If you like your heroes warts and all, you can hardly fault Hollywood or TV.
Today, unlike in the past, their heroes have, if anything, too many faults.
Fred Banting and Henry Dawson were world-shaking Canadian scientists who really didn’t invent or discover anything world-shaking.
But their atypical (for Canadians) can-do drive and mule-headed determination did bring forth medical miracles.
And like all bulldogged, pig-headed, mule-minded leaders, they came with much to admire and much to regret.
Canada (and its media) has long had a tendency to turn its ordinary heroes into extraordinary saints and the rest of the world, to the extent it even notices, permits Canadians to keep doing so.
Banting and Dawson may be media-imagined to be eternally floating up among the angelic white clouds, but a good historian’s job is to reveal that their feet, in fact, remained firmly rooted in the good old dirty clay....
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