lime holds only other goodnesses - like soluble and insoluble fibre.

Scientists knew this even back in the 1930s, but the majority had tagged along on a culture-wide Modernist mania for purity - racial and chemical - and couldn't see the fibre benefits for all their dark fears of possible unknown impurities in the innocent orange.

Nasty Reds lurking under "only innocent-looking" orange beds or groves.

Jimmy Duhig, along with Henry Dawson, Robert Pulvertaft and a very few others didn't buy all this : they thought that the golden solution of crude penicillin was the literal Water of Life, Aqua Vitae or Uisce Beatha , for their dying patients.

Even after 100% pure natural penicillin was available after the war, Dawson's co-worker Gladys Hobby, now a key employee of Big Pharma, was allowed to publish a scientific article seeking to demonstrate that crude penicillin was ,in some way, more effective than the pure stuff !

But back to our trios of modern-day James Linds.

Instead of waiting - perhaps centuries - for a patently-profitable synthetic penicillin pill , they did a James Lind and starting saving lives - right now ! - with the penicillium equivalent of Lind's natural lime juice for scurvied sailors : natural crude penicillium juice.

The fact that these still-unknowns saved many lives while the now-famous Howard Florey merely fiddled about trying fruitlessly to make synthetic penicillin merely reminds of the power of Big Pharma and their many scientific sycophants on Nobel Prize committees.....

Politics as the authoritative "prioritizing" of values

A Canadian (but not Canada) morally defines wartime penicillin

There is a broad academic consensus as to the best way to differentiate political bargaining from economic bargaining.

That consensus says that "prices" are used to come to an informal economic agreement as to the allocating of scarce resources between alternative uses.

But politics authoritatively allocates (rations/triages) scarce resources between alternative uses.


Politics does formally what economics does informally : it passes a laws that directs that the allocating will be done by fiat and force, if need be.

But this consensus explanation merely says how the two different forms of allocation will be done.

(Either by voluntary agreement as to how one chooses to spend one's own money, or by resources being allocated at the point of a government gun if need be.)

If does not say why the government has made its allocation decisions it has made.

(We already know that Economics has made its bargains based on the differing economic values the various differing players assign to various differing goods and services.)

So normally, the consensus view has to add that politics has made its decisions and bargains based on values.

This hardly settles much : I believe it needs to be said that the political values in question are ALL moral values - albeit often expressed in terms of economic values.

And it almost goes without saying that in the political bargaining process, various bodies of political players place differing weight on different moral values and that these bodies of political players have quite different political bargaining power.

Some are large in number but have little wealth, valuable skills or organizing cohesion.

Others are very small in number, but are very wealthy, articulate, skilled in influencing governments/public opinion, and are very united in their position vis vis certain valued vales.

Most bodies of political voters fall somewhere in the middle of these positions and in fact their political bargaining strength varies widely over time and over various issues.

In addition, all these bodies agree - albeit reluctantly - they they need the others, if society and the economy are going to keep on working : thus their bargaining positions are not absolute but will settle  - if need be - for half a loaf.

This is why I say the real hard bargaining in politics occurs over the priority we as collections of political bodies give to different moral values.

Politics is always and only about winning over 'Hearts and Minds'.

And in an earlier post, I suggested why such hard political bargaining gets more - not less - intense during times of Total War.

So, to recap that earlier blog post, some of us value very highly the giving of scarce penicillin to paratroopers with a case of the Clap, so they can go back 'on strength' in two days and possibly die in the next big battle, so our own son won't have to be 'called up' in their place.

Others of us feel that a severely wounded and infected soldier who has already fought bravely in battle is more worthy of the scarce penicillin than some paratrooper deliberately cheating on his wife without a condom in some Naples brothel, hoping thus to avoid dying in an upcoming battle by being in hospital for two months with the traditional VD treatment.

We value this severely wounded hero's contribution greatly and admit we had made a tacit bargain with him to say we stay-at-homes would give him the best possible medical care if he should be wounded while defending us stay-at-homes somewhere overseas.

So we feel we must honour that bargain, despite the fact that even if our severely wounded hero is cured of his infection and lives, he will be quickly released from the army and given a small pension for life (paid for by us staying safely at home), as he will remain too permanently injured to be a good soldier or even a good factory worker.

This in a nutshell and without a lick of exaggeration , was the moral values that the Allied world debated over in the summer of 1943 - at first, solely among the well-to-do fat old men running the war and then later - post Baby Patricia - among the entire Allied population.

As the moral value of wartime penicillin went, so went Modernity - and post Modernity

In the end, it was Henry Dawson, Robert Pulvertaft, Rudy Schullinger and Dante Colitti 's chivalrous values that were prioritized, not the modern values of Winston Churchill, Howard Florey, Alfred Richards and Lewis Weeds.

And in doing so, our world quietly slipped out of the Age of Modernity and into the post Modernity Age....