On Immunity : An Inoculation (9781555973278) (24 page)

Page 117

“taking immunity into your own hands” … “vigilante vaccination”:
Donald McNeil, “Debating the Wisdom of ‘Swine Flu Parties,’”
New York Times
, May 6, 2009.

Pages 118–19

the term
conscientious objector
… the conscience was very difficult to define:
Nadja Durbach,
Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccine Movement in England, 1853–1907
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 171–97.

Pages 119–20

George Washington and inoculation:
Seth Mnookin,
The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 27–29.

Page 120

Early vaccine refusers … under those laws:
Michael Willrich,
Pox: An American History
(New York: Penguin, 2011), 330–36.

Page 121

The only vaccine routinely recommended … “were not at all uncommon”:
Arthur Allen,
Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver
(New York: Norton, 2007), 111.

Page 123

“Can we fault parents …” and “I also warn them …”:
Robert Sears,
The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child
(New York: Little, Brown, 2007), 220, 97.

Page 125

“I am but one body naturally considered …”:
Elizabeth I: Collected Works
, ed. Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 52.

Pages 125–26

The Greeks imagined … “even while the little bodies are fully contained”:
Donna Haraway,
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
(New York: Routledge, 1991), 7, 253.

Page 126

“a population of self-interested people can defeat an epidemic”:
Steve Bradt, “Vaccine Vacuum,”
Harvard Gazette
, July 29, 2010; Feng Fu et al., “Imitation Dynamics of Vaccination Behavior on Social Networks,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
, January 2011.

Page 127

Attitudes toward the state … how she thinks about the other:
James Geary,
I Is an Other: The Secret Life of
Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World
(New York: Harper, 2011), 127–29.

Page 127

“If thought corrupts language”:
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,”
A Collection of Essays
(Orlando: Mariner Books, 1946, 1970), 167.

Page 131

“In the fall of 1901, regulation was a controversial idea”:
Michael Willrich,
Pox: An American History
(New York: Penguin, 2011), 171.

Page 133

“The imperilled ‘immune system’” … “New Age mysticism”:
Michael Fitzpatrick, “Myths of Immunity: The Imperiled ‘Immune System’ Is a Metaphor for Human Vulnerability,”
Spiked
, February 18, 2002.

Page 133

“Why was the term
immune system
” … multiple understandings:
Anne-Marie Moulin, “Immunology Old and New: The Beginning and the End” in
Immunology 1930–1980
, ed. Pauline Mazumdar (Toronto: Wall & Thompson, 1989), 293–94.

Pages 133–34

The immune system also gathered significance … one’s health becomes overwhelming:
Emily Martin,
Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture—from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS
(Boston: Beacon, 1994), 122.

Page 137

“Is the immune system at the heart of a new incarnation of social Darwinism” … “more refined systems of middle-class or upper-class people”:
Emily Martin,
Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture—from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS
(Boston: Beacon, 1994), 235, 229.

Page 138

“Why target two and a half million innocent newborns and children?”:
Barbara Loe Fisher, “Illinois Board of Health: Immunization Rules and Proposed Changes,” testimony,
nvic.org
, March 26, 1998.

Pages 139–40

I read an article … “six impossible (or at least highly improbable) things before breakfast”:
Arthur Allen, “In Your Eye, Jenny McCarthy: A Special Court Rejects Autism-Vaccine Theories,”
Slate
, February 12, 2009.

Page 141

“We live in a media culture”:
Maria Popova, “Mind and Cosmos: Philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Brave Critique of Scientific Reductionism,”
brainpickings.org
(blog), October 30, 2012,
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/10/30/mind-and-cosmos-thomas-nagel/
.

Page 142

A former editor was critical of the retraction:
Scott Rosenberg, “
Salon.com
Retracts Vaccination Story, but Shouldn’t Delete It,”
Idea Lab
(blog),
pbs.org
, January 24, 2011,
http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2011/01/saloncom-retracts-vaccination-story-but-shouldnt-delete-it021/
.

Page 142

“What matters is the totality of the evidence”:
John Ioannidis, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,”
PLOS Medicine
, August 2005.

Page 143

“Any science may be likened to a river”:
Rachel Carson,
Silent Spring
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002, 1962), 279.

Page 144

“One can see the insistence throughout the text”:
Allan Johnson, “Modernity and Anxiety in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
,” in
Critical Insights: Dracula
, ed. Jack Lynch (Hackensack, NJ: Salem Press, 2009), 74.

Page 150

“When all was said and done”:
Robert Sears,
The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child
(New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 123.

Page 151

“The idea of preventive medicine is faintly un-American”:
Nicholas von Hoffman, “False Front in War on Cancer,”
Chicago Tribune
, February 13, 1975.

Page 152

“Life”:
Donna Haraway,
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
(New York: Routledge, 1991), 224.

Page 154

“If we demonize other people”:
Susan Dominus, “Stephen King’s Family Business,”
New York Times
, July 31, 2013.

Page 154

Offering incentives for giving, one study concluded, can insult people:
Roland Benabou et al., “Incentives and Prosocial Behavior,”
American Economic Review
, December 2006.

Pages 157–58

In the fall of 2009 … “used to treat social maladies, such as prejudice”:
J. Y. Huang et al., “Immunizing Against Prejudice: Effects of Disease Protection on Attitudes Toward Out-groups,”
Psychological Science
, December 22, 2011.

Page 159

The introductory article in
Science
begins with the myth:
Stephen J. Simpson and Pamela J. Hines, “Self-Discrimination, a Life and Death Issue,”
Science
, April 1, 2002.

Pages 160–61

Danger Model:
Polly Matzinger, “The Danger Model: A Renewed Sense of Self,”
Science
, April 12, 2002; Claudia Dreifus, “A Conversation with Polly Matzinger: Blazing an Unconventional Trail to a New Theory of Immunity,”
New York Times
, June 16, 1998.

Page 162

“caught in an inescapable network of mutuality”:
Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963.

Page 162

The article where I learned this:
Carl Zimmer, “Tending the Body’s Microbial Garden,”
New York Times
, June 18, 2012.

Rachel Webster spent many evenings with me, sitting at her kitchen table while our children were sleeping, poring over draft after draft of what would become this book. My writing was fed by conversations with her and other good friends, particularly Suzanne Buffam, Bill Girard, Kristen Harris, Jen Jaume, Amy Leach, Shauna Seliy, Molly Tambor, David Trinidad, and Connie Voisine. Robyn Schiff advised me on all things gothic, thought with me, and articulated things I did not know that I knew. I am grateful to the community of poets—also mothers—who complicated my thinking, argued generously, and pointed me in new directions. I owe particular debts to Brandel France de Bravo, Arielle Greenberg, Joy Katz, Jennifer Kronovet, Cate Marvin, Erika Meitner, Hoa Nguyen, Lisa Olstein, Danielle Pafunda, Martha Silano, Carmen Giménez Smith, Laurel Snyder, Marcela Sulak, and Rachel Zucker, among others.

The writers David Shields and Rebecca Solnit lent me valuable support early in this project. John Keene suggested essential reading on metaphor, and Yiyun Li helped me find an immunologist with a taste for literature. Matt McGowan, my agent, read early drafts of this book and encouraged me to think of it as big even though it was small. My editor, Jeff Shotts, talked out every detail with me and, in his brilliant way, found many opportunities to make this book better. I am grateful to him and everyone at Graywolf.

Grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts allowed me to take time away from teaching for research and writing. The Christine Center provided me with a hermitage. Juthamas Latourte, Aimee Patke Kubes, and our wonderful friends at Total Child Preschool expanded my son’s world while I wrote.

Charlotte Cubbage at Northwestern University Library advised my early research attempts, and Maria Hlohowskyj served as my first research assistant. Later, my former student Yliana Gonzalez took time away from her own writing to assist me—she made this a smarter book.

The scientists and doctors who generously answered my many questions include Scott Masten, Ellen Wright Clayton, Patricia Winokur, Charles Grose, and Paul Offit. Leonard Green graciously reviewed a full draft of the book. Tom Waldshmidt explained many complicated things to me, read through several drafts, and was an indispensable adviser.

I am grateful to my colleagues at Northwestern for their ideas and support, particularly Brian Bouldrey, Katy Breen, Averill Curdy, Nick Davis, Harris Feinsod, Reg Gibbons, Mary Kinzie, Susan Manning, Susie Phillips, and Carl Smith. Thanks to Jane Smith for articulating the problem of power and powerlessness. Thanks to Laurie Zoloth for introducing me to bio-ethics, and for a thrilling discussion of “Contagion and the Limits of Irony.”

Maggie Nelson gave the first full draft of this book the good, tough read it needed. Nick Davis poured his brilliance into the margins and buoyed my spirits. Portions of this book were published in
Harper’s
, and Genevieve Smith made some enduring edits. Suzanne Buffam, John Bresland, Sarah Manguso, Mara Naselli, and Robyn Schiff all read drafts and made valuable suggestions that brought this book to completion.

I am grateful to my mother, Ellen Graf, for, among other things, educating me in myth and metaphor. And to my father, Roger Biss, for nurturing my interest in immunity, sending me articles, and lending his voice to this book. My sister Mavis Biss was my companion in thought, as always, and applied her rigorous mind to my problems. I am grateful for the many kindnesses of Cathy Biss, Fred Graf, Athan Biss, Genevieve Biss, Paroda Decavallas, Liz Graf-Brennen, and Louise Langsner.

Thanks to my husband, John Bresland, for collaborating with me in life and art, and for being a model of both skepticism and trust. And thanks to my son, Juneau, for giving me so much to think about.

EULA BISS is the author of
The Balloonists
and
Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays
, which received the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. Her essays have appeared in
The Best American Nonrequired Reading
and
The Best Creative Nonfiction
, as well as in the
Believer
and
Harper’s.
Her writing has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Biss holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She teaches at Northwestern University and lives in Chicago.

This book was designed by Rachel Holscher. It is set in Minion Pro type by BookMobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, and manufactured by Friesens on acid-free 100 percent post-consumer wastepaper.