Medicine and Mistrust Grandville

The world of my parents, and that of their children, dramatically improved in the latter half of the twentieth century as modern medicine introduced an array of effective vaccines and antibiotics, writes Jerome Groopman, reviewing On Immunity by Eula Biss in the March 5, 2015, issue of The New York Review of Books. When the Salk vaccine against the polio virus became available I was inoculated, along with my siblings. The idea of preventing or curing dreaded infectious diseases naturally, relying on the body alone, hardly entered our minds.

Eula Biss is one of many parents for whom the decision to inoculate a child, in 2015, is not so simple. We fear that vaccination will invite autism or any one of the diseases of immune dysfunction that now plague industrialized countriesdiabetes, asthma, and allergies, she writes. We fear that the hepatitis B vaccine will cause multiple sclerosis, or that the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine will cause sudden infant death. We fear that the combination of several vaccines at once will tax the immune system, and that the total number of vaccines will overwhelm it.

In the era between Jerome Groopmans vaccination and Eula Bisss indecision, The New York Review has published many articles on what Groopman, considering the origin of Bisss anxieties, calls our culture of suspicion, the widespread unease with expertise and mistrust of authority that complicates relations between doctors and patients. A selection of these articles is presented below.

Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet and the author of Health Wars: On the Global Front Lines of Modern Medicine, examines the shortcomings of institutionalized medicine in two essays, one on compromised medical research, and another on The Doctors Plague, the biography of a Viennese doctor whose discovery that colleagues were unwittingly spreading infection saved the lives of patients, but alienated him from the medical establishment.

In his review of The Creative Destruction of Medicine by Eric Topol, Arnold Relman questions whether advances in medical technology will produce better healthcare, or a wealth of useless information and wealthier technology executives.

Among several articles written for The New York Review on the practices of the pharmaceutical industry, Marcia Angell has advocated for reforms to curb corporate influence on the US Food and Drug Administration, in her review of Reputation and Power by Daniel Carpenter, and investigated the insidious influence of money on academic expertise and the integrity of practitioners, in an omnibus review of books on the subject.

Many of the contributions to The New York Review by Richard C. Lewontin have adopted a perspective skeptical of scientific claims to absolute truth and unbiased objective knowledge. In two such reviews, Lewontin writes on the political context of scientific progress, and the conflicted role of science in a world of believers.

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Medicine and Mistrust