on immunity

Beautifully written meditations on motherhood, vaccination, and medical care in our culture. Kind of discursive in structure, the chapters are short and loop back on each other in an unusual way. Ultimately a little unsatisfying, although I can't really tell why. Maybe it's because I want her to be a little more strident, but I think part of her point is that stridency is misplaced a lot of the time. Good lesson for me to remember. Anti-vaxxers may be wrong, and they may be harming our kids, but their fears are grounded in wider cultural understandings and tropes that are old and understandable to some degree, and that we're all part of in some way or other.

For example, dismissing mistrust of medicine out of hand ignores the very real history that medical doctors often invented elaborate "cures" for things that did not work or were actively harmful, but which gave the illusion of the doctor as a skilled practitioner who could bill for his practice, in contrast to women who, in their traditional healer role, often just advocated patience. Biss's dad is a physician, and he has a funny idea for a two-line medical textbook, which I'll paraphrase here: "Most problems will get better if you leave them alone. Problems that are so serious as to require intervention will probably kill the patient anyway, no matter what you do."

Biss's compassion and frank uncertainty are humbling.