Free On Immunity : An Inoculation (9781555973278) by Eula Biss

children, marked by a peculiar sharp ringing cough, and frequently proving fatal in a short time.” It was exactly this possibility, fatal in a short time , that had been keeping me up at night. But the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary , with its examples from 1765 and 1866, was referring to the variety of croup that had defined the condition from Homer’s ancient Greece into the twentieth century. That croup, the kind that was frequently fatal in a short time, was caused by diphtheria and has virtually disappeared in this country since the introduction of the diphtheria vaccine in the 1930s. My son had viral croup, once distinguished from diphtheria by the French with the term faux-croup. While diphtheria kills as many as 20 percent of the children who contract it, faux-croup is rarely fatal.
    “Antibiotics, vaccines, they’re both like time travel,” a friend wrote to me that spring. “You go back in time and you’re able to prevent a catastrophe, but who knows how you have irrevocably altered the future? I love my babies, and I go back in time (vaccinate) in order to prevent the catastrophe I can see, but then I risk the catastrophe I can’t see.” This was my friend who writes science fiction poetry, of course. And I knew what she meant. I had seen an episode of Star Trek in which the starship Enterprise travels through a rift in space-time and encounters an older ship that was destroyed many years earlier. Suddenly, rather than being a peacetime ship on an exploratory mission, the Enterprise of the present becomes a warship on the verge of a final loss to the Klingons. Because this new reality replaces the former reality instantaneously, only one crew member with a unique relationship to time understands that something has gone wrong. There are supposed to be children on the ship, she explains to the captain, and there is not supposed to be a war. When the ship from the past learns that they may prevent the current war from ever beginning by returning to the past, they heroically return to the past to die.
    Every day with a child, I have discovered, is a kind of time travel. I cast my mind ahead with each decision I make, wondering what I might be giving or taking from my child in the future. I send him off to preschool, where he learns about germs and rules, wondering all the time who he might have been if he had not learned to wash his hands and stand in line as soon as he could talk. But even when I do nothing, I am aware that I am irrevocably changing the future. Time marches forward in a course that is forever altered by the fact that I did nothing.
    For several nights while my son had croup I sat with him for most of the night, holding him upright while he slept so that he could breathe more easily. There was nothing else I could do for him. I traveled back in time then, or so I felt, passing through a space-time rift into what I imagined might have been the experience of a mother a hundred years ago, when faux-croup could just as easily have been killing croup. I thought of the mothers in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year , who were said to have died after losing their children—not of the plague, but of grief.

T HE CIRCASSIAN WOMEN,” Voltaire wrote to the French in 1733, “have, from time immemorial, communicated the small-pox to their children when not above six months old by making an incision in the arm, and by putting into this incision a pustule, taken carefully from the body of another child.” It was women who inoculated their children, and Voltaire mourned the fact that the “lady of some French ambassador” had not brought it from Constantinople to Paris. “What prompted the Circassians to introduce this custom, which seems so strange to others,” Voltaire wrote, “is a motive common to all: maternal love and self-interest.”
    Medical care was still mainly the domain of women then, though the tradition of the female healer was already threatened by