The Pope’s Algebra Lesson – Health, Politics, and Religion.

Posted on | May 12, 2025 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

Algebra came to life last week when Trump/Musk’s dismantling of our federal health services collided with the dramatic election of our first ever American Pope. As Health, Politics, and Religion collided, we saw the Transitive Property of Equality (If A=B, and B=C, then A=C) spring back to life for the first time since the early days of Algebra I.

As it applies here:

A = Health

B = Politics

C = Religion

I first argued that A = B on March 23, 2005 at the Library of Congress before leaders of the World Health Organization. Why is health political? I answered in part, “Health is a collection of resources unequally distributed in society. Health’s ‘social determinants’ such as housing, income, and employment, are critical to the accomplishment of individual, family, and community wellbeing and are themselves politically determined. Health is recognized by many throughout the world as a fundamental right, yet it is irreparably intertwined with our economic, social, and political systems. And growth in health, health care, and health systems requires political debate and political consensus.”

As for B = C, New York Times religion columnist, David French says, when it comes to Evangelical Christians, politics is their new religion. Trump won the white evangelical vote by a 65 point margin. More on that in a moment. French’s commentary was triggered by our “Entertainer-in-Chief” deciding to undercut the passing of Pope Francis and the serious process of selecting his new successor, by placing a dress-up of himself as a Gold Laden Pope on his Truth Social site.

Why did Trump lash out this way. By all accounts he was disgruntled over having to share the limelight with Pope Francis, and then his successor – the Chicago born, Villanova trained, devotee to the works of Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the former Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV.

The new Pope was a long shot. Nonetheless, the Conclave, on its fourth round of voting, chose this 69-year old product of Liberation Theology as the 267th occupant of the throne of St. Peter. This first-ever American Pope easily knocked Trump out of the news cycle – a fact neither the President nor his deeply conservative religious supporters could tolerate.

When it comes to Politics and Religion in America, Catholic numbers are problematic. Even after devastating abuse scandals left pews in most parishes empty on Sundays, roughly 1/5 to 1/4 of all U.S. adults (some 50 to 60 million) identify as Catholic. And some notable Catholic voices expect those numbers to rise significantly under this first American Pope who showed little hesitation in slapping down recent Catholic convert JD Vance 3 months ago for invading the religious doctrine air space with this direct statement: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

In Pew’s latest research, 54% of US Catholics are White, 36% Hispanic, 4% Asian, and 2% Black. More than four-in-ten are immigrants or children of immigrants. These congregants tend to be younger in a Church that had been aging fast with nearly 6 in 10 age 50 or older. Contrary to public opinion, Catholics are everywhere geographically now – 17% live in the Northeast, 21% in the Midwest, 38% in the South, and 24% in the West.

When it comes to B = C, time’s have changed, says French. In his piece last week titled “Trump Is No Longer the Most Important American.” He wrote, “I’m not Catholic. I’m an evangelical from the rural South who grew up so isolated from Catholicism that I didn’t even know any Catholics until I went to law school. But I’m deeply influenced by Catholicism, in both its ancient and its modern forms.”

French was a fan of Pope Francis, joining 3/4 of Catholics who also viewed him favorably. Before French’s well-publicized outing by his small (1/2 million) Calvinist conservative denomination, Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), French’s free-thinking riled his own congregants.He responded by turning to the enemy for guidance. “No book has influenced my approach to abortion and human life more than Pope John Paul II’s encyclical ‘Evangelium Vitae.’ It was in this study and reflection that I understood the true importance of the historical stream of Christian thought.”

Both French and the new Pope are Pro-Life, which places them at odds with most US Catholics, 59% of whom say abortion should be legal, including 42% of Republican Catholics. 61% believe Roe V. Wade should not have been overturned based on women’s bodily autonomy and access to reproductive health services.

What saves Catholics from devolving into a food fight? French says Catholicism is “an ancient faith, one that has endured through rulers and regimes far more ignorant and brutal than anything we’ve ever confronted in the United States.”

Not so his own former sect, Presbyterian Church in America, whose origin story dates to a 1973 split from a slightly larger (1.1 million) Presbyterian Church of the United States over their “theological liberalism which denied the deity of Jesus Christ and the inerrancy and authority of Scripture…and the traditional position on the role of women in church offices.”

Summing up his experience French writes, “We belong to churches that measure their existence in months or years, not centuries or millenniums. Our oldest denominations have existed for only the tiniest fraction of time compared with the Catholic Church. That lack of perspective ends up exaggerating the importance of politics. It narrows our frame of reference and elevates the temporal over the eternal.”

The table appears to have been set for an epic battle over who represents the values Americans hold most dear. The battle sees Health, Politics and Religion on collision course. The winner may be the leader who is best able to integrate A, B and C.

David French is betting on the newcomer. As he wrote last week, “In the case of Leo, the church’s witness to the world also becomes part of America’s witness to the world. Millions of Americans have been lamenting that the most prominent American in the world is a person who embodies cruelty and spite.”

I’m betting on Pope Leo XIV’s algebra skills.

The Day a Republican Senator Stood Up For Democracy and Against a Malignant Bully.

Posted on | May 6, 2025 | No Comments

Mike Magee

This past week, Trump’s posting of himself as The Pope surfaced once again David French’s classic Christmas, 2024, New York Times column titled “Why Are So Many Christians So Cruel?”

As I wrote at the time, “French and his wife and three children have experienced the cruelty first hand since he openly expressed his opposition to Donald Trump during the 2016 Presidential campaign. That resulted in threats to his entire family by white supremacists who especially targeted his adopted Ethiopian daughter.

Over the past week, American politicians of every stripe have debated what exactly was Trump’s motive in debasing the Papacy as Pope Francis was being laid to rest. Three main theories have emerged.

As a malignant narcissist, Trump could not bear the fact that Pope Francis was stealing his limelight.
Trump was appealing to conservative Christian Evangelicals who are strongly opposed to the Papacy on theological grounds.
Trump was appealing to conservative Catholics like New York Post columnist Charles Gasparino who says, “… we respect Trump more than the socialist Pope.”

Of course, there likely are elements of truth in each of these. But I prefer to fall back on my New York City high school training and believe that this is the product of a dull witted school yard bully who thought this was funny.

This is not to say he has the courage to claim ownership. (Obviously this doesn’t get posted without his approval.) No. He lies to your face, saying:

“I had nothing to do with it, Somebody made up a picture of me dressed like the pope, and they put it out on the internet. That’s not me that did it, I have no idea where it came from — maybe it was A.I. But I have no idea where it came from.”

With his blessing, the image was posted at 10:29 PM on May 02, 2025 on his Truth Social account. David French likely sees accomplices in the shadows.

As he explained in 2024, “It’s remarkable how often ambition becomes cruelty. In our self-delusion, we persuade ourselves that we’re not just right but that we’re so clearly right that opposition has to be rooted in arrogance and evil. We lash out. We seek to silence and destroy our enemies.”

He may be right. But when it comes to Trump, I recall another bully, and another heroine. On June 1, 1950, a 53-year old Republican Senator from Maine rose in the Senate floor to confront Senator Joe McCarthy. Four months earlier, in Wheeling, WV, McCarthy had unleashed a populist attack on what he claimed to be a conspiracy of “205 card-carrying communists in the State Department.”

What happened next is proudly recalled in the official historical records of the Senate as “A Declaration of Conscience.” The tale speaks directly to all those who enable Trump in the current era. It took four years (after this speech) to finally rid America of its menace. It remains to be seen who will emerge as our modern day Margaret Chase Smith, and how much time will pass before we rid ourselves of this modern day tyrant

Here is the official account of Senate Chase’s efforts that day as recorded by the U.S. Senate historians:

‘Mr. President,’ she began, ‘I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition…. The United States Senate has long enjoyed worldwide respect as the greatest deliberative body…. But recently that deliberative character has…been debased to…a forum of hate and character assassination.’ In her 15-minute address, delivered as McCarthy looked on, Smith endorsed every American’s right to criticize, to protest, and to hold unpopular beliefs. ‘Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,’ she complained. ‘It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.’ She asked her fellow Republicans not to ride to political victory on the ‘Four Horsemen of Calumny–Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.’ As she concluded, Smith introduced a statement signed by herself and six other Republican senators–her ‘Declaration of Conscience.’” . . .

“Smith’s Declaration of Conscience did not end McCarthy’s reign of power, but she was one of the first senators to take such a stand. She continued to oppose him, at great personal cost, for the next four years. Finally, in December of 1954, the Senate belatedly concurred with the ‘lady from Maine’ and censured McCarthy for conduct ‘contrary to senatorial traditions.’ McCarthy’s career was over. Margaret Chase Smith’s career was just beginning.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Catholics > Charles Gasparino > David French > evangelical christians > Margaret Chase Smith > Papacy > Pope Francis > trump

“What would FDR do if faced with Trump and Vance and Musk?”

Posted on | April 30, 2025 | Comments Off on “What would FDR do if faced with Trump and Vance and Musk?”

Mike Magee

Children of this era, decades from now, will recall a pandemic and their experiences with vaccines, in the same manner as citizens of my age recall the polio vaccine campaigns in the 1950’s.

While my generation was less informed on the science than our counterparts today, we had three advantages:

National administrative leadership of vaccines and their distribution.
A focus on mass immunization rather than preferential individualized encounters.
A unified community school-based (vs. hospital or pharmacy based) campaign, fully engaging local families and their physicians in validating the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, and immunizing the general public.

Management came in the form of Basil O’Connor, was an attorney and close friend of FDR. Their friendship predated FDR’s polio and included O’Connor serving as his legal adviser and for a brief period of time as his partner in the practice of law. He would serve loyally in that capacity for more than three decades as head of FDR’s National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP).

O’Connor did not have an NIH or CDC to direct his efforts, nor RFK Jr. to compromise his success. He took charge himself, setting up an organizational structure with reach across the country to support services and fundraising. Ultimately, 3100 chapters would be established and $233 million distributed in patient services for children with polio by 1955.

On the research side, Jonas Salk was recruited to the University of Pittsburg in 1947. In 1948, he received a grant from the NFIP to identify the various types of polio. But Salk’s goals were much more expansive. He intended to develop the first successful vaccine for the disease and devoted the next seven years to that effort.

Fully funded by the NFIP at $7,500,000, and therefore requiring no need to be distracted by fund raising, Salk initiated a trial on 15,000 children in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania in 1953. The decision to stay close to home vastly simplified the logistics and avoided extra red tape. It didn’t hurt that he also tested himself, his wife and his children or that he achieved startling results on his first try out.

Blood drawn from his subjects revealed antibody levels to polio that were 4 to 16 times the levels in non-treated children. These results were reported out in the Journal of the American Medical Association on March 25, 1953.

Following this announcement, which received worldwide attention, Salk took two additional steps that clearly demonstrated both his political and scientific prowess. First he went to Basil O’Connor at the NFIP and secured 100% funding for the largest scientific study that would ever be run in the US. In addition to securing that funding, he enlisted the vast marketing expertise and distribution system of the NFIP.

Secondly, rather than design the trials himself, at a time when scientific competitors were nipping at his heels, Salk enlisted his very popular and highly respected former mentor, Thomas Francis, to design and run the trials. Besides his scientific reputation, Francis had a distinguished record of public service having been the director of the Commission on Influenza for the Army Epidemiological Board. By 1953, he was a renowned virologist and chair of the epidemiology department at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. Once Basil O’Connor with Salk chose Dr. Francis, they carefully created a firewall between themselves and the scientific trials.

Francis was fully aware of the deficiencies in the design. Did every parent clearly read the permission material? Clearly not. Was defining the trial’s purpose “to determine the effectiveness of a vaccine in preventing paralytic poliomyelitis” understating the trial’s experimental nature? What sufficed as a “valid parental signature”? Why were the terms “permission” and “human experiment” found nowhere on the consent form?

Residual trust in FDR and his team of managers and scientists, now nearly a decade past his death from Congestive Heart Failure, created an enormous reservoir of good will. The end results were startling and have never been replicated since.

Beginning April 26, 1954, within a year’s time, 1.8 million children in 15,000 schools in 44 states were recruited for the experiment. 300,000 health professional volunteers, including my father and the majority of the physicians in the United States, participated without pay. 750,000 of the children – all 2nd graders form public and private schools – were part of a rigorous double blind study.

It was Dr. Francis who stood up on April 12, 1955 at 10:20 AM in Rackham Lecture Hall at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and declared in his characteristic direct style, “The vaccine works. It is safe, effective and potent.” The public trusted him at his word and complied with mass inoculations.

Seven decades later, with our scientific apparatus in shambles, and a vaccine denier at the helm of HHS, while measles spreads far and wide, it’s fair to ask, “What would FDR do if faced today with Trump and Vance and Musk?”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: basil o'connor > FDR > HHS > polio > RFK Jr. > Salk > Thomas Francis > vaccine

The Birth of Immunology

Posted on | April 29, 2025 | Comments Off on The Birth of Immunology

Mike Magee

The field of Immunology is little more than a half-century old and still shrouded in a remarkable degree of mystery. Even describing what we do know is a complex challenge. One way to proceed is to climb the scaffolding provided by the wide array of Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine over the last half of the 20th century.

What has been clear for centuries is that humans are vulnerable to contagious plagues and epidemics. For most of our history, these were attributed to toxic vapors or “miasmas.” The threat literally arose out of thin air it was believed. That was what Benjamin Rush thought as he and others struggled with the epic outbreak of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793.

But European medical detectives including Vienna General Hospitals head of maternity services, Ignaz Philip Semmelweis, in 1847, and John Snow in London nine years later, proved indisputably that human behavior, whether from lack of hand washing in a hospital, or accessing dirty water from a public pump, could place humans in harm’s way.

The “Germ Theory,” fleshed out by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Joseph Lister (The Famous Trio) and others made it clear the microorganisms of all shapes and sizes were the culprits, and that public health adjustments could lessen the risk, while scientific discoveries might retroactively target specific offenders.

Not surprisingly, we humans see the “battle against disease” as a complex, uphill, centuries-long engagement. It’s a bitter and highly personal battle as Mary Putnam Jacobi and Abraham Jacobi, two physicians instrumental in overcoming raw milk laden diphtheria in turn of the century New York City learned when they lost their only child, 7-year old Ernst Jacobi, to the disease.

Our modern day view of immunology builds on and incorporates centuries old learnings including acquired immunity and vaccination. Inoculation for protection from disease was aggressively promoted back in 1716, when the wife of the British Ambassador to Constantinople, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, after observing the practice among Turkish religious sects, had her only daughter, Mary Alice, innoculated against smallpox.

Later in that century, British physician Edward Jenner crossed species when he noticed that a young dairymaid, Sarah Nelms, had typical cowpoke pustules on her hands (spread from infected cow udders) but no generalized spread to her face or elsewhere. This led him to two insights: 1)The lesions were very similar to human smallpox, 2) the cowpox infection was less severe than small pox. He surmised then that exposure to mild cowpox lesions might protect those inoculated from future smallpox contagion. His ethically compromised experiment on an 8-year old son of his gardener, James Phipps, inoculating him first with cowpox, and later with smallpox, happily resulted in a mild infection and the child survived. Jenner labeled what he had created a “vaccine” after the Latin word for cow – vacca.

Immunity too has Latin roots from the word immunitas which in Roman times was offered to denote exemption from the burden of taxation to worthy citizens by their Emperor. Protection from disease is a bit more complicated than that and offers our White Blood Cells (WBCs) a starring role in “recognizing, disabling, and disposing” of the bad guys. These cells are produced in the bone marrow, then bivouacked in the thymus and spleen until called into action.

They are organized in specialized divisions. WBC macrophages are the first line of defense, literally gobbling and digesting bacteria and damaged cells through a process called “phagocytosis.” B-cells produce specific proteins called antibodies, designed to learn and remember specific invaders chemical make-up or “antigen.” They can ID offenders quickly and neutralize target bacteria, toxins, and viruses. And T-cells are specially designed to go after viruses hidden within the human cells themselves.

The first ever Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to German scientist, Emil von Behring, eleven years after he demonstrated “passive immunity.” He was able to isolate poisons or toxins derived from tetanus and diphtheria microorganisms, inject them into lab animals, and subsequently prove that the animals were now “protected” from tetanus and diphtheria infection. These antitoxins, liberally employed in New York City, where diphtheria was the major killer of infants, quickly ended that sad epidemic.

Where Jenner, and later Pasteur’s (anthrax) weak exposures prevented subsequent disease, von Behring’s antitoxin cured those already infected. More than that, it unleashed the passion and excitement of investigators (which continues to this day) to understand how the human body, and specifically its cellular and chemical apparatus, pull off this feat?

The body’s inner defense system began to reveal its mysteries in the early 1900s. Brussel scientist Jules Bordet, while studying the bacteria Anthrax, was able to not only identified protein antibodies in response to anthrax infection, but also a series of companion proteins. This cascade of proteins linked to the antibodies enhanced their bacterial killing power. In 1919 Bordet received his Nobel Prize for the discovery of a series of “complement” proteins, which when activated help antibodies “drill holes” through bacterial cell walls and destroy them.

Scientists now focused as well on the invaders themselves, termed as a group, “antigens,” and including microorganisms and other foreign bodies. How did the body know the threat and respond? Occasionally a brilliant breakthrough dreamer and the thinker would appear with a wild theory that turned out to be proven right.

That was the case with UK scientist Nils Jerne in 1955. Three decades later his theories were proven out and he received the 1984 Nobel Prize. As his award outlined, “He asserted that all kinds of antibodies already have developed during the fetus stage and that the immune system functions through selection. In 1971, he proved that lymphocytes teach themselves to recognize the body’s own substances in the thymus gland… An immunological reaction arises when an antigen disturbs the system’s equilibrium.”

By then, those Jerne’s WBCs had been termed “B lymphocytes” by an Australian scientist named Macfarlane Burnet, a 1960 Nobel laureate, who also saw antibodies already established in the fetus. Arguably, dreamers were well established at the turn of the century. For example, Robert Koch’s main assistant was Paul Ehrlich, who imagined the inner workings of the cell this way, “In his eyes, cells were surrounded by tiny spike-like molecular structures, or ‘side-chains’, as he called them, and that these were responsible for trapping nutrients and other chemicals, and for drawing them inside the cell.”

The “side chains” were in fact antibodies, large protein molecules made up of two long and two short chains. Roughly 80% of the four chains are identical in all antibodies. The remaining 20% varies, forming unique antigen bonding sites for each and every antigen. Already scientists began to wonder whether they could reconfigure these large proteins to create “monoclonal antibodies” to fight cancers like melanoma.

Imagination has occasionally carried the day. But more often direct problem solving uncovers answers. That was the case when French scientist, Jean Dausset, investigated a blood transfusion reaction in a patient who received blood type and Rh type compatible blood, a process defined by the Australian biologist Karl Landsteiner in 1930. What 1980 Nobel Laureate Dausset determined is that the incompatiblity lay not with RBCs, but with WBCs. The donor WBCs had incompatible attached antigens which were later termed human leucocyte antigens (HLAs). These are so individualized that they are often referred to as an “HLA fingerprint.”

One question always leads to another. In this case, “Why do HLAs exist?” What was eventually uncovered was that certain microorganisms (viruses) take up residence inside human cells gaining protected status. To deal with the problem, humans possess a specialized WBC – termed “T-cell.” We are familiar with them since they have been much publicized in our epic battle with the HIV virus. But for the T-cell to destroy an intracellular virus, it must “recognize and respond” to two messaging signals. First, the virus’s antigen. Second, a permissive signal that informs that the virus is housed in a host cell that deserves protection. The fingerprint HLA is that signal.

The downside of course is that the body’s own cells under certain circumstances can trigger an over reactive immune response. Most of us have experienced a bee sting or peanut allergy gone bad. This alarming cascade of symptoms called “anaphylaxis” derives from the Greek ( ana– against, philaxis-protection), and clearly involves HLAs. The same is true of auto-immune diseases which may involve genetic variants of HLAs. Finally, successful organ transplantation relies on compatibility of donor and recipient HLAs.

So to sum it all up, Immunology is a mysterious, complex, and evolving field of study. Host and predators (including everything from a microorganism invader to a roque cancer cell, to a wooden splinter left unaddressed could be fatal. But to respond the host must first identify the threat, and activate a specific and effective response, without inadvertently injuring the host itself. As our understanding has grown, harnessing the immune system to chase down metastatic cancer cells, or suppress a deadly response to a transplanted organ, or self-modify to avoid auto-immune diseases are clearly within our grasp in the not to distant future.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: anaphylaxis > antibodies > antigen > B cells > Emil von Behring > germ theory > immunization > immunology > innoculation > Jean Dausset > Jenner > Jules Bordet > Koch > Lister > macrophages > Nils Jerne > nobel Prize > Pasteur > Paul Ehrlich > T-cells > vaccine

Pope Francis, Skadden, Scalia and “Due Process.”

Posted on | April 22, 2025 | Comments Off on Pope Francis, Skadden, Scalia and “Due Process.”

Mike Magee

“If our church is not marked by caring for the poor, the oppressed, the hungry, we are guilty of heresy.”
― St. Ignatius of Loyola, Founder of the Jesuit Order

The Pope’s passing interrupted an epic battle between Trump and the rest of the civilized world over whether America remains a society “under the law.” Critical to the rule of law is the principle of “Due Process,” as described in not one, but two Amendments to our Constitution.

The Fifth Amendment states that no inhabitant shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified after the Civil War and Emancipation, uses the same eleven words, called the “Due Process Clause,” to describe a legal obligation of all states.

In arrogantly ignoring any pretense of “Due Process” last week by deporting accused (but not proven) alleged gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia to an El Salvador top security prison along with 220 others, and ignoring a court order to return the planes while still in flight, Trump basically thumbed his nose at America’s legal system. This was a bridge too far, even for some of his political supporters in Congress.

With that case still in litigation, the Administration tried to repeat the publicity stunt with another group of accused aliens this past weekend and was slapped down by the Supreme Court in an unanimous decision.

What Trump is learning the hard way is that without “Due Process” the law profession might as well hang up its shingle. Trump thought he had Chief Justice Roberts in his pocket when he purposefully allowed himself to be caught on a hot mic as he passed the Chief Justice on his way to deliver the 2025 State of the Union Address. His words for the camera, “Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget it.” were intended to signal to the world, He owes me big time, and I own him.

A common “Due Process” thread connecting these two current events (the Pope’s death and the illegal deportation of Kilmar Albrego Garcia) includes another Supreme Court Justice – Antonio Scalia. Catholic and trained by Jesuits, he shared a common lineage with Pope Francis, the first Jesuit ever to lead the Catholic Church. Other Justices also share this Jesuit educational parentage including Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch.

But Francis and Antonin have a second historical connection. Pope Francis, the day before the 2025 State of the Union address, publicly labeled the immigration policies of the incoming President and Vice President, “a disgrace.” More recently, the Vatican spoke out in opposition to last weeks El Salvador imprisonments. Part of criticism tracks back to the lack of “Due Process.”

Glaringly obvious today, this was just one arm of an aggressive Project 2025 campaign against America’s Legal Profession. By late March, multiple DC based law firms pledged allegiance to the Trump Administration to avoid being barred from entering Federal buildings to represent their clients. Some members of the targeted firms resisted. For example, Skadden associate, Rachel Cohen, resigned from her firm in protest, stating, “It does just all come around to, is this industry going to be silent when the president operates outside the balance of the law, or is it not?”

Former Skadden alumni spoke out in mass along with Rachel this week. Eighty plus former associates of the firm signed on to a letter of public protest that stated in part, “As alumni of Skadden, we write to express our profound disappointment and deep outrage regarding the firm’s recent agreement with President Donald Trump. At a time when rule of law, freedom of speech, and the adversarial system collectively face existential threat, Skadden’s agreement with President Trump emboldened him to further undermine our democracy.”

As it turns out, one current Skadden Associate’s voice, from 9 years ago when she was still a student at Harvard Law, has brought legendary conservative justice, Antonin Scalia, into the mix. Back then Lucy Dicks-Mireaux described herself as “a liberal, minority woman” who believed that “many of Justice Scalia’s opinions set equality back several decades—further back than his three decades on the Court would suggest.”

But she wrote in the May 4, 2016 issue of the “Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review,” that she had a partial change of heart “when I read Justice Scalia’s dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (and found) that I agree with him.”

As Dicks-Mireaux went on to explain at the time: “In Hamdi, the U.S. military detained Hamdi, a U.S. citizen, in the United States as an ‘enemy combatant‘ without a trial. The military believed Hamdi to be working with the Taliban, but did not bring a criminal suit against him. Hamdi’s father filed a writ of habeas corpus, a petition asking Hamdi to be delivered to the court or released absent a trial. The majority opinion curtailed Hamdi’s due process right by allowing him to be detained with a meager showing by the government of evidence that they had a reason to hold Hamdi. The tribunal before which Hamdi would be afforded a chance to rebut these allegations would not be a court of law, but a neutral decision maker. Hearsay evidence would be allowed. Hamdi would be presumed guilty until proven innocent.”

In a prescient remark that followed, we see how relevant her analysis a decade ago is to the current battle to return Kilmar Albrego Garcia. She states, “I was very disturbed by the extent to which the Court would curtail an essential constitutional right—due process—in the face of vague national security concerns.”

To her surprise, so was Justice Scalia. As she explained, “The voice of reason came from an unexpected source: Justice Scalia. Arguing that the government could not hold citizens unless the government prosecuted them, Justice Scalia would have granted habeas corpus (fundamental protection against unlawful detention). Justice Scalia would have required that the government either promptly bring charges against Hamdi in a court of law, or Congress would have to suspend habeas corpus. I could not believe that Justice Scalia was advocating for the little guy, but here he was, in black and white, writing that Hamdi deserved better than what the court had offered. Hamdi deserved better because the law required it.”

Attorney Dicks-Mireaux joined Skadden after graduating from Harvard Law School in 2018. She is an Associate in their Litigation Department, and in 2023, she received “High Honors” by the DC Courts for her “Pro Bono” work. Will her skills be put to Trump’s use in the future?

As many top lawyers in the United States, and religious leaders within the Catholic Church and beyond well understand, human rights are not only God-given, but also intended to be vigorously defended under the “Due Process Claus” of our Constitution. If we fail in this regard, we can hardly claim to be just citizens of these United States. As St. Ignatius Loyola said, and his disciple Pope Francis embodied to the very end, “If our church is not marked by caring for the poor, the oppressed, the hungry, we are guilty of heresy.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: 14th amendment > 5th amendment > Catholic Church > due process claus > hamdi v. rumsfeld > Lucy Dicks-Mireaux > Pope Francis > skadden > trump > Vance

The Birth of The Germ Theory

Posted on | April 21, 2025 | Comments Off on The Birth of The Germ Theory

Mike Magee

When Yellow Fever broke out shortly after the arrival of a trading ship from Saint-Dominque in Philadelphia among colonists with no immunity in 1793, the main response was panic, fear, and mass evacuation from the city. Five thousand citizens, roughly 10% of the population, including Alexander Hamilton and his wife, fled. Experts were at a loss to explain the cause, and were even more confused how to treat the disease.

Benjamin Rush was the primary leader of Medicine in the young nation where physicians were scarce and nearly all relied on Europe for their advanced education. In confronting the epidemic, Rush believed the problem involved a disturbance of the four humors – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. His solution was the rather liberal and barbaric use of cathartics and blood letting. For the most severe cases, Rush warehoused dying victims in the first “fever hospital” in the new nation.

But a century later, as historian Frank Snowden wrote, “Humoralism was in retreat as doctors absorbed ideas about the circulatory and nervous systems, and as the chemical revolution and the periodic table undermined Aristotelian notions of the four elements composing the cosmos…More change occurred in the decades since the French Revolution than in all the centuries between the birth of Socrates and the seizure of the Bastille combined.”

During the 20th century, but especially in the second half of the 1800’s, scientific progress was self-propagating. Much of the credit for this enlightened progress goes to the rapid evolution of “the germ theory.” No single genius was responsible. Rather, knowledge built step wise and involved a collective (if not fully cooperative) effort by multiple scientists.

One of the early insights was that late stage disease in morbid hospitalized patients literally “on their last leg” was the tail end of a process. French physiologist, Claude Bernard in his “An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine,” made the point that the challenge was to uncover the “beginnings” of these “final stages.” Rather than observe dying bedridden patients, he promoted “experimentalism medicine” in outside laboratories. In doing so, Bernard was likely not fully aware that he was tipping the national scale of medical discovery toward Germany where scientific and research laboratories enjoyed popular support.

It’s important to note that leaders at the time were not intellectual elites, but rather more often skilled artisans of the natural world. A prime example was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek who opened his first store as a cloth merchant at the age of 22 in 1654. Prior to this, he had served as an apprentice to a lens grinder and metalworker. It was in pursuit of a better view of the threads of cloth he was purchasing and selling that he devised one of the first single lens microscopes which had a magnification of 275X.

His curiosity spilled over to the natural world as well. And so it was that he noted in a liquid specimen single cell organisms he labeled “animalcules” in a poorly received communication to the Royal Society of London at the age of 44 in 1676. After a year of hedging, the Royal Society finally acknowledged such creatures existed.

But another seventy years would pass before a connection was made between microscopic “animalcules” and disease. The insight came thanks to the dogged experimentation of an Hungarian gynecologist who put 2 and 2 together in 1847. Maternal mortality from “puerperal fever” was commonplace at Vienna General Hospital at the time. But Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, the physician director of the service, noticed that mortality rates between his two service – one run by physicians and the other midwives – was strikingly different. (20% vs. 2%). Delivery practices were roughly the same. But one difference stuck out. The physicians also were in charge of mandatory autopsies, and often shuttled between the delivery suite and morgue without a change in clothing or any cleansing whatsoever. Also one of Semmelweis’s trainees who cut himself during an autopsy also died of an identical disease. So he decided to require that members of both team would wash their hands in a chlorine solution before entering the maternity area. Mortality rapidly dropped to 1.3%.

Others were making the connection as well. For example, few stories are as well known as the case of John Snow, the London public health pioneer, who in 1854, traced the death of 500 victims during a cholera epidemic to a contaminated Broad Street water pump. Removing the pump handle was curative. As important as the investigative findings were his publication the following year titled “On The Mode of Communication of Cholera” because scientific progress relies heavily on transfer of knowledge and sequential collaboration. That same year, an Italian physician, Fillippo Pacini, first visualized the organism. But 3 more decades would pass before the German physician, Robert Koch, would isolate the bacterium in pure culture.

Koch was one of “The Famous Trio,” credited by historian Frank Snowden with creating “a wholesale revolution in medical philosophy.” In addition to Koch, these included French scientist Louis Pasteur and Scottish surgeon, Joseph Lister.

I. Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was a French chemist (not a biologist or physician) who famously stated that “Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.” In the 1850s, while investigating spoilage of wine and milk, he developed the theory that putrefaction and fermentation were not “spontaneous”, but the result of bacterial processes, and that these degrading actions could be altered by heat. Heat destroyed the bacteria, and prevented spoilage (ie. pasteurization). This insight launched the field of “microbiology”.

Pasteur also helped define the principles of “nonrecurrence” (later called “acquired immunity”), and “attenuation”, a technique to render microbe causing disease specimens harmless when introduced as vaccines.

II. Robert Koch (1843-1910) was a German physician 20 years younger than Pasteur. He investigated Anthrax in the mid-1870’s at the University of Gottingen. Luckily the bacterium was very large and visible with the microscopes of the day. He was able to reproduce the disease in virgin animals by injecting blood from infected sheep. But, in addition, he detected and described spores formed by the bacterium, which were left in fields where infected animals grazed. The spores, he declared were why virgin animals grazing in these fields, became infected.

Teaming up with the Carl Zeiss optical company, Koch focused on technology, improving magnification lens, developing specialized specimen stains, and developing fixed culture media to grow microbes outside of animals. Armed with new tools and stains, he discovered the Mycobacteria tuberculosis and proved its presence in infected tissues, and described his findings in “The Etiology of Tuberculosis” in 1882.

“Koch’s Postulates” became the 4 accepted steps constituting scientific proof of a theory.

1) The microorganism must be found in infected tissue.

2) The organism must be grown in fixed culture.

3) The grown organism must instigate infection in a healthy laboratory animal.

4) The infective organism must be re-isolated from the lab animal, and proven identical to the original microbes.

III. Joseph Lister (1827-1912), the third of our trio, was a professor of surgery at Edinburgh. At the time, major complications of surgery were pain, blood loss and deadly post-operative infections. In the 1840s, ether and nitrous oxide were introduced, controlling intra-operative pain. As for infection, Lister suggested scrubbing hands before surgery, sterilizing tools, and spraying carbolic acid into the air and on the patient’s wound. Koch took an alternate approach, advocating sterile operating theories and surgeons in gowns, gloves, and masks. The opposing techniques merged and became common surgical practice in the 1890s.

For New York City, Chadwick’s sanitary movement and the “famous trio’s” germ theory couldn’t arrive soon enough. The Civil War had been a wake-up call. Of the 620,000 military deaths, 2/3 were from disease. At the top of the list was dysentery and diarrheal disease, followed by malaria, cholera, typhus, smallpox, typhoid and others. Filth, disease, and disorder ruled the day. But opportunity lay in the wings. As historians described the challenge of those days: “New York City experienced a pivotal moment in its development following the historic 1898 consolidation, which united Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island into one comprehensive entity. By the year 1900, the city’s population had surged to 3,437,202 according to the U.S. Census.” Keeping those millions healthy would be a public health challenge of the first order.

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The Birth of The Sanitation Movement from “Dirty Old London” to NYC.

Posted on | April 10, 2025 | Comments Off on The Birth of The Sanitation Movement from “Dirty Old London” to NYC.

Mike Magee

I. Florence Nightengale and Sidney Herbert

Order had always been part of Florence Nightingale’s life. Her father was William Edward Shore, a Country Squire, who at age 21 inherited his rich uncle’s huge fortune as well as his name. On his death, the younger (now) Nightingale, seamlessly managed the profits of the family’s lead smelting business, as well as, not one, but two named estates – the 1300 acre Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, and the equally impressive Embry Park in Hampshire.

He and his wife had two daughters, each named after the Italian cities where they were born while vacationing. Parthenope carried the Greek name for Naples, and Florence arrived on May 12, 1820, one year later 300 miles north in the “Birthplace of the Renaissance.” The family was well connected with members of Parliament, none closer than Baron Sidney Herbert. It was he who the family turned to for reassurance and guidance when Florence declared at age 16 that her life’s work would be nursing the sick and ill in the service of the Lord.

This was quite a surprise to her father who had taken special care to see that she was classically trained in Greek, Latin, French, German, Philosophy and Religion. But in Florence’s words, she “craved for some regular occupation, for something worth doing instead of frittering away time on useless trifles.” To do so, she was willing to decline suitors and her mother and older sister’s life of comfort and philanthropy.

Sidney Herbert was willing to support the strong willed woman, 10 years his younger, carrying her along on fact-finding trips to Egypt and beyond. None of it shook her commitment. Her intent was clear when she noted in her diary, “On February 7, 1837, God spoke to me and called me to his service.” The calling was specific – nursing the ill in institutional settings. As luck would have it, her goal aligned well with the voluntary efforts of Sidney’s wife, the Lady Elizabeth Mary Herbert, a prodigious fund raiser.

Queen Victoria assumed the throne of England following her Uncle’s death just 4 months after Florence’s religious awakening. The two were born exactly 1 year and 12 days apart. Both the young Queen and her husband, Albert, were military enthusiasts, and saw themselves as active participants in the nation’s armed conflicts. In September, 1854, they had a front row seat in a simmering conflict between the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Britain and France had thought they had brokered a deal between the two primary combatants when the truce fell apart.

Russian Emperor, Nicholas I, then ordered the invasion of what is now current day Romania in July of 1853. By January, 1854, the British and French fleets had entered the Black Sea, and the war was on. Britain’s Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, suggested the effort was preventive. As he said in words that ring true today, “The main and real object of the war is to curb the aggressive ambition of Russia.”

Military historians would later document: “The Crimean War is largely forgotten now, but its impact was momentous. It killed 900,000 combatants; introduced artillery and modern war correspondents to conflict zones; strengthened the British Empire; weakened Russia; and cast Crimea as a pawn among the great powers.”

At the time, Queen Victoria leaned heavily on her new Secretary of War, Sidney Herbert, and Florence Nightingale saw a once in a lifetime opportunity for clinical experience and seized it. With Herbert’s endorsement, she and the 38 nurses in her charge arrived at Barrack Hospital at Scutari, outside modern day Istanbul, ill prepared for the disaster that awaited them. Cholera, dysentery and frostbite – rather than battle wounds – were rampant in the cold, damp, and filthy halls.

During that first winter, 42% of her patients perished, leaving over 4000 dead, the vast majority absent any battle wounds. Florence later described her work setting as “slaughter houses.” Their enemy wasn’t bullets or bayonets, but disease -typhus, cholera and typhoid fever. Over 16,000 British soldiers died, 13,000 from disease.

Nightingale’s initial assessment was that warmer clothing and food would stem the tide. Going over the heads of medical leadership, she did what she could, and leaked details of what she was observing to Herbert and journalists who, for the first time, were stationed within the war zone. In the process, she became a celebrity in her own right, and as Spring of 1855 approached, a first ever Sanitary Commission was sent to the war zone and Victoria and Albert themselves, with two of their children, visited the area.

Famed artist Jerry Barrett made hasty sketches of what would become The Mission of Mercy: Florence Nightingale, which hangs to this day in the National Gallery in London. During this same period, the first lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, Santa Filomena, would take shape, including “Lo! In that house of misery, A lady with a lamp I see, Pass through the glimmering of gloom, And flit from room to room.” And the legend of Nightingale, the actual “Lady of the Lamp”, appeared on the front page of the Illustrated London News complete with etched images.

It read: “She is a ministering angel without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides gently along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her.”

What became clear to Florence and others was that infection and lack of sanitation were the culprits, and corrective actions on the facilities themselves, along with sanitary practices that Nightingale led, caused the subsequent mortality rates to drop to 2%. By the time the war drew to a halt in February, 1856, 900,000 men had died. Florence Nightingale remained for four more months, arriving home without fanfare on July 15, 1856. Thanks to the first ever war correspondents, she was now the 2^nd most famous woman in Britain, after Queen Victoria.

While she was away, the Herberts raised money from rich friends. The Nightingale Fund now had 44,000 pounds in reserve. These would help fund a hospital training school and her famous book, “Notes on Nursing” in future years. Though her re-entry was quiet and reserved, she had plenty to say, and committed most of it to writing. While in Crimea, she had written to Britains top statistician, Dr. William Farr. He had replied, “Dear Miss Nightingale. I have read with much profit your admirable observations. It is like light shining in a dark place. You must when you have completed your task – give some preliminary explanation – for the sake of the ignorant reader.” Shortly after her return, they met. Working closely with William Farr, she documented in dramatic form, the deadly toll in Crimea and tied it to disease and lack of sanitation in “Notes Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army”, which she self-published and aggressively distributed.

Illustrated with spin wheel designs divided into 12 sectors, each one representing a month, she graphically tied improved sanitation to plummeting death rates. Understanding their long-term value, she carefully approved the paper, ink, and process that have allowed these images to remain vibrant a century and a half later. As she said later with some cynicism, they were “designed ‘to affect thro’ the Eyes what we may fail to convey to the brains of the public through their word-proof ears.” In 1858, she became the first woman to be made a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.

In that first year of her return, she was described as “a one woman pressure group and think tank…using statistics to understand how the world worked was to understand the mind of God.”In 1860, she published her “Notes for Nursing,” selling 15,000 copies in first two months. It purposefully championed sanitation (“the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet”) and promoted cleanliness as a path to godliness. It targeted “everywoman” while launching professional nursing.

II. Edwin Chadwick

Florence Nightengale was not the originator of the Sanitary Movement in “Dirty Old London.” That honor goes to one Edwin Chadwick, a barrister who, in 1848, published his “Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of Great Britain.” As historians and commentators have noted, there was a good case to be made for cleanliness. Here are a few of those remarks:

“The social conditions that Chadwick laid bare mapped perfectly onto the geography of epidemic disease…filth caused poverty, and not the reverse.”

“Filthy living conditions and ill health demoralized workers, leading them to seek solace and escape at the alehouse. There they spent their wages, neglected their families, abandoned church, and descended into lives of recklessness, improvidence, and vice.”

“The results were poverty and social tensions…Cleanliness, therefore, exercised a civilizing, even Christianizing, function.”

Chadwick was born on January 24, 1800. His mother died when he was an infant, and his father was a liberal politician and educator. His grandfather was a close confidant of Methodist theologian, John Wesley. Early in his life, young Chadwick pursued a career of his own in law and social reform. A skilled writer, one of his early essays that appeared in the Westminister Review was titled “Applied Science and its place in Democracy.” By the time he was 32, he focused all of expertise on social engineering – especially public health with an emphasis on sanitation

But the Sanitary Movement required population-wide participation, structural change, new technology, and effective story telling. By then, Sir William Harvey’s description of the human circulatory system in 1628, complete with pump, outlet channels, and return venous channels, was well understood by most. Seizing on the analogy, Chadwick, along with city engineers of the day, imagined an underground highway of pipes, to and from every building and home, whose branches, connected to new sanitary devices.

One of those engineers was George Jennings, the owner of South Western Pottery in Dorset, the maker of water closets and sanitary pipes. He was something of a legend in his own time, and recipient of the 1947 Medal of the Society of Arts presented by none other than Prince Albert himself.

When Jennings patented the first toilet, as a replacement for soil pots, hand transported each mornings and emptied in an outhouse if you were lucky, or in the streets if not, its’ future was anything but assured. But, by good luck, the Great Exhibition (the premier display of futuristic visionaries) was scheduled for London in 1851. The Crystal Palace exhibition was the show stopper, attracting a wide range of imagineers. Jennings “Monkey Closet” was the hit of the show. His patent application followed the next year and read: “Patent dated 23 August 1852. JOSIAH GEORGE JENNINGS, of Great Charlotte – street, Blackfriars-road, brass founder. For improvements in water-closets, in traps and valves, and in pumps.”

Modernity had arrived. And none was more enthusiastic than Thomas Crapper, a then 15-year old dreamer. Within three decades he had nine toilet patents, including one for the U-bend, an improvement on the S-bend, and an 1880 Royal commission granted to Thomas Crapper & Co. to install thirty toilets(enclosed and outfitted with cedar wood seats in the newly purchased Norfolk county seat’s Sandringham House. His reputation lives on thanks to this diminutive term, used with the greatest guttural emphasis by the Scots – CRAP. The company is also still in existence, now selling luxury models of the original design.

Sanitary engineering combined with Nightingale’s emphasis on fastidious housekeeping, and cleanliness in hospitals, enforced by nurses with religious zeal, would change the world. And they did. But those same changes would take decades to reach crowded immigrant entry points in locations like New York City.

III. The Horse and Swill Milk

One historian described it this way, “As New York City ascended from a small seaport to an international city in the 1899’s, it underwent severe growing pains. Filth, disease, and disorder ravaged the city to a degree that would horrify even the most jaded modern urban developer.”

One of the prime offenders was the noble work horse. By 1900, on the eve of wholesale arrival of motor cars, there were roughly 200,000 horses in New York City, carrying and transporting humans, and products of every size and shape, day and night along the warn down cobble stone narrow roads and alley ways.

It was a hard life for the horse, who’s lifespan on average was only 2 1/2 years. They were literally “worked to death.” In the 1800’s, 15,000 dead horses were carted away in a single year. Often, they were left to rot in the street because they were too heavy to transport. If they weren’t dying, the horses were producing manure – a startling 5 million pounds dumped on city streets each day.

As for human waste, sewer construction didn’t begin in New York until 1849, this in response to a major cholera outbreak. Clean water had arrived seven years earlier with the arrival Croton Aqueduct carrying water south from Westchester County. This was augmented with rooftop water tanks beginning in 1880. By 1902, most of the city had sewage service including the majority of the tenement houses. The Tenement Act of 1901 had required that each unit have at least one “water closet.”

As for the horses, the arrival of automobiles almost eliminated the “horse problem” overnight. Not so for cows, or more specifically the disease laden “swill milk” cows. Suppliers north of the city struggled to keep up with demand in the late 1800’s. To lower production costs, they fed their cows the cast off “swill” of local alcohol distilleries. This led to infections and a range of diseases in the bargain basement beverage sold primarily to at-risk parents and consumed by children.

Swill milk was the chief culprit in soaring infant mortality in New York City between 1880 and 2000. Annually there were some 150,000 cases of diphtheria, resulting in 15,000 deaths a year. A Swiss scientist, Edwin Klebs, identified the causative bacteria, Corynebacterium diphtheriae, in 1883. A decade later, a German scientist, Emil von Behring, dubbed the “Saviour of Children” developed an anti-toxin to diphtheria and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1901for the achievement.

The casualties were primarily infants whose mortality rate in NYC at the time was 240 deaths per 1000 live births. Many of these would be traced back to milk infected with TB, typhoid, Strep induced Scarlet Fever and Diphtheria. The casualties were primarily infants whose mortality rate in NYC at the time was 240 deaths per 1000 live births.

The process of heating liquid to purify it, or pasteurization, was discovered by Louis Pasteur in 1856, not with milk but with wine. Its’ use on a broad scale to purify milk first gained serious traction in 1878 after Harper’s Weekly published an expose’ on “Swill Milk.” But major producers and distributors resisted regulation until 1913 when a massive typhoid epidemic from infected milk killed thousands of New York infants. But diphtheria remained the most feared killer of infants.

As Paul DeKruif wrote in his 1926 book, The Microbe Hunters, “The wards of the hospitals for sick children were melancholy with a forlorn wailing; there were gurgling coughs foretelling suffocation; on the sad rows of narrow beds were white pillows framing small faces blue with the strangling grip of an unknown hand.”

One such victim was the only child of two physicians, Abraham and Mary Putnam Jacobi whose 7-year old son, Ernst, was claimed by the disease in 1883. Working with philathroper, Nathan Straus, the Jacobi’s established pasteurized milk stations in the city which coincided with a 70% decline in infant mortality from diphtheria, tuberculosis and a range of other infectious diseases.

By 1902, the horses hero status was reclaimed as it became the source of diphtheria and tetanus anti-toxins. The bacteria were injected into the horses, and after a number of passes, serum collected from the horse was laden with protective anti-toxins, relatively safe for human use. In 1901 alone, New York City purchased and delivered 25,000 does of ant-toxin funded by the Red Cross and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.