I'm a thinkin' : maybe its the Gotham EIGHT ?

I've always regarded the number of Gotham's 'unfits' who rescued natural lifesaving penicillin and set it free to do good as being just seven in number but now I am thinking that I was wrong.


First, the two unfit clinicians, Dr Henry Dawson and his assistant Dr Thomas Hunter.

Then three other unfits who greatly assisted them (Dawson's wife Marjorie Granger Dawson, his friend and ex-patient Floyd Odlum , and his ex-patient Dr Dante Colitti).

Finally, the two unfit patients, Charles Aronson and Ms H. H. , whose continued survival under Dawson's pioneering treatment, despite repeated setbacks, allowed the program time to finally succeed in spades.

But I now realize that these seven unfits didn't need to have gotten involved in the first place.

Not if the eighth Gotham 'unfit' , the penicillium notatum. had been accepted on its own considerable merits instead of being dismissed on sight as too small, too simple, too weak and too too disgusting.

But the God of the Modern Era (from the 1870s to the 1960s) was always on the side of the biggest battalions and the Moderns saw most of the world as being on the unworthy-of-life side of the fit/unfit question.

But they were dead wrong.

Because in fact the greatest medical blessing this world has ever seen was brought to us by a handful of unfit doctors serving unfit patients with unfit medicine.

Their unexpected victory in 1945 did not spell the immediate end of the Modern Era and the immediate rise of our present post-Modern Era.

 But it certainly spelt the beginning of that end...

Why it took the efforts of seven "lives unworthy of full life" to finally bring penicillin to the rest of us ...

The selfless five of The Seven

Regard closely , if you will, the personal circumstances of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, his teacher wife Marjorie Dawson, doctors Dante Colitti and Thomas Hunter, industrialist Floyd Odlum.

For none of these five (out of the total of seven key - and handicapped - individuals who brought us all penicillin) actually needed penicillin in the early 1940s .

All would have had extra-privileged access to the scarce medication if they had needed it.

So their actions were purely of agape love for others, rather than as part of a patients' advocacy group.

So why were these few , a mere one out of five hundred million of all the people living on the planet in 1943 - so willing to "Act Up" to see that all those dying for lack of wartime penicillin should receive some of the new lifesaver ?

I am convinced that they responded  personally - at a deep empathetic level  - against the then fashionable eugenic arguments about why the lives of SBE patients were intrinsically unworthy of scarce lifesaving penicillin.

To be Modern was to be Eugenic 

It was then fashionable in that besotted - modern - eugenic - age to argue that these 4Fs , born with intellectual and physical challenges and even those who acquired them later in life, were unworthy of the full lives granted to those who was 1A in mind and body.

(This intellectual net thus swept up almost all those (poor or minority) members of society who caught infectious diseases by claiming they had a defective gene that made them get these diseases.)

These "handicapped" or "crippled" members of society might be denied an education, or an fair access to jobs or marriage and children or medical care.

Ultimately some of these handicapped were even denied access to Life itself  - murdered by an direct injection as in Nazi Germany or murdered by quiet but deliberate indirect neglect --- as in the rest of the world.

The then popular prejudice - at both the official and popular level against people who wore glasses  ("four eyes")  - a category that ultimately most of us fits into at some time in our lives  - suggests some of the strength of this 'modern era' insanity seeking impossible physical perfection.

Or take "The Greatest Canadian Ever", Baptist minister and socialist politician Tommy Douglas.

He is regarded as the Father of Canadian Medicare -  a lifetime spent promoting that cornerstone of Canada's present day egalitarian values : full medical care provided to all Canadians regardless of their social status.

But surprisingly, eighty years ago, this young University of Chicago PhD student in sociology (and at the height of the Great Depression in particularly badly hit Saskatchewan !) still chose an eugenic over a political or economic explanation to account for why so many were living on welfare in his home town of Weyburn.

His highly divisive eugenic values was probably entirely typical of his age group and class in the Canada of the 1930s, just as his later egalitarian values were equally in tune with the egalitarian Canada of the 1980s.

In the 1930s, Douglas seemed to regard almost any physical handicap in the children he visited as something not just genetic and eternal but as a marker of darker moral failings.

But when this net of "handicapped-ness as a symbol for useless and less than fully human" was cast so wide, most should have said to themselves, "they're coming after the SBEs today, but they'll be after all those with congenital or acquired chronic defects tomorrow."

But the world did not - but these five did.

Dawson and his wife had met as fellow wallflowers at a college dance in the dance-obsessed Twenties.

Dawson had been a champion basketball guard as a teen but being twice severely wounded during the war had left him missing the use of one Great Toe and with restricted movement in one arm and shoulder.

Marjorie had been born with a relatively common defect in one hip.

The severity of the condition varies greatly - in her case , despite the best operations money could buy in the Edwardian age - she was left with severe restrictions on her movements , sometimes requiring the use of a cane.

But she was intellectually smarter than others and emotionally livelier as well - but these bonuses didn't compensate for her physical failings in this physical perfection obsessed age.

Dawson had acquired, in late 1940, a severe and probably quickly terminal case of Myasthenia Gravis , then a horribly debilitating chronic disease.

Death usually came from respiratory 'crises' and so he often needed a wheelchair and oxygen assist to get about.

Floyd Odlum had been healthy all his life until his worries over the course of the war gave him an unusual severe case of chronic rheumatoid arthritis , so severe that for the rest of his life only his time in a warm pool ever gave him body and mind some relief.

He walked with crutches, mostly , from then on.

Thomas Hunter had severe polio at an early age - leaving him paralyzed from the waist down and requiring the use of crutches.

Despite this, he was not just a star pupil but also very active in student affairs - including coxing race-winning crews at Harvard and Cambridge.

Dante Colitti came from a poor Italian family living in the crowded Lower East Side - he got TB as a child that went into his spine , leaving him a hunchback and requiring braces and crutches.

He spent years in hospitals and came to admire doctors and their roles.

His hunchback, his Catholicism and his Italian origin held him back in that many-prejudiced age , but he persisted and became a surgeon , though he eventually found he was more useful and much more valued as an unusually skilled anesthetist.

Noteworthy is that none of these five had a normal vocational reason to be involved in penicillin and in treating a heart condition .

They all stepped out of their comfort zone to do good , I believe , because they knew personally what it was like to be handicapped and to feel society's eyes upon them.

And they could all feel in their own bones just how the poor SBEs felt when they were handed their death sentences by an uncaring and eugenic Allied medical establishment ....

"The other Manhattan Project : Penicillin for 'life unworthy of life'

Henry Dawson was in moral combat with the Allied medical-scientific elite and their handmaids, the wartime Allied governments.

He felt the best way to win over all the people worldwide who were neutral towards the conflict with Hitler and Tojo was to demonstrate - in actions, not just empty words - that morally the Allies were different from the Nazis, not just a weak 'me-too' echo.

He felt the "CODE SLOW" (denying life-saving penicillin)  imposed upon the SBE youths dying in Allied hospitals because their disease was judged to be  "not militarily important" was the moral equivalent of the Nazi Aktion T4 , the project to kill all Germans judged to be" life unworthy of life" .

Time says he was right - when Doctor Mom joined his battle, the Allies reluctantly had to give in and started a massive program - at least in America - to provide abundant cheap penicillin to all....

ALL life is worthy of life as a full citizen or are just SOME judged 'worthy' ?

Nazi Germany - even at the depths of its imminent defeat - treated its full citizens well : recall that POW Kurt Vonnegut was working in a Dresden factory that made food supplements for pregnant mothers at the time of that city's Allied firebombing in February 1945.

But its non full citizens it killed outright or worked to death as starved slaves.

'Life worthy of Life' - 'Life unworthy of Life' are infamous German cum Nazi catchphrases that have come to symbolize THEM, so as to separate US for any shared responsibility for the horrors of  the
eugenic mass murder of WWII.

But when we re-cast those catchphrases as' life worthy or unworthy of life as full citizens' , we become uneasily aware that no society in the early 1940s was free of the sin of treating some of its members as less than fully human.

None .

When Henry Dawson proved this up for the Anglo Allies over their denying of life saving penicillin to young SBE patients deemed useless for the war effort - judged just 'useless mouths' consuming valuable medical resources - he made it clear to many just how close the Nazis and their erstwhile opponents really were, morally......

Dying life unworthy of wartime penicillin was Life unworthy of Life

"all Life is worthy of Penicillin"

The infamous term "Life unworthy of Life", created by a German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche in the 1920s , is generally thought of as bring used exclusively by the Nazis.

Used by them during a Total War to justify killing everyone from working class Aryan babies with developmental issues to the entire Jewish population of Europe.

But the term had a much greater transnational appeal than that .

Prominent American psychiatrist Foster Kennedy thought , in 1941 and 1942, during that same Total War, that the USA would be justified in killing its little Aryan babies with developmental issues.

Shamefully, America's leading psychiatric journal actually agreed with him and only one psychiatrist disputed his thesis.

And the Allies' medical establishment, led by Dr Chester Keefer and his NAS committee, used this idea to justify denying SBE-curing penicillin to young people dying of SBE all over the Allied world,  because they felt that even a cured SBE patient was still useless to the Total War effort.

("Life judged unworthy of Penicillin.")

By contrast, Henry Dawson and a handful of other doctors worldwide supported, and fought for, the notion that "All Life is worthy of Penicillin" - even in , particularly in , a Total War supposedly  fought precisely against the evil idea that some Life was, ipso facto, unworthy of Life.....

By 1945, Martin Henry Dawson's 1940 war aim had become OUR war aim too

Baby, dank Harry Lime, werden nicht neeeding Teddy

In September 1940 , at the height of the Battle of Britain, war hero Martin Henry Dawson decided against rejoining the Canadian Army to help fight Hitler.

He would fight Hitler instead by saving the lives of the very people that Hitler (and a lot of Dawson's medical colleagues) judged to be "lives unworthy of life" --- particularly in wartime.

In five short weeks, he grew and then injected penicillin into two working class youths, a Negro and a Jew , both dying of invariably fatal SBE.

 In many eyes, they were judged to be the 4Fs of the 4Fs, and definitely not a priority for life-saving during a Total War.

But Dawson instinctively felt that this was something that would definitely separate the Allies from the Axis , proving that the Allies believed in saving all lives - in particular even the smallest and the weakest, "the least of these", as it were.

The Allied government-scientific-military-commercial establishment disagreed, saving penicillin only for the 1As of the 1As, the frontline combat soldiers away from the killing zone due to a non-fatal dose of the clap they had picked up.

They banned the use of penicillin to save SBEs , sentencing them to a certain death.

Dawson, himself dying from a terminal disease, defied the authorities and stole some government-issued penicillin to give to the SBEs , later getting secret supplies from a sympathetic CEO at a Big Pharma corporation.

His misdeeds inspired others, the story broke, Doctor Mom sided with Dawson's ideas and the males in the establishment reluctantly fell in line.

But very soon they saw the virtue in Dawson's ideas, and warplanes were soon flying about, dropping not bombs but penicillin for dying children in both Allied countries and in Neutral nations.

Penicillin-the-lifesaver-of-all-civilian-lives had become a very public weapon in the battle to win the hearts and minds of the world for the Allied cause.

So much so, in fact, that by 1949 erstwhile 'citizen of an Allied nation' Harry Lime was judged one of fiction's all time villains mostly because he had dared to water down the penicillin intended for dying children.  Dying Axis children.

It is this viewpoint, only 4 years after the war, that I thinks allows us to claim "The Third Man" as one of the first postmodern films.

Dawson was four years dead by that point, but I think he would have be proud to think how far his war aims had become our war aims.....