Age of Antibiotics' Patients Zero : Aaron Alston of St Nicholas Ave, Harlem and Charles Aronson of Vyse Ave, the Bronx

Thanks to the hard work of two relatives of these penicillin pioneers (Claude Jay for Aaron and Lisa Liel for Charles), these forgotten individuals can emerge from the shadows almost fully formed.

Of all the Charles Aronsons in America in 1940...

Regardless of their age or residence, the 1940 American national census only shows about 38 Charles Aronsons and a half dozen spelled with close variants ---- making the task of finding history's missing Patient Zero of the Age of Antibiotics much easier.

Bickel penicillin book vivid -- at cost in accuracy

Lennard Bickel's 1972 book, "Rise Up To Life", was the first book that covered the wartime saga of penicillin as it occurred around the entire world.

But it was also one of the first written by someone who was not an eyewitness to the actual events.

But Bickel, an Englishman who emigrated to Australia in mid life, was a very good journalist and interviewed all and everyone he could find from the wartime era and got lively quotes from all.

Unfortunately, as a journalist rather than a historian, he sometimes chose to sacrifice all the facts in order to keep things lively and vivid.

Antibiotics' Patients Zero, part 2

In the end, finding out about the Patient Zero I knew the least about, Aaron Alston, turned out to be by far the easiest.

But first I had to make all sorts of naive mistakes.

Antibiotics' Patients Zero , part 1

When I began the search for Antibiotics' Patients Zero ten years ago, I very naively thought like a historian, not a genealogist, and as a result, I got precisely nowhere for ten wasted years.

October 16th 2015 'Red Letter Day' for Selective Service System AND Medicine !

Two extraordinary anniversaries -----connected by two extraordinary individuals

On October 16th 1940, 75 years ago this year, America's system of registering for selective service began - a process that continues to this very day.

On that very same day, 75 years ago, the Age of Antibiotics began.

Unlikely as it may seem, both events are intimately united in the persons of patients Aaron Alston and Charles Aronson.

October 15 1940 : a Fighting 69er fights SBE instead ?

Almost everyone dimly recalls hearing about New York's famous "Fighting 69ers" / "the Fighting Irish" - an infantry regiment more formally known as the 165th (infantry) Regiment, New York State National Guard,--- part of New York State's 27th Division.

Though a state regiment, it in fact recruited exclusively from NY City.

On October 15th 1940, the day before America's first ever peacetime draft registration, the day before History's first ever antibiotic shots, it was 'federalized' and began moving to the US Army's Fort McClellan in Alabama.

And there by hangs yet another intriguing tale in the wartime penicillin saga.

Genealogy, like melodies, is all about those 'permutations and combinations' we learned in school

Every wonder how a composer get a endless stream of unique melodies from 'just seven notes' ?

 Ever wonder how researchers find people lost to history, with only a tiny handful of facts to guide them ?

Math popularizers explain all those wonderfully different melodies and all those wonderful genealogical successes by the simple arithmetic of combinations and permutations.

The Double V victory : the Last shall be First

On October 16th 1940, it is said, Dr Martin Henry Dawson gave history's first ever antibiotic injections to a black man, Aaron Leroy Alston and to a Jew, Charles Aronson.

"And" : not "and then to".

But how ? How on earth do you give two injections at the same time ?

Three of four pioneering SBE patients (first patients ever to be treated with penicillin injections) still alive at first published report

I know two* and believe possibly three of Martin Henry Dawson's first four SBE patients treated with the first ever injections of penicillin were still alive at the time of his May 5th 1941  paper on this project.

75 years ago, on a day supposedly devoted to 1As, two New York City 4Fs made medical history instead

It is an irony beyond all measure that on America's first ever peacetime Draft Registration Day, October 16th 1940, a day designed to separate the 1A sheep from the 4F goats, two 4Fs (a black man from Harlem and a Jew from the Bronx) instead made medical history by ushering in our current Age of Antibiotics !

And they made history not by accident of sheer coincidence either.

First injection of penicillin into patients : October 16th 1940 New York

The first penicillin needle into a patient, ushering in our present Era of Antibiotics, was one of the most signal events in all medical history and it happened exactly 75 years ago this Fall.

Yet, until this present article, even the barest of its bare facts have never been publicly reported accurately - not even by the three key team leaders that first performed them !

First antibiotic penicillin patient : when did we learn his name?

How do we know what we know ?

I am very confident that the very first patient of the Antibiotic Era was a young black man named Aaron (Leroy) Alston and that he lived on St Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, New York City.

But when I was asked recently by one of Aaron's relatives (journalist Claude Jay) to demonstrate my proof, I was momentarily nonplussed.

The search for Antibiotics' PATIENT ZERO .... in lead-up to celebration of 75 years of life-saving antibiotics

ABSTRACT : Patient Zero of the Age of Antibiotics (seventy five years young as of October 16th 2015) was Charles Aronson , a Jewish youth from 1202 Vyse Street in East Tremont, Bronx, New York.

Born about 1913, he was a newspaper teletype operator in 1940.

His parents Alex (born in 1889) and Olga (born 1890) were from the old Polish part of the old (pre-Soviet) Russian Empire while he and his sister Lillian (born about 1915) and younger brother Samuel (born about 1920) were born in New York.

Olga was a homemaker and Alex was a ladies coat maker (probably cutting ladies' fur coats at the famous Levine and Smith firm in lower Manhattan) and their two other children were belt-makers.

Charles had a lifelong affinity/weakness for deadly diseases caused by strep throats, combined with an amazing ability to cheat death from them --- over and over.

As a small child , he had a near fatal case of Rheumatic Fever, that affected not only his joints temporarily and his heart valves permanently , but also led to severe neurological effects.

Then he was quickly swept up in the frequently fatal mysterious "sleepy sickness" that ran its course worldwide from 1917 to 1927. Oliver Sacks made it famous in the book and movie called Awakenings.

Those it didn't quickly kill outright, it would often leave in a coma or catatonic state.

Again he survived this disease as he did its frequent Parkinson-like aftereffects.

Despite all these brain-related attacks, he not only managed to finish High School during the hard times of the Great Depression but also to find a good skilled job as a teletype operator at a newspaper.

He then survived two attacks of fatal SBE thanks to receiving history's first penicillin , only to get a severe stroke in 1944 that left him paralyzed and speechless.

Again he survived at least until the beginning of 1949, when he passes out of the public record.

I currently believe he died in October 1951 and is buried at the NEW MONTEFIORE cemetery in West Babylon (Long Island) , along with his parents and two siblings.

****************************

Penicillin-the-Antiseptic was already twelve years old in October 1940 and a relative laggard in the human discovery and use  of antibiotics (maybe antibiotic number twelve ?) --- at least by the dictionary definition of antibiotics.

The dictionaries describe antibiotics as lethal substances produced by one microbe to keep other microbes at bay.

But you and I - mere laypeople and not dictionary editors - know exactly what Antibiotics are and are not (that's a capital "A" there , by the way !)

They are not some minor external antiseptic your mom dabs on your scraped knee when you fall off your tricycle, as penicillin had only been used  for from the Fall of 1928 to the Fall of 1940.

Rather they are highly potent lifesavers that you take internally as a ten day course of pills - or in a real emergency, get many times a day via injections.

In one sense we already know a good deal about injected penicillin's INDEX PATIENT , the individual who started the whole thing by inspiring Dr Dawson to birth the Age of Antibiotics.

His name was Aaron (Leroy) Alston and he had had his 'invariably fatal' condition of SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis, a Rheumatic Heart Disease usually caused by Rheumatic Fever) for about a year.

The latest conventional treatment was to give the patient as much of the latest (least toxic, most powerful) sulfa drug as their body could endure.

(All sulfa drugs are toxic in high doses  and the size of the doses of sulfa that 99% of SBE cases need for a cure would result in patient death long before they cured.)

Alston had all the latest sulfa drugs and many of the other proposed SBE cures besides and none were working.

But I believe that the first patient to actually get that historic  first needle of penicillin , our historic PATIENT ZERO , even if only moments before Alston, was a last minute patient called Charles Aronson.

If Aaron Leroy Alston had been cured by his historic course of injected penicillin , the ever-present and very jealous Alpha Males among medical scientists would have quickly trashed this claim - crediting sulfa drugs for the success instead.

But if Charles Aronson, a patient so new he hadn't yet had time to be put on the conventional sulfa treatment , was cured of SBE after a course of penicillin , the critics would all be left speechless.

Better then to 'do' him first, to make a stronger lead in the subsequent medical article.

Penicillin did not cure Alston and he died three months later.

Nor did penicillin - alone - cure Aronson.

But a little penicillin (more morale booster than medicine) a lot of sulfa and a miracle from heaven above let Aronson be that very rare person, maybe one in a hundred or one in a thousand who survived more than three years after first contracting SBE.

About four years later , he got an onset of a new SBE attack and this time got a decent amount of penicillin from the same doctor and was cured.

So who was he ?

The doctor who gave those first needles , Dr Martin Henry Dawson, had never been a lead doctor on treating an SBE case before - he was newly appointed to  a middle rank position in the hospital pecking order - only having substantive control over one public (semi-free /teaching) ward.

Such wards tended to attract poor patients and their poor relatives, who liked getting free or cheap treatment in a world class hospital that was only a short bus trip away.

Dawson had no reputation for his SBE work having never dealt with any - so his public ward patients were almost certain attracted to the closest cheapest quality hospital rather than to him personally.

The other historic penicillin patient, Aaron Alston , proved that so - he lived about two miles south of the hospital.

In any case, there were only two men named Charles Aronson in the 1940 national US census that were born around 1913.

I contacted the children of the one who lived a thousand kilometres away from NYC at the time - they said he was never sick - let alone sick with all the severe diseases as described by Dr Dawson's medical report on his Charles Aronson.

The only other Charles Aronson the right age in America in 1940 was lived in the Bronx, a mere four miles directly east of the hospital.

He had to be PATIENT ZERO.

I have already described what we know of him in the abstract above --- basically not much.

For unlike Alston (and the third penicillin-the-Antibiotic patient, George Conant) Charles Aronson and his family seemed to have left almost no mark in the public record.

Even so, it is hard to believe that an entire Jewish family of five that lived in the same part of the Bronx for over fifty years are remembered by no one.

In the 1930s, the Bronx was the world's biggest Jewish community and while those days are long gone , literally millions of North American Jews still have some sort of family link to the pre-war Bronx.

There is something else I should mention.

Dr Dawson, a gentile , literally gave up his life during WWII to save the lives of  Rheumatic Heart Disease patients sentenced to a Code Slow death by an uncaring Allied Anglo-American medical establishment.

We know the names of only six of those patients - and yet four of the six have Jewish sounding names .

Because Rheumatic Fever and SBE hit the poor , minorities and immigrants the hardest and many metro New York area Jews in those days were very poor I suspect this ratio would hold if we knew the names of all those saved from death by his efforts.

(Because Dawson also inspired a then small soda pop supplier in Brooklyn (Pfizer) to develop the natural fermentation process we still use to make 95% of all our antibiotics , we all owe him a big debt of gratitude.)

A direct counterpart to Charles Aronson, a German man named Martin Bader, a man with the same chronic conditions as Aronson and who like Charles was a productive employed citizen , wasn't so lucky.

His condition rendered him in the Nazi mind as a life unworthy of life and he was one of the first killed by the Aktion T4 program as part of the run up to the Holocaust.

Yet America and New York were the ones who actually birthed eugenics , not Germany , and if America was unwilling to directly murder 'unfit' Jews such as Aronson, they came damn close by officially denying them access to wartime penicillin.

Dawson gave up his life to combat these values and in the end he was successful  - the powerful War Production Board  (WPB) reversed course and made penicillin-for-all a vital wartime priority.

So Charles Aronson's story is that distinct rarity , a wartime story of Jews and eugenics that ends up a good news story with world wide benefits for all of us.

Yet another reason to find out more about this elusive PATIENT ZERO of the Age of Antibiotics ....

Updating J D Ratcliff's wartime penicillin classic, YELLOW MAGIC

I like to think that my "UN-SUPER HEROES" is an 21st century updating of JD (John Drury) Ratcliff's written-to-order 1945 popular science classic "YELLOW MAGIC" .

Ratcliff wrote the facts as truthfully he knew them in 1945 (or was told about them by the few penicillin participants he was able to contact firsthand).

Since late 1941, Penicillin had been surrounded by an ever more effective wall of wartime censorship all over the Allied world.

This allowed anyone involved in wartime penicillin's development to spin their own take to Ratcliff, without fear Ratcliff would have any access to paper documents to query their oral account.

Since 1945 , many of the paper documents have been archived or made public via scholarly articles and books.

But no one has since tried to do with the dramatic tale of wartime penicillin what Ratcliff ( following somewhat upon Paul de Kruif's style) did so well in his little volume.

JD could make any Science story come alive simply by re-telling it in a series of dramatic scenes.

And by freely adding his purple imaginings whenever his participants' eye witness accounts of specific incidents failed to actually recall much color or specifics.

Remember - unlike with the contemporary workings out of atomic energy and atomic bombs - no participants in this particular medical story had any sense - until mid 1943 - that they were making world-shaking history instead of just making penicillin.

So the drama and the little personal details were generally liberally 'recalled' later - after penicillin had become world famous - rather than being accurately recorded at the time.

So we only know the distinctive smell of wartime (crude) penicillin because an otherwise ordinary 1945 war nurse recounts the smell , in passing , in her much later memoir of combat hospital experiences.

Like all writers and historians, JD had to first hear all and read all of the varying accounts about wartime penicillin and then insert his reasoned opinion as to which composite account was mostly likely to be correct.

I can't tell you what SBE patients Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson felt like on October 16 1940 - but I can and will tell you how SBE patients their age tended to act at that stage in their disease.

The same with the smell of Dawson's crude penicillin as that first historic ampoule was broken ---- I'll have to use that wartime combat nurse's description - his penicillin , being much cruder, could only have smelt worse.

 I do not know how the specific ward nurses looking after Aronson and Alston on October 16th 1940 felt about a new medicine that smelt like a return to dirty dank moldy old basements.

But we do know lots about the house-proud nurses of the 1940s , in the days before handling high tech machines replaced pails and mops in the priority list of nurse training !

I won't invent speech inside quote marks - if it is inside quote marks, it will only be there because it is a direct quote from a contemporary document.

Instead I will use a lot of an old fashioned form of free indirect speech - something quite common until the 20th century , when authors were strongly discouraged from commenting inside their own works .

I will freely intermingle my comments (my opinions) in a sound alike version of those particular participants' voice, as I try to imagine what typical participants of their age, nationality, class, gender etc would likely say at that place and point in time.

I call my book a drama in five acts - so dramatizing each scene really isn't much of a stretch  ....

Un-Super Heroes, the Epilogue : Apollo Theatre , February 17th 1956

Scene 1, Act I of Un-Super Heroes opens on October 16th 1940 with the arrival of patient Charles Aronson at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City just as the last scene of the last Act (V) is August 15th 1944 with Charlie's departure from that same hospital.

But every drama deserves an epilogue and Un-Super Heroes's epilogue is set onstage at New York City's Apollo Theatre, just a mile from the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, on the night of February 17th 1956.

Appearing as a headliner in New York City for the very first time is a Georgia-born black singer from a dead poor family , a singer born with a badly handicapped leg.

But if racism, poverty and his affliction have held him back , he could only echo the sentiments from one of the first of Dawson's SBE cures, Miriam Laskowitz .

Because, like her , regardless of what problems life has tossed him, his heart and lungs certainly weren't one of them.

No siree Bob - or should that be no siree
 "A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom!"

Because from the moment Little Richard opened his mouth, the whole world noticed that while almost all the original rock'n'roll greats ( white and black) were dead poor by American standards , their heart valves and lung capacity were definitely in great shape.

This then was penicillin's most lasting legacy.

Unlike Aaron Alston (also from Georgia like Little Richard, also poor talented and driven) Richard and other rock 'n' rollers did not have their talents die unused when some infectious disease tragically cut them down in young adulthood.

Dawson's cheap abundant penicillin-for-all benefited everyone for sure - but it benefited the poorest amongst us the most.

And they gave it back to us - in particular in voice, melody and dance.

I can't see Henry Dawson ever becoming a true fan of rock n roll - ragtime was the rock'n'roll of his teen years.

 But I feel sure even he'd smile a broad ironic grin to think of how much of that 'God-awful caterwauling noise 'was all down to his untiring efforts from 1940 to 1945 to secure some penicillin for the poor and the unwanted ....

October 16 1940 : the Eyes of History focus in on a small hospital room on the nearly deserted Columbia University campus

Global contemporary opinion (and global contemporary journalism) was unanimous : the most important event in the world on October 16 1940 was Registration Day for America's first ever peacetime draft.

A world at war (Allied, Axis and Neutral) was momentarily united in wanting to know two things and two things only.

After the deprivation of the decade-long Great Depression and all the American university anti-war protests , were the young men of the world's greatest power able to fight and were they willing to fight ?

The fate of the world literally hung in the balance.

So all contemporary eyes were on the registration of America's potential A1 males.

But the Eyes of History, distilling events through the long glass tubes of time and sober second thoughts , may differ from global contemporary opinion , even when that global opinion was as united as it was on October 16 1940.

Because history - 75 years on - is agreed that a rare world-changing event actually did happen in America on October 16 1940 but it wasn't the coming of the Draft.

Instead it all happened, unnoticed at the time , in a small hospital room on the medical campus of New York City's Columbia University.

Despite the fact that almost all assumed that both in that hospital room would shortly be dead from then invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis , the young black man (Aaron Leroy Alston) and the Jewish youth (Charles Aronson) had been earlier been dutifully registered by a selective service team specially assigned to hospital patients.

Clearly these two were not just 4F , but 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs'.

But one man - Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson - didn't assume their death was inevitable.

He hoped to have them both up and around and turning up for their selective service medical exam when called.

The engine of his hopes lay in a small hypodermic needle in his hand.

By his own admission his medicine was new, untested, crude.

To the sceptical nurses watching in the corridor, it was also as dirty as rust and smelt like a moldy old damp basement.

Their response was natural - successful 1940 nursing was less about high tech machines and more about extreme cleanliness.

The nurses in the corridor couldn't believe that Dr Dawson was actually thinking of injecting something so dirty and foul smelling into the temple of the human body.

But he was - and he did.

And with that needle sliding into the young mens' arm began the Age of Antibiotics - because that crude moldy powder was penicillin, made - as the nurses suspected - from a mold of the penicillium family .

This was the first time ever that penicillin (available for a dozen years as a lab clearing agent) was given its proper - real job - lifesaving.

Thanks partly to that October 16 1940 penicillin shot, Charles Aronson went on to beat his endocarditis death sentence.

A small Brooklyn supplier to the soda pop industry (Pfizer !) got inspired by Dawson's success with penicillin and went on not just to produce most of WWII's penicillin but also to develop the biological production techniques that still used to produce most of today's antibiotics.

All of this was reported in a seminal book (Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge) by a women scientist (Dr Gladys L Hobby) who was not merely a close participant at many of the seminal events of the entire Age of Antibiotics but who was part of the tiny team that day in that small hospital room.

She confirmed her memories by consulting hospital records that have since been destroyed and she too has since died.

It has been possible to trace relatives of Aaron Alston but the sole survivor of the pair, Charles Aronson, has slipped from the grasp of historians.

The best hope we have of learning more about this Patient Zero of our Age of Antibiotics is - ironically enough - in those registration records complied by the Selective Service personnel and now held in the US government archives in St Louis.

So in the end, in a surprisingly satisfying way - both stories (Draft and Penicillin) come together to a happy conclusion...

Meet the "GOTHAM SEVEN"

Their leader, Dr Henry Dawson, dying of Myasthenia Gravis (MG) with deadly bulbar nerve involvement.

By the end , his MG crisis were ever more frequent and he was reduced to working out of a wheelchair, with oxygen assist.

WWI poison gas and too much time in damp trenches hadn't helped his lungs now threatened by bulbar nerve failings.

His foot and shoulder had also been severely wounded in the war, resulting in months spent in hospitals recovering.

His wife and helpmate, Marjorie Granger Dawson, had been born with congenital hip problems and no amount of operations had helped - she walked , but with a cane.

His clinical assistant , Thomas H Hunter. Polio had left him with two legs paralyzed so he got about with two crutches.

Former Dawson patient (and Dawson's great behind-the-scenes influence within the powerful WPB ) , financier Floyd Odlum.

The Warren Buffett of his age, he was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis while stressing about American unpreparedness for total war.

He was wracked with pain for the rest of his life and only really comfortable submersed in a warm water swimming pool.

Another former Dawson patient, Dr Dante Colitti

Years spent in hospital while doctors struggled to save his life from TB of the spine left him determined to become a surgeon despite his arthritis of the spine.

A condition which left him a hunchback and required him to use crutches.

The medical establishment rejected his services - partly because he was also catholic and Italian-American.

When he saw his chance he delighted in emulating Dawson , by tweaking the noses of the medically powerfuls by getting scarce penicillin for a dying baby via an appeal to the Hearst newspaper empire.

Miss H : Dawson's first SBE patient in which is can be said for sure that his penicillin alone saved her life.

But SBE casts its net wide and with her , it also damaged her uterus so badly she couldn't have children and left her blind in one eye. But she hung on, despite all the new operations and hospital stays, and thrived.

Her continued survival was crucial to answering the many doubters of Dawson's use of precious penicillin on the useless SBE patients, in the critical period between the Fall of 1942 and the Fall of 1945.

Charlie Aronson, along with Aaron Alston, was the first person to ever get a penicillin shot. Dawson's historical injections couldn't have hurt, because Charlie amazingly survived the then almost invariably fatal SBE.

He got a second bout of SBE and more Dawson penicillin again saved his life - but SBE also gave him a life threatening major stroke that left him permanently paralyzed in speech and body and in a wheelchair.

He survived and thrived - it was but the latest in a life long battle with a half dozen diseases that should have killed him.

As far as we know , he survived SBE - thanks in part to his historic first ever penicillin injection - from October 1940 till at least the end of December 1948.

(My current best guess is that he lived at least until 1955.)

His continued survival again stifled the many doubters to Dawson's SBE efforts.

In the parlance of the day, all seven were 4F --- in fact, the 4F of the 4F , useless, unfit, useless mouths.

But these seven , the Gotham Seven, were the ones who fought off their own Allied government and their own physical weaknesses to rescue natural lifesaving penicillin and set it free for all.

Honour their names : un-super heroes indeed....

Holocaust Studies (and Jewish genealogy) ignoring the Jews saved from 'death by deliberate neglect' planned for them by hostile ALLIED medical establishments ?

"Code Slowing" New York Jews to a certain death during height of Holocaust - and the dying Gentile who saved them

During the darkest days of WWII - at the height of the Holocaust - Charles Aronson , Miriam Laskowitz, Penny Mehler and Otto Morowitz all faced a death sentence as sure as any issued by the Nazis.

They were children of immigrants growing up in crowded homes in the NYC area during the late 1910s and 1920s , at the height of the deadliest phase of acute Rheumatic Fever.

As a result all had badly damaged heart valves and now as young adults during the war years, faced certain death from the uniformly fatal SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis).

Taking a page out of the Nazi handbook , Anglo-American medical elites were using the excuse of 'war necessity' to deny them the medicine that could save these Jewish lives.

Yet as other Jews around the the world were dying from battlefield bullets or in secret gas chambers , these New York City Jews (and ultimately tens of thousands of other Jews worldwide very like them) , were plucked from death and given a new life.

As the result of a selfless act of agape from a dying Gentile doctor.

This Canadian-born doctor gave up his own life to save the lives of strangers - and changed our whole world for the better - forever.

I mention these patients' names only because they have already been already made public long ago , by Gladys Hobby in her seminal account of the exciting saga of wartime penicillin (PENICILLIN : MEETING THE CHALLENGE).

Hobby was one member of Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny medical team at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital (today's CUMC) who had laboured for five years to save these four and dozens of others.

These four can not be all the wartime Jews plucked from death by the direct and indirect efforts of Dr Dawson's tiny team - it is just that they are the only names I currently know.

And that is almost all I know about them - they have vanished from history.

Next year - October 16th 2015 - will mark the 75th anniversary that the first of these Jews (Charles Aronson) was saved from death by Dr Dawson's hospital-brewed natural penicillin - an event that also ushered in our era of life-saving antibiotics.

Jewish Genealogy in the New York City area

I appeal to those involved in New York City area Jewish genealogy , to New York City medical personnel with an interest in medical history and to all those scholars researching Jewish death and survival during WWII .

Please consider helping to mark the 75th anniversary of the world's first ever penicillin shot (Manhattan Oct 16th 1940) by turning your eyes and skills towards recovering some of this lost story of Jews saved from certain death.

Beginning with recovering the stories of Charles, Miriam, Penny and Otto and their families ...

Charles born about 1913
Miriam born about 1920
Otto born about 1914
Penny born about 1932

Based on my assessment of their penicillin treatment patterns and Gladys Hobby's whereabouts upon retirement , I believe all four were living in the greater NYC area in the mid 1940s (ie including the near-by parts of New Jersey) and the last three were still living there circa 1980 as she prepared her book.

Penny's last name might be Mahler. There is always a distinct possibility that all these names are actually their middle names (or that they are their first names but their families knew them by other names.)

After all , the Dawson patient who was received the world's first penicillin shot was recorded as Aaron Alston , but was known as Leroy to family and friends and he always wrote his name as A. Leroy Alston !

I think that Charles might well have died in the 1950s - for a child and man who cheated death at least six or more times, a by no means bad fate ....

New York Times - succinct for once - on Fleming's penicillin vs Dawson's penicillin

On Feb 23rd 2009 , the New York Times did a story about the first times it ever mentioned penicillin on its pages.

In that article the Times reporter , Nicholas Bakalar , correctly (and yet so succinctly) said that in a major story on May 6th 1941 , the Times described the first ever use of penicillin IN a patient (Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , October 16th 1940 at Manhattan's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital).

Completely true , because all previous clinical use of penicillin - stretching back 12 years and all in the UK - had involved the use of penicillin ON a patient.

The breakthrough from harmless to lifesaving happened in North America - in NYC - first.

It was left to Dr Martin Henry Dawson from new Scotland - not Dr Alexander Fleming from old Scotland -to elevate penicillin from a harmless enough antiseptic (ON) to the potent lifesaver it became (IN) - thus ushering in the Age of Lifesaving Antibiotics.

Overwhelming , external antiseptic medications* by themselves do not save patients from acute life-threatening infections - but internal antibiotic medications do .

(*Surgical and nursing procedures that follow strict disinfectant and antiseptic protocols of course do save hundreds of millions of lives worldwide each year , but indirectly,  by avoiding future potential infections.)

Antibiotics can only save patients from imminent death if used IN the body - never ON the body

It was Dr Dawson who lifted penicillin out of a dusty museum of medical curios and stuck it into a dying man's arm and saved his life - not Fleming.

Fleming thought penicillin was only useful as an antiseptic and only if it was first made artificially synthetic - neither which proved in any way accurate.

Bravo Nicolas ------ Fleming : first to put penicillin ON a patient , Dawson : first to put penicillin IN a patient ...