Why I write about Henry Dawson :
HENRY DAWSON's story is actually about all of us.
In fact ten billion of us , so far, since 1940.
All of us enjoying better health because of a single selfless act of Agape: a dying Manhattan doctor putting the saving of ten other lives above his own life.
These ten (and millions of others like them) were judged as having no military value to WWII. Republican-dominated NAS death panels dismissed them as lives unworthy of life-saving penicillin.
Dr Dawson won't accept Big Pharma's excuses for the continuing scarcity of penicillin, 15 long years after its initial discovery.
So he 'homebrewed' penicillin himself and became the first ever to inject it into patients to save lives.
But his efforts were frustrated and censored --- until patients' families and ordinary GPs started 'Acting Up' to support Dawson's call for 'wartime penicillin for ALL humanity' .
His moral stance had unexpected economic consequences. Penicillin G became our cheapest (and hence most widely available) as well as our most effective lifesaver.
Cheap abundant penicillin finally removed the pockets of endemic virulent germs that always hung around the untreated poorest in society when being treated depended on your income.
This in turn has given all of us a sort of 'Herd Immunity' against these once endemic bacterial diseases.
Ten Billion benefiting from Dawson's efforts to save Ten: 'Bread cast upon Waters' indeed !
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