Nothing does more to lower the normally high social prestige of all doctors, than a disease that is 100% incurably fatal.
You could argue that no disease is 100% incurable, technically ----
but you would be wrong. Wrong, wrong: dead wrong.
Yes, there is always a tiny number of people who survive even the worst diseases -- but they not 'cured' --- these people survived even if they never saw a hospital or a doctor.
They survived , yes.
But they were not 'cured' by human agency.
Give the credit to God or Mother Nature instead.
No doctor or nurse likes to have to tell patients and their families that there is nothing medically one can do and they should prepare for a tragic death.
Death is painful for all of us - but for medical professionals to have to admit to others that they are powerless and useless adds an extra sting to the unpleasant task.
Normally they get to say "Its Stage Four - the prognosis is very guarded but we will try radiation."
The patient still dies but the family respects the doctor for at least
trying.
SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis) was one such invariably fatal and uncurable disease during the war years.
In fact, it was the most common invariably fatal disease in the western world in those years - the invariably fatal form of brain tumors ran a very distant second.
It could hit anyone: anyone can get strep throat anytime in their life, and get it over and over --- from that they could get RF ((Rheumatic Fever) at any time in their life, and get it over and over.
That greatly increased, in turn, their chances of getting SBE, at any time in their life, - and get it over and over, if by some real Miracle, they survived the first bout.
Every medical single doctor came across cases of fatal SBE in their career in those days --- they hated it for what it did to patients and families ( particularly because SBE patients were on the younger side of life usually) and because it made doctors feel powerless.
Now: cue August 1943, and the medical community of greater New York City.
Throw in SBE researchers, ordinary ward nurses, SBE patients, their families and friends, - heck throw in all the patients and families of people with past bouts of RF, just waiting to be told they now have SBE.
On one hand, the government - your government - has publicly and officially said that regrettably Penicillin does
not cure SBE.
But this is wartime - who totally trusts the government and media?
The wartime medical slash patient grapevine throughout greater New York City area is alive with a different story: a doctor named Martin Henry Dawson has gotten half a dozen cures off of penicillin for SBE .
"One patient got his SBE back in August 1940, that's three long years ago. And he's still alive !!!!"
Dawson's success, he tells all who ask, is only limited by the tiny amount of penicillin he can steal - that's right -
STEAL from the government supplies, to give to his SBE patients.
Doctors from all over the area are visiting him, asking him to help with their SBE patients, promising to steal additional penicillin if he will only help.
Heavens ! One of them is even the President's personal doctor, yes FDR himself !!!!!
Mysterious bottles of bootleg penicillin keep on turning up at doctors' doors, provided by ladies in white --- taken presumably from the city's one pharma plant that is producing penicillin.
None of this is being reported in the local or national media ---strangely a cone of silence has descended on this good news story in the wartime media, which could use a little relief from having to report years of bad news stories.
That is until a young hunchback doctor named Dante Colitti and the purple-paged Hearst flagship newspaper decide to blow the story wide open.
In theory, its just a local NYC story --- but there is an old,old saying in the music biz : "In NYC, there is no such thing as a regional breakout: if a song is breaking in New York, its breaking wide stateside...."
Within days the story is all over North America - and then all over the world - even into wartime Germany and Japan.
I have always been very interested in the differences between knowledge that is private, that which is public and that which is popular.
For example, the Nazi Hunger Plan to kill 30 million Slavs during WWII to free up food was private during the war , the killing of 3 million Polish jews was publicly known during the war while the Nazi killing of 300 people in the little Czech village of Lidice was popularly known during the war.
Open Secrets are an unusual hybrid of the private and the popular - bypassing the public (aka the official/conventional/ mainstream media).
Lots of Nova Scotians (my estimate was 5%) knew, from gossip, the private knowledge that a high public official in Nova Scotia 'couldn't keep his pecker in his pants' when it came to women (particularly young women, unwilling young women).
About one person in twenty could tell me detailed details of the crime when I asked.
That may not sound like much, but I bet fewer than 5% of any given population could tell you much about the top news story in the land, despite it receiving wall to wall coverage in the conventional media.
So it was private, yet popular, yet not public - none of the semi-official media in Nova Scotia (aka the CBC, CTV and the Herald newspaper) had reported anything on it.
The stones may have cried out over the injustice, but no opposition politician, or theologian, professor of ethics, feminist group or police department had gotten exercised over the scandal.
This had a corrosive effect on how ordinary Nova Scotians viewed their supposed moral leadership when the population knew a crime but their leaders did nothing.
I often wonder what led young Dante Colitti to do what he did ---I can't help feeling he wanted to prick this cone of official secrecy as much as he wanted to help save the life of the baby girl in his care...
