August 3rd, 2022

First week in August

I do not know what is happening in towns, countries, galaxies I do not know, but seems to me a major change occurs the first week of August, as if a change of shift happens when no-one is in charge.

The first week of August has been momentous to my small and larger family, as well as the world. The 1914-1918 global war that made sure I have few first, second, and third cousins started on July 28^th and the first week of August was taken with ultimatums and, finally, Britain's declaration of war on Germany.

From The Times, August 5^th , 1914:
The following statement was issued from the Foreign Office at 12.15 this morning:-
Owing to the summary rejection by the German Government of the request made by his Majesty's Government for assurances that the neutrality of Belgium will be respected, his Majesty's Ambassador at Berlin has received his passports and his Majesty's Government have declared to the German Government that a state of war exists between Great Britain and Germany as from 11 p.m. on August 4.
Yesterday morning the British Government dispatched an Ultimatum to Germany. It required that Germany should give an unequivocal assurance that she would respect the neutral territory of 1elgimn, guaranteed by her under the Treaty of l839 - a guarantee endorsed in writing in 1870. It also intimated that, failing this assurance, Great Britain would declare war on Germany at midnight. The steps by which the Prime Minister and the Government of Great Britain approached the moment of decision were as dignified as they were inexorable. Following upon Sir Edward Grey's statement in the House of Commons on Monday, the Government on Tuesday morning telegraphed to the British Ambassador at Berlin, protesting against the violation of Belgian neutrality by Germany and asking for an immediate reply.
The reply came quickly. On the same morning the German Government telegraphed to the German Ambassador in London, instructing him to repeat most positively " the formal assurance that, even in the case of an armed conflict with Belgium, Germany will not under any pretence whatever annex Belgian territory."
The German Ambassador was also instructed to inform Sir Edward Grey that Germany had disregarded Belgian neutrality in order to " prevent what means to her a question' of life and death, the French advance through Belgium."
Thereupon followed the British ultimatum. In the House of Commons yesterday the Prime Minister, with admirable dignity and conciseness, set before the nation the action which the Government had thus found it necessary to take in vindication of British honour. Then, proceeding to the Bar of the House, he handed to the Speaker a Proclamation by the King, providing for complete mobilization of the Army. Vice-Admiral Sir John Jellicoe has assumed command of the Home Fleets, with the acting rank of Admiral. Two British Minister, Lord Morley and Mr. John Bums, finding themselves unable to approve of the action taken by the Government, have resigned from the Cabinet.
Admiral Mahan, the American naval expert, in an interview published in New York on Monday. expressed the opinion that " Great Britain must at once throw her preponderating Fleet against Germany, for one chief purpose -that of maintaining her own position as a world Power." German troops have entered Belgian territory. On the German frontier more minor incidents between French and German troops have taken place. Near Belfort German detachments are making requisition upon the inhabitants of French territory.
The Turkish Government is reported to be mobilizing its forces. The King has issued a Proclamation to the Dominions, thanking them for their loyalty and their proffered help, and expressing his "confident belief that in this time of trial my Empire will stand united, calm, resolute, trusting in God.”

The above is horrific, but not to a crowd gathered outside the British Foreign Office in London. According to The Times on August 5^th, 1914:

As the news of the declaration of war reached the street, the crowd expressed its feelings with loud cheering. It left the precincts of Downing-street and gathered in front of the War Office, where patriotic demonstrations continued until an early hour this morning.

A young Welsh teacher named Meredith was taken prisoner by Germany in 1918, and released in December, a month after the Armistice. Not long afterwards Meredith married Rachel, and in June 1922, a baby who was known as Bob. In 1939 Bob was still a student at the Sherborne School, where Meredith taught until he retired (his students included John Le Carre, Alan Turing, and my father), but as the war dragged on, Bob finished school, and spent a year as an Oxford University undergraduate, which he left for officer training in the British Army.

In 1944, on the night between August 2^nd and August 3^rd, Lieutenant Robert Dalzell Dillon Thomas was shot dead by a sniper in Italy, near Florence. That was the end of the future hoped for by Rachel and Meredith. By 1980 his disabled brother, father and mother were gone, and all that was left of Bob was a small book his mother had published in 1945, “The Note-book of a lieutenant in the Italian Campaign.”

I bought a copy of the book from second-hand book stores, I guess it was meaningless to inheritors of estates but seemed important enough to sell. I am grateful for that, and especially for the letters from Rachel to another mother whose son had been killed. I can feel grief dripping from the letters, even after 78 years. Does grief continue long after the lives of the grieving have ended? I believe it does.

I never remember seeing a copy of Bob’s book in my parents’ book collections, where did it go? Bob’s mother and my father’s mother were sisters. And I was told that my eldest brother was named after him. My father certainly knew about the book; Rachel wrote to him about it as she was compiling Bob’s letters and writings.

Rachel’s strengths did not lie in editing or public relations. I wish she had included more letters, more of Bob’s writings. I want to know how Bob was thinking, what he was doing in his year at Oxford before the weight of misery of others serving in the military affected him, and he turned himself into a British Army officer. Bob landed in Naples exactly when Mt Vesuvius was erupting, and caused a lot of damage, and continued the march up north while Americans were liberating Rome. Nothing about that in the book. I wrote about the book, published extracts, and pictures: http://emeraldpademelonpress.com/runrabbitrun.html

The same week Bob was killed in action, Anthony Dalzell Dodgson, aka my Uncle Tony, caught two bullets after landing in Normandy. Story about my Uncle Tony, and if you scroll down, a picture of my English grandfather in uniform, a story about Dr Althea Hankins and her museum dedicated to veterans, and links to Biafran stories, http://www.drsusanna.org/20120528memorialday.html

In the same week that devastated the sons of two of the six daughters of Miss Agnes Mary Doherty, on August 4^th, 1944 a distant cousin of Lothar’s (they shared ancestors in Zacharias Frank and his wife) was seized by Nazi terrorists and taken to a concentration camp to die of illness after mistreatment and starvation. Her work was carefully, lovingly recovered. Which is why we know more about a teenager who grew up under Nazi occupation than a poet who loved music and art. http://drsusanna.org/mjotatalkshumanrights/holocaustremembered.html

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Starting a medical school

I knew a man who starts medical schools. At least one, but possibly three. He lived in my house from July 1993 until March 1994, while I was in Germany with my three sons, and when I was in Sweden working in a lab on cow livers.

I returned in March 1994 by myself because I was pregnant with my daughter and my sons were all settled in schools in the Black Forest. OLP left a beautiful bunch of a dozen red roses on my kitchen table to welcome me home on that snowy day.

In 1993 I was deep in Hail Mary pass territory. The five-year laboratory funding for the grant proposal I wrote in 1986 was gone, and I discovered I could continue at the University of Pennsylvania from July 1993 for a year because I had been there so long they paid me sabbatical funding, and because I was still be paid occasional grants from Johnson & Johnson to figure out the connection between topiramate being both an anti-epileptic drug and a carbonic anhydrase inhibitor.

Meanwhile life was whizzing by. I took my three sons to Germany for Christmas, to the house Lothar had just bought in the High Black Forest. The older boys expected to ski, but the weather had not cooperated, for the first time Lothar could remember, and this has not happened since, Hinterzarten and Breitnau had not a snowflake on the ground.

On our return to Frankfurt Airport we stayed a night in Floersheim in Main with Lothar’s mother and her German shepherd. She was clearly ill, she told us she kept falling and did not feel well. After dropping us off at the airport Lothar drove his mother to hospital, where she was diagnosed with cancer in the brain. The lung cancer that had been diagnosed, and treated, two years earlier had spread, and Ruth was dying. Lothar moved his mother to a hospital in the Black Forest so he could visit her daily; I went back to Germany with my youngest son to provide some measure of support to them both. Ruth died in March 1993, and that was the end of the ties to Floersheim am Main of the Noerdlinger and Blossfeld families.

Descendants of the Busch family remain in Hesse, a lot of them, one or two of them migrated to the United States in the 1800s and started Anheuser-Busch; Ruth told me the American Busch family was very good at sending food parcels to Germany when Germans were starving. Another child of Floersheim moved to the US and started a luxury shoe brand; were they related to the Busch family? Possibly. There are, and were, a lot, a lot of Busches in Hesse.

I was introduced to OLP because he was on the faculty at Drexel University and had a whole lot of well-kept rats who developed type 1 diabetes, which was then known as juvenile diabetes, the type that occurs when a pancreas stops making insulin, and someone had a theory that his rats could be part of a grant proposal on diabetes and carbon dioxide. I was trying, once again, to write a grant proposal that could be funded. That never happened, but I kept trying, but I did not have enough hours in the day.

In the 7 years since 1986 I had divorced, married a German physicist I met in a pub near the River Dreisam in Freiburg im Breisgau, produced a third son while caring for my two older sons, and was being taken to court every six months by the father of my older sons and being contacted daily by the school principal. Finally the principal gave my middle son his own teacher, and then sent him to a juvenile delinquent school, where he did not belong. My son was, and is, the smartest person I have ever met. Genius can be a huge handicap. In 1993 I needed to get my son into a school where he would be not treated as a freak, an aberration. My gorgeous sapphire-eyed son.

Everything came together fast. OLP wrote a part of the grant proposal, showing he had no idea how NIH grant proposals worked, and not surprisingly, it was not funded. He was unsettled, and agreed to stay in my house for a year while I took my children to Germany, and worked in labs in Sweden and Finland. Before I left New Jersey with my children, the father of the two older dropped them off at my house, and talked to OLP and me. He told me he was happy with them being in a German school for the year. Six months later, after I had sent them back for Christmas, their father told the court that I had kidnapped them, and they needed to stay in New Jersey. OLP wrote a letter to the judge, saying he had heard their father say that keeping them in Germany was fine. OLP was a colonel in the US Reserve Army. They tell the truth. The boys flew back to Germany to finish the school year.

Time moved on, I left the University pf Pennsylvania and reinvented myself as a medical writer; OLP retired from Drexel. Married, produced two babies to replace two that had been taken from his daughter when she was having trouble, and acquired a medical degree from the University of St Petersburg. Why not? And started medical schools. The most successful was in a British crown colony that had lost half its land mass after a volcanic eruption in the 1990s.

He really tried. OLP came from a family of hard workers, and worked hard himself, and created a wonderful settled life for his new family, and for his daughter who became untroubled.

OLP wanted others who came from disadvantaged families to be able to access education: following is a lovely letter he wrote. Before too long the wolves came after him, and his medical school was shut down. But he tried, he really did try, and several professionals are graduated working physicians who went on to complete residencies, and have careers that would have been impossible. I am forever thankful for his taking care of my house while I was away, and writing a beautiful letter to the Family Court Judge.

Dear Students,

Thank you for your interest in the University of Science, Arts and Technology (USAT), and the programs we offer.

We recognize that professionals, like yourself, are interested in pursuing a medical career while still working a traditional schedule.  In addition to the live lectures at the Montserrat campus, we try to accommodate our students by offering our live lectures via webinar.  This allows students to participate in interactive basic science class sessions, and then complete the clinical portion of the MD training in hospitals and clinics near their homes.  This is a ladder type, blended program (combines progressive distance education along with scheduled core lectures on island) that builds on your current level of medical education, rather than duplicating it as many other MD programs do.  Moreover, there are no age restrictions on enrollment or matriculation.

This is a two-phase program, Phase I is 12 to 15 months of focused lectures and examinations in a seminar, clinic, or hospital setting, and represents the basic medical sciences component of the program.  The curriculum is based on an integrative systems model, and the lectures are supplemented by slide sets which are provided to matriculated students.  Most lectures for this program are USA MD-PhD Credentialed.

The second [Clinical] Phase consists of 80 weeks of clinical training preferably close to your home, so as to enable you to continue essentially full time employment while studying.  Clinical training may be completed in most states and in some foreign countries.  The Clinical training phase includes 50 weeks of core specialities and 30 weeks of elective specialities.  All clinical training must be completed in an accredited institution or clinic authorized by the University.  Each student must attend a minimum of 15 hours of training with a clinical mentor in any given week in order for the credit hours to count as a satisfactory week.

USAT normally awards one of two medical degrees to its graduates:  the MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) or the MD upon completion of all didactic and clinical requirements.  USAT is licensed to award the MBBS, MD and DO degrees.  Currently, we are able to give successful graduates opportunities to prepare and asit for the medical board exams for all of the CARICOM nations.

The CARICOM member states include Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Belize, Dominica, Haiti, Jamaica, Grenada, Guyana, Montserrat, St. Lucia, Suriname, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago and the Cayman Islands.  You may verify the status of USAT on the World Directory of Medical Schools website (WDOMS).  USAT graduates qualify for post graduate training outside the US and Canada.  USAT is licensed by the Government of Montserrat.

Our tuition is modest, currently at $5,490.00 per semester base tuition plus one-time fees for this program.

Thank you again for your interest.

OLP, PhD, MD, FACN, CNS
Professor of Pharmacology and Nutritional Sciences
President, University of Science, Arts and Technology

Wednesday Meeting for Worship

All are welcome to join us after 5:30pm for a check in, chat, tell each other concerns, and are welcomed to a safe Quaker space. We are quiet from 6 to 6:30 when you worship in your own way that you have to connect with the Light; at 6:30 we come out of our worship space and greet one another.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81331805733?pwd=SnF1WE5waUZ3ZDdleEw1SVR4Wjdsdz09 
Meeting ID: 813 3180 5733 Passcode: 190526

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May you continue your good work cheerfully and in peace,

Susanna J Dodgson

http://peacescientists.org
YouTube: Dr SJ Dodgson
Twitter: DrSJDodgson@SusannaDodgson
609-792-1571 (text first, email is usually faster)