Eula Biss

On Immunity

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In this bold, fascinating book, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear — fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what may be in your children's air, food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines. Reflecting on her own experience as a new mother, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. She extends a conversation with other mothers to meditations on Voltaire's Candide , Bram Stoker's Dracula, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors, and beyond. On Immunity is an inoculation against our fear and a moving account of how we are all interconnected — our bodies and our fates.
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217 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2015
Publication year
2015
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Impressions

  • Ivana Melgozashared an impression4 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    🔮Hidden Depths
    💡Learnt A Lot
    🎯Worthwhile
    💧Soppy

    Es bellísima la escritura de Biss en relación a la idea del cuerpo en interdependencia con otros cuerpos y otros seres no humanos, nuestro organismo como un jardín que necesariamente es colectivo y cómo habla de los cuidados es hermoso <333

  • Leo Ilijasevicshared an impression2 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    💡Learnt A Lot
    🚀Unputdownable

    Iako sam je citao na engleskom, i to bas u periodu korone i kucnog karantina, knjiga je fenomenalna. Kroz licne primere i primere njenih bliskih ljudi pisac zeli da objasni poentu i moc kolektivnog dejstva ljudi i kroz primere vam daje opciju da sami odlucite u sta cete da verujete. Velika preporuka!

Quotes

  • Juan Xulzhas quoted3 years ago
    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
  • Juan Xulzhas quoted3 years ago
    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
  • Juan Xulzhas quoted3 years ago
    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

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