On Immunity
An Inoculation
An essayist becomes a mother, meets the fear around vaccination, and traces what immunity means to us as a metaphor.
Written after Biss became a mother and found herself surrounded by other parents’ fears, this is an essay rather than a polemic, moving between Dracula, Achilles, Voltaire and the history of variolation. Her subject is what vaccination means to us metaphorically: purity, contamination, the boundary of the body, and the uncomfortable truth that immunity is held in common rather than privately. Calm, literary, and quietly firm about where the evidence sits.
Recommended by 1 Person
Mark Zuckerberg
Book Club · February 2015
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