On Immunity

When Voltaire wrote “On Inoculation,” the primary meaning of the English word inoculate was still to set a bud or scion, as apples are cultivated by grafting a stem from one tree onto the roots of another. There were many methods of inoculation, including the snuffing of dried and ground scabs up the nose or the sewing of an infected thread through the webbing between the thumb and finger, but in England it was often practiced by making a slit or flap in the skin into which infectious material was placed, like the slit in the bark of a tree that receives the young stem grafted to it. When the word inoculate was first used to describe variolation, it was a metaphor for grafting a disease, which would bear its own fruit, to the rootstock of the body

The princess of Wales, having also survived smallpox, arranged for variolation to be tested on prisoners condemned to die. The prisoners lived, immune to smallpox, and were freed for their trouble. The

Vaccination is a precursor to modern medicine, not the product of it. Its roots are in folk medicine, and its first practitioners were farmers. Milkmaids in eighteenth-century England had faces unblemished by smallpox. Nobody knew why, but anyone could see it was true. Nearly everyone in England at that time got smallpox and many of those who survived bore the scars of the disease on their faces. Folk knowledge held that if a milkmaid milked a cow blistered with cowpox and developed some blisters on her hands, she would not contract smallpox even while nursing victims of an epidemic.
By the end of the century, just as the waterwheels of the industrial revolution were beginning to turn the spindles in cotton mills, physicians were noting the effects of cowpox on milkmaids and anyone who milked cows. During a smallpox epidemic in 1774, a farmer who had himself already been infected with cowpox used a darning needle to drive pus from a cow into the arms of his wife and two small boys. The farmer’s neighbors were horrified. His wife’s arm became red and swollen and she fell ill before recovering fully, but the boys had mild reactions. They were exposed to smallpox many times over the course of their long lives, occasionally for the purpose of demonstrating their immunity, without ever contracting the disease.
Twenty years later, the country doctor Edward Jenner extracted pus from a blister on the hand of a milkmaid and

in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”

How can we be so different and feel so much alike?” one of the birds asks the bat. “And how can we feel so different and be so much alike?” another bird wonders

And like the plot of Dracula, the drama of Silent Spring depends on emblematic oppositions—good and evil, human and inhuman, natural and unnatural, ancient and modern. The monster in Dracula has ancient origins, but in Silent Spring evil takes the form of modern life

And so her personal struggle with cancer was told only through dwindling numbers of bald eagles, through eggs that did not hatch, and through the robins that lay dead on the lawns of suburbia

but either way malaria has resurged in some countries where DDT is no longer used against mosquitoes. One

What natural has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is pure and safe and benign. But the use of natural as a synonym for good is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world

If we feel polluted, we are offered a “cleanse.” If we feel inadequate, lacking, we are offered a “supplement.” If we fear toxins, we are offered “detoxification.” If we fear that we are rusting with age, physically oxidizing, we are reassured with “antioxidants.” These are metaphors that address our base anxieties. And what the language of alternative medicine understands is that when we feel bad we want something unambiguously good