On Reading Vaccine
A little while back I finished reading Vaccine, by Arthur Allen (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2007). I admit a prior interest in reading some history about vaccination, but I didn't expect to enjoy it nearly so much. Until I discover a better example, this book strikes me as the book to read on the subject: well organized, comfortably written, filled with fun stories, illuminating facts, and thoughtful analysis. (More at my Science Besieged book note.)
As usual, there were a couple of quotations that I couldn't find a place for but wanted to note down.
First, about the connection — emotional if not directly causal — between vaccination and the Raggedy Ann doll.
The smarter antivaccinationists picked up on Progressive-era public health's intolerant streak. "A bull in a china shop is a gentle, constructive creature compared with a lot of prim and more or less pious folks when they start in to clean up society and the world," wrote the activist Lora Little. "Mr. Sudden Reformer sees something he does not like in some of his fellow citizens. Very likely it is a reprehensible thing. Plenty of evils exist in the lives and habits of all classes. This would be a thing of which Mr. Sudden Reformer is not himself guilty, therefore he hates it with a mighty loathing. Dwelling on it, he works himself into a frenzy. He would suppress, eradicate, exterminate and stamp out that evil instantly."
Artists and intellectuals were prone to challenge vaccination as unintended consequences continued to dog the procedure. In 1915, Marcella Gruelle, daughter of the New York City illustrator Johnny Gruelle, became paralyzed soon after a vaccination was administered at school without her parents' permission, and later died. Gruelle believed fervently that the vaccination had killed his daughter, although the medical record blamed a heart defect. He created a special cloth rag doll for her during her illness, a floppy doll with hair fashioned from red yarn. Gruelle called it Raggedy Ann. The doll, with its limp limbs, became a symbol of vaccine-damaged children, and Marcella was the heroine of the Raggedy Ann stories that Gruelle went on to illustrate. The editor of Life magazine, John Mitchell, was so strongly antivaccine that he published a prayer in the magazine to the effect "that our children may in future be born immune from all diseases of the kinds for which toxins and serums are injected in their blood–most especially, dear, lord, smallpox, for the supposed prevention of which the ancient, useless, dangerous and filthy rite of vaccination is performed." [p. 99]
New techniques and new afflictions require new words:
War on diphtheria opened a new door in science by introducing the massive, almost industrial use of animals to teat and produce biological products. It was diphtheria investigations that gave rise to the term "guinea pig" to describe an experimental subject. Thousands upon thousands of the adorable little Andean creatures were slaughtered in the great European bacteriological labs after Loeffler discovered in 1884 that, unlike mice and rats, guinea pigs were highly susceptible to the germ. George Bernard Shaw, an animal lover and a skeptic of the Pasteurian worldview, as we've seen, described the extension of such experiments to human subjects as "the folly which sees in the child nothing more than the vivisector sees in a guinea pig: something to experiment on with a view to rearranging the world." Thus "guinea pig" entered the English language, reflecting a new social risk brought on by medical progress.
"Guinea pig" was not the only neologism to emerge from this Promethean era. As scientists such as McFarland in Philadelphia and Milton Rosenau of the new Hygienic Laboratory were getting a handle on the bacterial contamination of smallpox vaccine at the beginning of the twentieth century, young scientists in Vienna became aware of another disease process that could be set off by immunization. The syndrome occurred in children following the injection of diphtheria antitoxin. To make the substance, a horse was injected with increasing dosages of diphtheria toxin until its body had produced enough antibodies to be harvested. The hose was then bled, the red blood cells separated out, and the clear yellow serum, which contained the antibodies, was heated to kill bacteria. Of course, the serum contained more than just diphtheria antibodies. It contained antibodies to other germs the horse had been exposed to, and billions of other proteins that the human immune system would recognize as foreign. The injection of these substances into the blood for thousands of people created a new arm of the growing field of immunology–the study of allergy.
When practitioners injected crudely separated horse serum into a small child, it often produced an allergic response–and the child might respond with a full-out anaphylactic reaction to a second injection. Neither "allergy" or "anaphylaxis" were terms that existed before the twentieth century. Clemens von Pirquet, a scientist working at the Universitaets Kindkerklinik in Vienna, first invoked allergy in his 1906 publication Klinische Studien über Vakzination and vakzinale Allergie, to refer to responses observed in some children vaccinated against smallpox. There were two different responses to antigenic stimulation, von Pirquet noted: immunity, and "altered reactivity"–allergie, in German. The term anaphylaxis, or "against therapy"–was coined in 1902 by two French scientists, Charles Richet and Paul Portier, who found that a tiny amount of jellyfish toxin produced an inflammation in a dog dramatic enough to kill it. Upon the second injection of antitoxin, some children responded with an almost instantaneous rash and skyrocketing fever. Von Pirquet and his younger colleague, Bela Schick, called it Serumkrankheit, serum sickness. They theorized that the first injection had led to the synthesis of antibodies, whose rapid response to horse proteins after the second shot led to a systemic reaction. This completed the basic picture of allergic responses. [pp. 125–126]
In: All, Books, Common-Place Book, The Art of Conversation
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on Tuesday, 6 March 2007 at 00.59
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While I no doubt wouldn't have supported her purpose, Lora Little made a valid point. I know because I've seen it in action.
There are among us small people who desire the bigness of power, or, on getting a little power find they want more and more. They're often not ones to run for office or to win if they do. Instead, they seek to leverage activism against some unpopular trait or habit of others into gaining power for themselves.
This can be seen most recently in the excesses of anti-smoking activism. People in a tiny town in my state have been obliged to leave the town's lone cafe/tavern and stand in the middle of a state highway to smoke, day or night, no matter the traffic or weather. A feature story about this pointed out about half the town's adults smoke and most of the smokers frequent the tavern. Most nonsmokers in town think the state law against their friends, neighbors and family members being able to smoke in the cafe/tavern is ridiculous, but that doesn't matter.
Another story told how aged, infirm residents at an extended care facility have to go outdoors in the bitterest weather, usually in pajamas and robe or nightgown and robe, to smoke. These are people trying to have a little enjoyment or at least a little consolation in the final days of their lives.
Granted, all these folks would be well advised to give up smoking, which society, propelled by the manic do-goodism and power-weilding excesses of people like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has deemed fair game for wholesale violation of personal rights and freedoms.
Yet nothing is said about such activities as skiing, which claims numerous lives and leaves numerous people crippled for life every year.
on Tuesday, 6 March 2007 at 17.16
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I think I'll go along with you, SW, even though my objectivity may be questioned since I was a smoker up until 2004. I was continually surprised by the vehemence, or zealotry, of the anti-smoking crowd. It seemed clear that there was more to their motivation than just the public health issue. The mystification feels similar to the zeal of the gay-hating crowd — one tends to feel there's a lot more going on in their heads than they let on.
In my own mind, I always imagined this contrast: a young child approaching a person on the street and yelling "you're ugly!" would likely be slapped by a parent; the same child yelling "smokers are disgusting and filthy!" would likely get smiles and nods of approval.
I did, however, get some years of humor out of anti-smokers who kept trying to find the place to make smokers stand, and seemed to keep putting us right in their own path. Now that self-satisfied bunch seems inordinately pleased to make their fellow humans stand outside in all manner of weather. It has long seemed to me that it's less that they want second-hand smoke out of the way than that they want to punish smokers.
Odd, isn't it, how many things in America are converted to moral failings.