"On Risk and Personal Belief" - Susan McCallum Smith (LARB)
Pestilence is in fact very common, but we find it hard to believe in a pestilence when it descends upon us. There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared. […] When war breaks out people say: ‘It won’t last. It’s too stupid.’ And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesn’t prevent it from lasting. Stupidity always carries doggedly on, as people would notice if they were not always thinking about themselves.
— Albert Camus, The Plague
DURING A PRENATAL VISIT to her pediatrician, Eula Biss asked about the necessity of the Hep B vaccine because claims — unproven — have suggested it is linked to multiple sclerosis and sudden infant death syndrome. Her doctor told her that her child wouldn’t need it because it was “for the inner city […] to protect the babies of drug addicts and prostitutes.” It didn’t occur to Biss to clarify that her Chicago neighborhood might be the kind he was talking about. “I am ashamed by how little of his racial code I registered,” she writes in On Immunity: An Inoculation. “Relieved to be told that this vaccine was not for people like me, I failed to consider what exactly that meant.”
On the copyright page of On Immunity appears the following disclaimer: “This book is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. It is an inoculation only against maladies of a metaphorical nature.” This wry (no doubt legally necessary) statement strikes at the nature of Biss’s project: to continue in On Immunity, her third book, a conversation she began inNotes from No Man’s Land, her second, about the impact of race and class on American culture.
Published in 2009, Notes from No Man’s Land received a rapturous reception, winning the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction; therefore On Immunity has been much anticipated, and it does not disappoint. Its somewhat musty title — that academic overtone — alludes to Voltaire’s “Letter XI — On Inoculation,” a short essay produced sometime between 1733 and 1742 by France’s preeminent writer of the Enlightenment, in which he recommends to his countrymen the revolutionary practice of immunization. Biss’s contemporary plea — directed more specifically at her countrywomen — is less introspective, more journalistic, than Notes from No Man’s Land, but no less striking or accomplished. Biss, who describes herself as “an essayist, a citizen thinker,” uses her personal journey through early parenthood as the book’s connective tissue, while chewing the bones of human nature right down to the nub. Indeed, On Immunity may be too reasoned, too intelligent, too thoughtful, too philosophical — and be perceived by those who adamantly oppose its conclusions as too unrealistically altruistic — to be heard above the cacophony of sensationalized quackery that masquerades as debate about immunization (and other scientific issues such as the environment and diet) in our popular media. It is a necessary book — a hefty dose of compassionate rationality prescribed by our contemporary heir to Voltaire — asking us to take a long, hard look at the societal consequences of individual choices. Some may be unwilling to swallow it, though — the idea of preventative medicine being, according to Biss, faintly un-American, because it implies that “the enemy is us.”
Continue reading "On Risk and Personal Belief."
