I was born in the last week of 1990 in Plainfield, Vermont, a town where everybody used the same midwife, Judy Luce, and considered chickenpox to be a healthy, natural way to build a child's immune system. The general consensus was that it was fine to go the hospital if you'd been in a car crash, but in terms of disease? Western medicine would probably just make whatever it was worse.
Around that same time, someone in the community passed my mom a copy of A Shot In The Darkby Harris Coulter, a doctor who specialized in homeopathic and alternative medicine. It bounced between junk science that portrayed vaccines as dangerous time-bombs pushed by the government and horrifying anecdotes from parents. It took particular aim at the vaccine for pertussis—the 'P' in the DPT combo shot, which also inoculates against diphtheria and tetanus—which it claimed could cause neurological damage.
"That book was definitely making the rounds," my mom tells me. "It had a serious impact on everybody in Plainfield. It opened with this god-awful scene, a registered nurse talking about her baby dying in her arms after getting vaccinated … everybody in this little town of fairly well-educated people where everybody used echinacea, we were totally ripe for that kind of book."
Read more on Tonic
Advertisement