Mary Benson (campaigner) Mary Benson (campaigner) Mary Benson (8 December 1919 – 19 June 2000) was a South African civil rights campaigner and author. Born in 1919 in Pretoria, Benson served in the South African Women's Army during World War II. After the war, she was secretary to film director David Lean. Benson became acquainted with the author Alan Paton, and read his novel "Cry, the beloved country" (1948), whose main theme was racial discrimination in South Africa. This affected her greatly, and she became a campaigner for the rights of black people there. She worked with Michael Scott (who, in 1946, was
The Cry and the Covenant street telling women to demand of their doctors that they wash their hands, and otherwise behaving so erratically that he is committed to an insane asylum, where because of a cut finger he contracts and dies of the very disease he spent his life fighting. A legacy of Semmelweis, highlighted in "The Cry and the Covenant", is that hand washing, to this day, remains the most effective method of preventing the spread of infection. The Cry and the Covenant The Cry and the Covenant is a novel by Morton Thompson written in 1949 and published by Doubleday. The novel is