HP Lovecraft's "helpful monsters" : how the Slime saved more kids than Civilization bombed or gassed

In 1937, the world's most honoured cultural hero was invariably some sort of a medical researcher.

Probably someone with a German accent, gained from years of study at the world's best research universities ---- someone who researched on children's illnesses, someone invariably photographed giving candy to kiddies.

Someone rather like Dr Josef Mengele in fact.

In that same year, the world's scariest monster was usually a foul smelling shapeless giant blob of slime, terror on the the classic HP Lovecraft model.

A blob that was always less than a real object than rather a metaphor representing the horrific dissolving of Progress's reassuring certitudes ("science's terrible simplicities").

Certitudes that a huge number of us need to daily get through a messy actual world of instability, uncertainty and change.

(Insert here links to research on the 'conservative brain'.)

Yet by 1946 and The Doctors' Trial, Dr Mengele's medical research on children had become the last word in evil and horror.

And the child-saving albeit foul smelly penicillium slime was the surprise medical hero of the hour, the only truly Good News Story to ever come out of WWII's Bad News War.

HP himself had died back in 1937 and so never got to live long enough to see his expectations confounded.

And upended...

WWII upending the Ladder of Progress : moral and technological failures at the top, moral and technological successes at the bottom

Lost beneath all the signal moral failures of WWII's top civilizations (Auschwitz et al) was the many technological failures thrown up by the top human civilizations.

On all sides, all through that six year long war, their citizens were promised ultra quick successes, due to their side's superior technology.

(The Maginot Line - the Bomber Always gets Through, the Six Week Blitzkrieg against the Russians, and on and on.)

Technological failure at the top, over and over.

At the bottom, there was the unexpected technological triumph of primitive microbe-made penicillin winning against diseases the best human synthetics (the Sulfas and the never to be synthetized penicillin) couldn't hope to cure.

Also at the bottom,the even more unexpected success of Henry Dawson, Dante Colitti, John l Smith and Larry Elder, who together forced the Allies to stop using penicillin as an exclusive weapon of war and made wartime penicillin-for-all instead into the one moral triumph of WWII....