“Some prefer to assume health as an identity. I am healthy, we tell each other, meaning that we eat certain foods and avoid others, that we exercise and do not smoke. Health, it is implied, is the reward for living the way we live, and lifestyle is its own variety of immunity.
When health becomes an identity, sickness becomes not something that happens to you, but who you are. Your style of life, I gleaned from the way the word lifestyle was used in junior high school health class, is either clean or dirty, safe or unsafe, free of disease or prone to disease...
...My generation came of age in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, and it seems to have left us believing not that we are all vulnerable to disease, but that it is possible to avoid disease by living a cautious life and limiting our contact with others.”
Eula Biss's thoughtful book is not a pro-vaccination polemic (although I certainly enjoy such polemics, and if you also enjoy them, I thoroughly recommend Paul Offit to you). Rather, it is a meditation on health and disease in the tradition of Susan Sontag's classic essays "Illness as Metaphor" and "AIDS and its Metaphors." (I also recommend Susan Sontag. Strongly!)
What I liked most about Biss's work was how explicitly she called out the classism that pervades the anti-vaccine movement.
