WWII: the battle for inclusive medicine over exclusive medicine

In 1940, Big Pharma only wants to sell its profitable-expensive (patented drugs) to those who could afford to pay for them directly : just as the AMA only wanted doctors to heal those who could afford to pay directly for its members profitably-expensive services.

Against this, some doctors like Henry Dawson believed that all life dined at a common table and that all life deserved a chance to live , all life deserved medical care, including penicillin.

He did not believe in dividing the world into "life worthy of wartime penicillin" and "life unworthy of wartime penicillin".

Despite Eric Lax, Howard Florey is still "Box Office Poison" to women readers

And as every book editor well knows , most readers of narrative fiction/non-fiction  are women.

But in the Lax take on the wartime penicillin saga, the hero offered up is a man who leaves his deaf middle class wife to ride around on her bike in the rain collecting urine from penicillin patients while he 'has it off' with his aristocratic mistress in the luxurious bath and bedroom suite he had at his office in (never-Blitzed) Oxford England .

And this at a time when millions of Britons in the rest of the UK were being bombed out their homes by the Blitz and (barely) living in makeshift shelters.

Charming, really charming !

Just of the sort of hero women readers want to cuddle up to - Not.