Pecking Order Shocker !!! Lowly day clinic doctor launches Age of Antibiotics

All teaching hospitals display an informal but exceedingly powerful medical pecking order in terms of prestige and access to scarce resources.

At the very very bottom of the food chain are those day/outpatient clinics that serve patients who are both walking ambulatory and suffering from non-acute non-life threatening conditions.

Wrongly, the old fashioned arthritis day clinic (today's rheumatology day clinic) was seen as to fit that description to a "T".

That was perhaps because that description did indeed fit most of its patients, suffering as they were from osteoarthritis, but in fairness, many other forms of arthritis are much more acute or are chronic yet decidedly life-shortening.

In any case, arthritis clinic staff, like Rodney Dangerfield, got little respect or status from the greater medical research world, in the years on both immediate sides of WWII.

How utterly galling then that it was that a lowly arthritis clinic doctor, Henry Dawson, who ushered in our present Age of Antibiotics and then led the finally successful effort to see the use of non-patented natural fungus-made penicillin to win the war, instead of pissing countless lives away while the world's scientific elite chased the hopeless chimera of synthetic patented man-made penicillin.

Most importantly, Dr Dawson's natural non-patented fungus-made penicillin is still the all important base behind almost all of our (lightly semi-synthesized) lifesaving antibiotics we depend upon seventy five years later...