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I've been getting a lot of messages over the past few weeks about good readings for the anti-vaccination stuff going on, so here's "Immunity and Vaccination: a Syllabus"! /1
Nadja Durbach's Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 (fascinating study of the Victorian anti-vax movements and their relationship to the gothic, liberalism, and activist organizing. This was the largest anti-medical campaign in western history!
Elena Conis' Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization ; James Colgrove's State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America (extremely useful for understanding how we got to our current moment in American anti-vax culture)
Jacob Heller's The Vaccine Narrative (helped me conceptualize how anti-vax politics coheres around narratives of vaccine efficacy or risk/danger -- Heller's concept of the "master narrative" helps to see how certain tropes underpin this movement)
Anna Kirkland's Vaccine Court: The Law and the Politics of Injury (importantly contextualizes anti-vax responses in terms of a long history of legal battles over vaccine injury)
Eula Biss' On Immunity: An Inoculation (a fantastic, accessible book that meditates on the cultural place of immunity/inoculation -- lyrical and great overview on the topic)
Ed Cohen's A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (a book I continue to return to for its genealogical history of immunity as a political and biological concept -- such a rich text for theorizing immunity/immunology)
Roberto Esposito's Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (a political philosophy approach to immunity as the cornerstone of Western modernity -- what he calls the "immunitary paradigm")
Alfred Tauber's The Immune Self: Theory or Metaphor (history of science approach to the concept metaphor of "the immune self" (v. "other) dominant in immunology. Would also plug my own piece on "Cripping Immunity," which draws on this scholarship.)
And the book that really began it all for me: @sethmnookin's The Panic Virus (extremely accessible and cogent study of anti-vax logics and origins)
Two physicians have also written polemics against anti-vaxxers: Paul Offit (Autism's False Prophets, Deadly Choices, The Cutter Incident, Vaccinated) & most recently, @PeterHotez' Vaccines Did Not Cause My Daughter's Autism
For those interested in the eighteenth-century and romanticism, see also Andrea Rusnock's Vital Accounts (about the quantification of health vis-a-vis smallpox), as well as Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee's "The Beast Within: Vaccination, Romanticism, and Jenneration of Disease"
An extremely recent book (2019): Gareth Millward's Vaccinating Britain: Mass Vaccination and the Public Since the Second World War
