Massive, non-toxic, doses of Penicillin, the original kind, Penicillin G, is still the best way to prevent deaths from rapidly acute bacterial meningitis.
This had been known for over ten years when Mary Louise died, but no doctor had yet had the nerve to inject raw penicillium juice into a human patient.
Like Dr Alexander Fleming, the world’s doctors were willing to let patients died needlessly, until the chemists synthesized pure penicillin, if they ever would.
They did not and have not.
If we had waited for the chemists, we’d still be waiting for the Antibiotics Revolution to begin.
That changed on October 16th 1940 when a Nova Scotian born and raised doctor, Martin Henry Dawson, put basically raw penicillium juice into two patients, hoping to save their lives from an invariably fatal disease he was sure penicillin could cure.
That disease was the once-dreaded SBE, subacute bacterial endocarditis, a frequent consequent of having rheumatic fever as a kid.
Once-dreaded because Dawson was right : penicillin does cure SBE and all kinds of other once fatal diseases.
Dawson said that if only somebody - anybody - had bit the bullet in 1938 and made a little of impure natural penicillin - Mary Louise would still be alive.
As would (savage irony fully intended) Robert Fleming in that same year 1938,if only Alexander Fleming had got off his comfortable arse and made just a little impure natural penicillin, enough to save his favourite brother from easily-cured-with-pencillin-pneumonia.
John L listened intently to Dawson, no doubt remembered his daughter pointlessly dying that long ago summer day of dreadful meningitis, and ‘bit the bullet’.
The normally highly cautious manager put his company full in (and more) to make as much impure natural penicillin as quick as possible, bucking his industry, the big universities and the Allied governments’ firm conviction that only synthetic penicillin would do the trick.
Dawson, Smith and his firm were proved fully right and the others fully wrong.
His firm, Pfizer, never looked back.
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| Baby Carl’s needless tragic death from meningitis helped more than any other single event to make Medicare reality in Canada |
Baby Carl’s story was once much better known than that of Mary Louise, which is known only to people who read deeply in specialist accounts of wartime penicillin.
Carl Derhousoff was nine months old on July 1 1962, a seemingly healthy child of Dokabour parents Mr and Mrs Peter Derhousoff, farming in rural southern Saskatchewan.
Suddenly, as is always the way with rapidly acute meningitis, the baby took deadly sick and his desperate parents set off to the nearest small town with a doctor.
In any other month, in any other province in Canada, or indeed almost anywhere else in the world in 1962, the doctor would have suspected meningitis and given the baby a big needleful of penicillin G and sent the baby on to the nearest town with a general hospital.
Bu in Saskatchewan on July 1 1962, almost all the provinces doctors had closed their doors, to protest the incoming medicare system.
The ever more despairing parents drove on and on, from pillar to post, being rejected everywhere until they arrived at the big hospital in Weyburn.
Too late, their desperate drive for life had all been for not.
As I recall their terrible drive, I am afraid I can only think of the world’s best known lieder, DER ERLKONIG, by Schubert and Goethe : it recalls a father’s desperate horse ride through the night, as he holds his very sick child by his side, en route to a doctor. Always the fevered boy hear the seductive voice of the Elf King calling the boy over to the peaceful calm of permanent death and the father’s equally pleading to the boy that it is only the wind, or the fog or the leaves rustling.
The ride ends as sadly as Mr and Mrs Derhousoff.
The story was big big news across Canada and indeed around the world and it probably did help to break the doctors’ strike a few weeks later.
Medicare in Canada never looked back and within a few years was stoutly defended by the very same doctors who had once let an innocent baby die rather than bend to the democratic will of the people.
I was just at my sister Tracy’s house and as it happens she is almost exactly the same age as Carl and I remember well looking at tiny Tracy when I learned about baby Carl, as I followed the news of the Doctors Strike closely on CBC radio, in Macleans and in the Canadian edition of Time Magazine.
Her health was good, but my mother’s was not after her birth and Mom came very close to dying around the time of the Doctors Strike.
Believed me, back then, many many times I thanked God that we were living in Nova Scotia and not Saskatchewan....
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