In the Fall of 1940, it must have seemed to Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny penicillin team that pretty well the whole world was profoundly morally sick : exalting the powerfully wicked and casting down the blameless weak.
It badly needed an intervention.
So into the rooms of the rejected, dejected and terminally dying SBE patients, Dr Gladys Hobby daily displayed above her head a transparent glass petri dish of radiating penicillium growth, intensely blue green grey with tiny bright golden dew drops of exuded penicillin juice.
In those partially darkened rooms, if the October light through the small window caught the petri dish just right, it suddenly appeared to the patient's eye like some glowing bejewelled monstrance : with natural penicillin's promise of, if not Eternal Life, than at least a fair crack at three score and ten.
A monstrance, along the lines of the various Catholic traditions, but held aloft by a devout protestant Presbyterian and venerated before an audience of a Southern Baptist and an Orthodox Jew : only in Manhattan.... !
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