Comments on: Back-to-school report: just the vax, m’am

By: Historiann

Historiann — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 23:11:20 +0000

Susan–I should have thought to include the fake “Oxford” controversy, too! I heard that on NPR and thought it would really fry you.

I thought about you last week at the Mark Twain house. The brief movie overview of his life (and the house) suggested to me that Twain is really the American Shakespeare–not just because of their stature as foundational authors of the national literature, but also because of his completely untutored childhood and career as an adventurer, newspaperman, and self-taught writer. But because many Americans believe in the “natural genius” of our national character, and because Twain’s time was a time when many men rose from obscure origins to great fame and wealth, we believe Twain’s life and career possible. But because many people see the sixteenth century as hopelessly ancient, and English/British society as class-bound from time immemorial, many can’t accept that Shakespeare was actually Shakespeare.

By: Susan

Susan — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:23:15 +0000

Great post. As I read it, I thought about the other conspiracy theorists, who tend to denigrate our knowledge as historians. My own pet peeve is the Shakespeare authorship crowd, who manage to get uncritical coverage by saying “It’s not possible. . .” And part of the problem is that historians and literary scholars have done a bad job of explaining why we think it is possible. How do we assess evidence? Why do we think some evidence is more compelling than others? Etc. (Bardiac had a great series of posts on this a few weeks ago, responding to an NPR series that made my blood boil!) It’s hard not to sound snotty about things like this, but jeez, I did spend a lot of time in school learning stuff!

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:05:46 +0000

Hey, that pic looks like me, seconds before I grabbed Dr. Ammerman (my mother’s sainted pediatrician) by his $250 Panama silk shirt and shredded it down to his navel! Unavailingly, too, I must say, because the needle went in anyway, as did a whole lot of others. Authority was authority in those days, and so was professional oblige, I guess, because we didn’t even get billed for the shirt, which would have bought a small house on Long Island back then! The democratical and populist revolts of the past half century have the downsides of their upsides. Not much deference happens whenever a contrarian notion goes viral. I would probably switch the order of the last sentence to: “explain what the term ‘evidence’ *means* and then what the particular consensus *is*…” because it’s really an epistemological divide that’s out there now.

I googled Dr. Ammerman once to see if he was really the legend in the culture that he was in our household, but he doesn’t have a Wiki page or anything like that. And I did hack through a horrific summer with the whooping cough as an adolescent, come to think of it, so maybe I DID fight off one of those shots!

By: Historiann

Historiann — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:53:00 +0000

Janice–thanks for commenting on this. I’m sure it must be very painful and irritating to cope with the anti-vaxers as the parent of an autistic child. (Although, I’m sure you can probably understand in ways others can’t the desire to find a single, avoidable cause of the condition.) I hope your daughter has access to the therapy she needs. One of the things I rather like about allopathic medicine and most MDs themselves is that they don’t fall for the single-cause, single-solution false simplicity that seems to drive so many non-evidence based theories and schools of thought (like some chiropractors, as you point out.) The fact is that while a lot of therapies and drugs work for a lot of people, they don’t work for all of them, and usually not in the same way, and most MDs are very committed to finding anything that works for their patients. But it’s very seductive to think that there are single causes for people’s miseries (environmental toxins, wheat gluten, the MMR vaccine, etc.) and therefore also single cures (manipulation, homoeopathy, miracle diets, etc.)

Thanks for the link about the chiropractors–I’ll check that out.

By: Janice

Janice — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:33:52 +0000

Don’t get me started on anti-vaccination quacks! I’m tired of people telling me that my daughter has autism due to her vaccinations. (They’re wrong!)

Chiropractors tend to this stand in large numbers, having some in their ranks who believe everything can be healed through manipulations (adding in a little homeopathy for extra bonus points of anti-science).

One of the best explanations of this trend amongst some chiropractors is at Chirobase:
http://www.chirobase.org/06DD/chiroimmu.html