*From The Front Lines Of The Class Struggle- Victory To The Shaw's UFCW Workers

Click on the headline to link to an "Open Media" Website report on the Shaw's Strikers- "From The Front Lines Of The Class Struggle- Victory To The Shaw's UFCW Workers"

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-The Battles Against Syphilis and AIDS: Medicine vs. Anti-Sex Moralism-A Tribute to Paul Ehrlich

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1987 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

****

The Battles Against Syphilis and AIDS: Medicine vs. Anti-Sex Moralism

A Tribute to Paul Ehrlich

"I was led by the desire to direct my lifetime's work to an important and worthy objective— I chose diseases that affect man and which it had hitherto been impossible to combat with other medicines." —Paul Ehrlich, quoted in Ernst Baumler, Paul Ehrlich, Scientist for Life

Women and Revolution has chosen this International Women's Day as an occasion to commemorate Paul Ehrlich, one of the great pioneers of medical science. Among his many discoveries in bacteriology, immunology and hematology, any one of which would earn him a place in history, was Salvarsan, the first effective treatment for syphilis, one of humanity's most terrible scourges. Although Salvarsan has been superceded by the far more effective penicillin, its discovery established the use of chemical agents in the treatment of disease (chemotherapeutics) as a new branch of medicine. And by targeting a venereal disease for treatment, Ehrlich took head-on the superstitious moralist which viewed such an illness as a "just punishment" for "sin." To the scientist Paul Ehrlich, this terrible disease was a medical condition, caused by a microbe, that could be cured and eliminated; his concern was to find that cure. Today, when anti-sex bigotry and hysteria against AIDS victims impede the already difficult task of conquering this new and deadly disease, the lessons of Paul Ehrlich's work are all the more important.

Ehrlich was born in 1854 of a German Jewish family. He entered medical school in 1872, at the dawn of anew age in medicine: the discovery that microorganisms are the cause of many diseases. With the aid of the microscope and the new theory, Louis Pasteur had saved the silk industry of southern France from the ravages of silkworm diseases. Over the next decade, the German bacteriologist Robert Koch identified the agents of anthrax, tuberculosis and Asiatic cholera.

Previously medicine had been dominated by the ancient theory of "humors." Syphilis patients, for example, were treated with mercury to cause profuse salivation and perspiration, which were believed to remove the bad "humors." Doses of mercury, a poison, probably neared lethal levels; whether patients suffered and died more from the illness or the "cure" is impossible to say.

It is hard to comprehend today the scale of devastation caused by this dreaded disease. The 1940s movie made of Ehrlich's life, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (starring Edward G. Robinson), paints a heart-rending picture of the suffering caused by syphilis: the desperate faces of the ill; a young man who commits suicide when informed that he has syphilis and cannot marry his sweetheart. The lives of millions of people were destroyed by syphilis, which often caused terrible complications such as heart ailments, blindness, insanity, sterility and paralysis. It has been estimated that 20 percent of the inmates of mental hospitals suffered from syphilis-induced dementia. In the latent phase of the disease, a woman could pass it on to her unborn child, without even being aware that she was infected. Congenital syphilis was a leading cause of stillbirths and infant mortality.

Bacterial research had been greatly aided by the discovery of dyes to stain tissue, which enhanced the microscopic details of cells. As a student Ehrlich became fascinated with staining and meticulously researched the affinities of various dyes with cellular structure. One of his first important discoveries was a stain which made a positive diagnosis of tuberculosis possible for the ordinary doctor.

In 1892 Ehrlich joined Robert Koch at the Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin, where they worked on tuberculosis immunology. Ehrlich was also part of the research team which realized the development of a diphtheria antitoxin and saved the lives of countless children. For this work Ehrlich won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1908, along with llya Mechnikov, who introduced the theory of the role of the white blood cells in immunity.

Out of this work Ehrlich developed the concept of chemotherapy, highly controversial at the time. He expressed his insight in a vivid image: "Antibodies are to some extent magic bullets which seek out their own targets without damaging the organism" (Baumler, Paul Ehrlich, Scientist for Life). Would it not be possible to use chemicals which would bind with specific microorganisms and render them harmless in the body? As the later development of antibiotics was to show, Ehrlich was on the right track, in a broad and technical way. But his discovery of Salvarsan was fortuitous: his work was highly experimental and conducted primarily through trial and error, without benefit of the decades of research into bacteriology and biochemistry which medical science now has. Advances in molecular biology have enabled scientists to better understand many cellular functions and so to design more effective drugs.

In 1907, with the Japanese bacteriologist Kiyoshi Shiga, Ehrlich discovered the dye known as trypan red, which destroyed trypanosomes in infected animals. Encouraged by this success, Ehrlich decided to target the spirochete causing syphilis, which had already been identified. In 1906 his colleague August von Wassermann had even developed a diagnostic test for the disease, but there was no effective treatment.

Ehrlich began his search for the "magic bullet" with arsenic compounds, which had long been known to be effective against disease. With his own research facility and staff in Frankfurt, Ehrlich proceeded to subtly alter also found himself the target of scurrilous attacks by moralists and enemies of scientific progress: one Dr. Richard Drew, formerly in the police vice squad, accused him of endangering the public health. Scandal sheets distributed in Frankfurt charged that Salvarsan had been forced on prostitutes and was responsible for blindness and several deaths. Ehrlich characterized his opposition as anti-scientific, anti-progress and anti-Semitic "rabble." When the Nazis came to power they took up the cudgel for this rabble, the enemies of Paul Ehrlich, and tore down the street signs on Paul-Ehrlich-Strasse. Ehrlich's widow was forced into exile.

Ehrlich's magic bullet targeted more than the syphilis spirochete: the stigma of venereal disease had been as much of an obstacle for its victims as the disease itself. Henrik Ibsen's 1881 play Ghosts describes the ravages brought by secrecy, hypocrisy and syphilis on one family. An eminent critic of the time gave voice to typical destructive prudery: Ghosts was "an open drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged, a dirty act done publicly, a lazar [leper] house with all its doors and windows open" (quoted in Six Plays by Ibsen, Eva Le Gallienne). In 1916 Dr. Allan J. Mclaughlin, a Massachusetts public health authority, denounced the moralists who claimed that "to advertise the marvelous effects of Salvarsan, and to place it within the reach of the poor is to place a premium upon vice and to absolve the syphilitic from the just punishment of his sins. As health officers let us be practical and consider syphilis as a public health problem..." (Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880). In 1881 Massachusetts General Hospital had changed its policy from charging syphilitic patients double rates to refusing them admission altogether!

To this day, although both syphilis and gonorrhea are generally easily cured, they are widespread in the United States. In 1979 gonorrhea accounted for two-thirds of all reported communicable diseases in the U.S.; it is the most prevalent human bacterial infection on the planet. Just when the wide availability of penicillin after World War II could have dramatically lowered rates of venereal disease, government funding allocated for public education was slashed to the bone. While disingenuously de-emphasizing that syphilis and gonorrhea can be treated and cured, educational programs still often withhold the simple truth that condoms can be effective against venereal disease. The current controversy over public advertising for condoms is merely another episode in a long, dreary story.

For Free, Quality Health Care for All!

The control of disease is as much a social question as a scientific one; in this sick capitalist society, the profits of the pharmaceutical giants and the insurance vultures come before public health. For decades the U.S. Public Health Service conducted an "experiment" only one step away from Nazi Germany: for 40 years, from 1932 to 1972, it "studied" 400 black sharecroppers with syphilis, who were never told they had it and never treated, so that "researchers" could watch the ravages of the untreated disease as it destroyed their bodies and minds. Over one-quarter of the victims died of the effects of syphilis!

Today a new plague is upon us: AIDS, caused by a virus which destroys the immune system. Because the victims of AIDS in the United States have so far been predominantly gay men or users of intravenous drugs, bigotry and ignorant fear have come down on them full force. Ostracism and discrimination compound the physical suffering of an invariably fatal disease that is if anything even more horrible than syphilis.

So far AIDS has no effective cure and there is no preventive vaccine. Although much has been learned about the virus, the obstacles are indeed formidable. The only good news is that it is rather hard to transmit; nevertheless, hysteria has focused on bogus "dangers" of casual transmission as reactionaries seek to eject AIDS children from the classroom and fire AIDS victims from their jobs. The recent federal proposal for massive testing of hospital patients and applicants for marriage licenses will do nothing to stop the spread of AIDS—but it will create a blacklist of victims of the anti-sex crusade.

Conservative columnist William F. Buckley thinks that people infected with the AIDS virus should be tattooed—perhaps he has in mind the pink triangle that marked gays in Hitler's Germany? In fact, the fascists have put themselves forward as the shock troops of anti-sex bigotry. J.B. Stoner, the man behind the racist Birmingham church murder bombings in 1964, rallied the Ku Klux Klan in Forsyth County, Georgia against black civil rights marchers with a pamphlet "Praise God for AIDS." Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, frothing at the mouth as usual, railed against government expenditures on vaccination research: "Are they aware that in the name of compassion they are giving social sanction to what can only be described as brutish degradation?" (ibid.).

As the history of syphilis and gonorrhea reveal only too well, such bigotry can be as much of an obstacle to fighting a disease as the microbe itself. Although the need for massive funding for AIDS research has been evident now for years, Reagan has consistently cut allocations for this work, while his director of communications, Patrick Buchanan, declared AIDS to be "nature's retribution" on homosexuals. What's necessary is bi//ions for an internationally coordinated program of AIDS research,

Paul Ehrlich pointed the way forward when in the early years of this century he brought in the methods of science and threw out ideas of "retribution" as medieval rubbish. It will take a socialist revolution to put the tools that the heroes of medical science have given us fully to use in the service of all humanity."

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Dr. Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis: A Man Who Saved Millions of Women

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1983 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.


**********

Women and Revolution has chosen International Women's Day this year as an occasion to commemorate Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis. As an obstetrician in mid-19th century Europe Dr. Semmelweis searched for, found and tried to apply the cure for puerperal (childbed) fever. For his actions he was ridiculed, forced out of his practice in Vienna and eventually driven to insanity. While his discoveries preceded those of Louis Pasteur and John Lister and were superior to the earlier work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Semmelweis is little remembered today—even by many in the medical profession. Yet his simple concern for his female patients resulted in the saving of millions of women, in his lifetime as an originator of current medical procedure.

Semmelweis was born in Hungary in 1818. By 1844 he had begun work as an obstetrician in the First Maternity Division of the Vienna General Hospital, a facility for charity cases and the poor. An estimated 1,800 women a year died there of childbed fever, an extremely contagious and painful microbial infection which led to* certain death within days after childbirth. Indeed, the First Maternity ward was notorious for these statistics, and women went to incredible ends to avoid it, sometimes even trying to hold off labor pains until they could be admitted to the Second (midwives') Maternity Division. When Semmelweis met his first patient she was shaking with fear, but he somewhat arrogantly assured her that the doctors' ward was certainly superior. She soon became one of the many thousand dead, and he was jolted. He checked the records of deaths at both wards for the previous six years and found a nearly ten percent mortality rate at the First and less than two percent at the Second.

For the next two years, Semmelweis devoted himself to researching the likely causes of the disease, nagging his rather uninterested superiors, unsuccessfully trying every conceivable corrective measure. He wrote, "I was like a drowning man grabbing at straws. Everything was questionable, everything inexplicable, only the great number of dead was an undoubted actuality" (quoted in Men Against Death, Paul de Kruif). In March of 1847 the assistant pathologist at the hospital died after cutting himself during the autopsy of a puerperal patient. Semmelweis noticed that his disease was identical to those of women who died in his ward after childbirth. He realized then that, unlike the midwives, doctors went straight from surgical and autopsy rooms to the maternity ward where they examined each woman in turn. This led him to the discovery that puerperal fever was not some unknown, cosmically-caused disorder emanating from within the childbearing woman (as was commonly believed at the time) but rather an infection that was conveyed to them by their doctors.

He immediately instituted the practice of doctors washing their hands in calcium chloride solution
before entering the maternity ward (and eventually between examining each patient). In April of 1847,18 of every 100 women had died of childbed fever. By June of 1847, one month after Semmelweis' discovery, one out of every 100 women died, less than the mortality rate in
the midwives' ward.

Semmelweis' findings were not exactly embraced by his colleagues and superiors. He had, after all, proved that doctors themselves were responsible for these deaths. More importantly, his discovery ran counter to the prevalent medical philosophy of his day. German medicine in the first half of the 19th century reflected the extreme idealism of intellectual thought generally. It was dominated by the Nature-Philosophy school, whose leading light, a naturalist named Lorenz Oken, was as inept as he was fanciful. Oken went so far as to declare, "Ideally every child should be a boy" (quoted in History of Medicine, Fielding Garrison). This doctrine, along with several equally mystical offshoots, was shattered as a result of the 1848 revolution. But its successor, the New Vienna School in which Semmelweis was trained, hung on longer. It subscribed to the theory of "therapeutic nihilism," taking great pains to diagnose and describe disease without any expectation of curing it. Patients were regarded merely as objects of investigation, and the humane aspects of medical practice were ignored. When it came to treatment, the leading clinician of the school, Josef Skoda, would shrug and say, "Ah, it's all the same!" (ibid).
Hospital conditions reflected this attitude. No one used gloves or washed hands. Instruments and bandages were not disinfected, linen was not changed from one patient to the next, and open windows let in the putrid air of adjacent morgues. In an article entitled "Madness" in the 16 December 1982 New York Review of Books, Princeton University professor of history Lawrence Stone commented:

"It is now credibly believed that hospitals were lethal death traps before Pasteur demonstrated the importance of a sterile environment. It is now also generally recognized that doctors—presumably unwittingly—have killed more patients than they cured, certainly before the
early nineteenth century, and maybe before the invention of anti-biotics in the mid-twentieth.”
"
Semmelweis began to make changes in these conditions, and the medical profession retaliated. While some—notably Dr. Skoda—stood by him, he became an object of derision. His boss finally had him demoted by having it brought to the attention of the medical authorities that Semmelweis had worn the plumed hat of a revolutionary in 1848 (which, if true, is certainly an honorable statement). Semmelweis returned to Budapest where he was again scorned and ignored. Yet he continued his fight, first as an unpaid obstetrician at St. Rochus Hospital and then as a professor at Budapest University. It was there that he published a treatise on his work and a scathing attack on his fellow obstetricians with the refrain, "This murder must stop." Semmelweis' anguish over and obsession with the needless number of deaths overwhelmed him, and he died in a public insane asylum of massive infection in 1865. It was not until the work of Pasteur and Lister that his breakthrough was accepted. Feminists will doubtless denounce us for saluting the work of a man on International Women's Day, just as in the past we have been assailed for upholding and implementing the revolutionary work of "old men with white beards." We are not champions of "sisterhood" but rather seek to strengthen the ranks of the working class in struggle against capitalist society, including the reactionary nuclear family which enslaves women. Semmelweis was hardly a Marx or Engels nor is the medical profession now, despite greatly increased knowledge, a humane champion of women and the oppressed. What we share with Semmelweis is his desire to make childbirth an easy and safe procedure. The reality of having children with real choice, without the certain knowledge that motherhood means a life of mindless drudgery and the fear for the lives and livelihoods of one's children, awaits the socialist future. And it is the development of technology, not least through scientific achievements of such men as Dr. Semmelweis, which has laid the basis for a society with the resources to replace the family structure and ultimately liberate women."

Dr. Semmelweis and the Revolutions of 1848

Postscript

For our International Women's Day 1983 editorial we wrote a piece honoring Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, the 19th century Hungarian doctor who discovered the cause of and preventive cure for puerperal (childbed) fever, which had caused the deaths of thousands of women (see "A Man Who Saved Millions of Women," W&R No. 26, Spring 1983). His discovery—that doctors themselves were spreading the disease because they came directly from the morgue, bearing deadly bacteria, and examined woman after woman without washing their hands—caused intense hostility from his supervisors. As we noted, "His boss finally had him demoted by having it brought to the attention of the medical authorities that Semmelweis had worn the plumed hat of a revolutionary in 1848 (which, if true, is certainly an honorable statement)."

It is true. We recently came across an article from the Militant (5 July 1948), the newspaper of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, titled "Semmelweis—Forgotten Martyr," which noted that:

"The revolution that swept over Europe in 1848 gave Klein [Semmelweis' supervisor in the Vienna General Hospital] the opportunity he was looking for. In Vienna the people drove the Emperor from the city. Semmelweis, an ardent revolutionist, belonged to the famous 'Academic Battalion/ composed of intellectuals, artists, professionals and students. When reaction triumphed, Klein secured his assistant's dismissal and banishment from Austria. Returning to Budapest, Semmelweis found the revolution still in power there; he embraced it with enthusiasm. But this upsurge of the people, too, was defeated."
The revolutions of 1848 were defeated by the rotting absolutist powers of Europe at the time—yet they provided inspiration for new generations of revolutionaries: the Paris Commune of 1871, then the triumphant Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Semmelweis himself, his life-saving discovery largely ignored in his lifetime, died in a madhouse of a massive infection. Yet his pioneering work ultimately won out.

We are pleased to honor Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis again, then, not only as a man who fought to obliterate the death agonies of women he treated in his "professional capacity" as a doctor, but as a comrade in the more than century-long struggle for social revolution."

*The Latest From The "Progressive Democrats Of America" Website

Click on the headline to link to the "Progressive Democrats Of America" Website.

Markin comment:

This internal "left" grouping within one of the two main imperial governing parties is a "bell weather" these days on the Obama presidency. Right now this recently passed, totally inadequate and, frankly, ugly heath care legislation has them back on the Obama team. The little "dust up " over the imperial war budget and Obama troop escalation in Afghanistan which had them screaming in the night a while back are on hold. Compare this slogan though to what passes for "progressive" health care legislation just enacted- Free, quality health care for all! Socialism, yes. Necessary, yes. Case closed.

*From The SteveLendmanBlog"- On Obamian Health Care

Click on the headline to link to a "SteveLendmanLog" entry about the passage of President Obama's health care proposals.

Markin comment:

As I have noted before it is always good to have this blog that covers the bourgeois political scene so that I don't have to do so and can, merrily, work on placing my communist propaganda material in this space. Thanks "SteveLendmanBlog"