Frankie - How One Woman Prevented a Pharmaceutical Disaster

When we say someone looks like a poet, we don’t mean they look like Shakespeare, nor like the Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot, who spent many years of his career working in the city of London as a banker and was often photographed wearing a suit. Still less do we mean that they resemble Philip Larkin, the illustrious twentieth-century British poet, who as an adult was tall, skinny, balding, and bespectacled.

No, when we say someone looks like a poet, we mean they remind us of Lord Byron or Percy Shelley. It’s not clear why this cultural notion of the typical appearance of a poet has persisted from the Romantic Age of poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but it has.

We also tend, more generally, to have an archetype for what constitutes a person who makes a profoundly positive mark on the world. We usually adopt the attitude that such people are likely to be extroverted, comparatively brash, even loud, and intensely passionate about their work, and that people who are quieter and more introspective are less likely to be successful.

Our epoch places an emphasis on soundbites and easy-to-understand summaries of careers that have usually been far more complex, and far more troubled by setbacks, than the person’s public image implies. Confusing achievement with the prominence of a person’s image is a kind of cultural shorthand that can, too easily, falsify both history and living reality.

There is no clear cultural image today of what a hero or heroine should look like. This wasn’t true of the Romans or the Greeks; they were quite sure that a hero (and their heroes were almost all men) would have tremendous musculature and abundant shining armor, and be blessed with tremendous physical skill in using deadly weaponry.

This book is about a woman called Frances Kelsey, a completely different kind of heroine. She is one of the most eminent women in the history of medicine, not only in the United States, but in the world, yet during the twentieth century she was not even given a mention in Encyclopedia Britannica. Nowadays she is.

It’s reasonable to describe Frankie as a “reluctant heroine”; not because she didn’t want to do the wonderful things she did, but because to her, what she did was simply part of her job. She didn’t seek fame or prestige; still less did she set out to be regarded as a heroine. Yet all the same, she is one of the great heroines of history, and she did far more for humankind than any Greek or Roman hero ever did.

In modern culture, reluctant heroes are typically portrayed as ordinary people, thrust into extraordinary circumstances which require them to rise to a heroism they don’t seek, but who rise to the challenge nonetheless and prove themselves abundantly worthy of the mantle fate has placed upon them.

Dr. John Swann, a historian at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Washington, D.C., who knew Dr. Kelsey personally in her old age, comments:

The world, not unreasonably, has taken a different view. Today, there are many tens of thousands of people living in the United States whose lives would have been irretrievably blighted had it not been for Frances.

As Matthew Kelly, the best-selling inspirational speaker and writer, comments:

This insightful remark offers a deep and ingenious way of defining heroism: a way which doesn’t rely on the typical hero attributes (how actively one seeks to help others, or how much they are willing to sacrifice for the greater good), but instead, focuses on the impact one has had upon the world. What Kelly is suggesting is that alongside the world we inhabit, there is a darker world of disastrous events that never happened. Of course, there is also, within our world and our history, a darker world of disastrous events that did happen, and there are heroes and heroines who have acted to reduce the duration of these dark effects or to alleviate the suffering caused, but that’s another matter.

In Dr. Kelsey’s case, the suffering that would have occurred if that person had never existed or had never done their work was due to a drug called thalidomide, sold in many countries around the world as a sedative and—tragically—as a highly effective cure for morning sickness in pregnant women. In fact, thalidomide was subsequently found to cause appalling physical injuries and deformities in babies while they were in the womb, damage that was in many cases so severe that the baby died before it even had a chance to be born.

When we think of the nature of Dr. Kelsey’s heroism, it is instructive and moving to consider a remarkable poem by John Milton, in which he reflects on the poor eyesight that started to afflict him from the age of around thirty-six, in 1644. By early 1650 he had nearly lost his sight, mainly due, as he understood it, to his love of study and working by candlelight until late in the night. Unfortunately, Milton became completely blind during the winter of 1651–1652.

Milton probably dictated the sonnet to an assistant, as he most likely wrote it at a time when he had lost his sight completely.

The first line contains a pun at the end; the word spent means both “spent” in the sense of spending time, and also “spent” in the sense of an energy or resource that has been used up.

Milton is saying he is worried his blindness makes him useless and unable to serve God. Milton believed that his lot in life was to work hard at his writing and to offer his writing to the world for the glory of God. This sounds like a pious aim, but in fact Milton, far from being some old crabbed religious pedant, was profoundly interested in life and people.

In the poem, he’s saying that the affliction of his blindness perplexes him because he wonders whether God still demands that people undertake hard, physical work—“day-labor” —when they don’t have any light. This is the meaning of the line, “Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?”

Milton is then about to “murmur” his question regarding whether God would be so cruel as to make impossible demands of a blind man, when “Patience” steps in to stop him. The remainder of the poem is the counsel offered, in effect, by Patience.

First, Patience explains that God doesn’t actually need anything, with the implication that this is because God (or by extension, whatever the reader understands by the notion of a deity) is complete and perfect as he is and so doesn’t require work or talents (“gifts”) of any kind. Patience next goes on to argue that those people who are the best servants of God allow their fates to be linked with and even controlled by God, as if they were wearing a yoke. This, Patience explains, means accepting things as they come, especially suffering and misfortune.

Milton, however, doesn’t want to make God sound like a slave driver, so God’s yoke is called “mild.” Using his persona of Patience, Milton argues that God, with his kingly status, has an abundance of servants doing his “bidding”—that is, carrying out missions for God that require light and vision. But kings, by implication, also have people who stand in a state of readiness until their action is needed.

The culmination of Patience’s response to the central question of the poem is wonderfully moving. We can be sure that in this imagined response Milton found much consolation, especially in the final, on the face of it simple, even naïve but in fact magnificent line: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

“They” are God’s angels. What Milton is saying is not that there are two distinct orders of angels—one which is busy doing God’s bidding and another which has a much quieter life of waiting. Instead, Patience argues that all angels are envoys of God and that some are indeed being sent on missions and are extremely active in carrying out God’s bidding, while others waiting to be sent can also be seen as heroes or heroines who have not yet made their mark, but shall before long.

Frankie was an extremely busy and active person, but the nature of her heroism was quieter and...