The Intellectual History of Vaccines

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

―Milan Kundera,The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

In conversations with contemporary medical doctors, I’ve occasionally observed that many seem to have no idea about the intellectual history of their profession. Nor do they have much grounding in philosophy—especially the important discipline of epistemology (how we know what we believe we know)—or literature.

Though medical knowledge has advanced tremendously since the life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809 – 1894), today’s typical medical school graduate possesses little of Holmes’s general intellectual cultivation.

I mention Holmes because he made what has long struck me as a profound and important observation about the scientific enterprise:

Science is the topography of ignorance. From a few elevated points we triangulate vast spaces, inclosing infinite unknown details.

As we note in our new book, Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality:

During the Covid pandemic, vaccine advocates often proclaimed that they “follow the science,” as though science was a settled entity in their possession. Even a superficial study of the history of medicine teaches us that every generation has overestimated its understanding of the human body and disease. Only an arrogant fool would believe that scientific understanding has culminated with his generation. Proper scientific inquiry has always given us glimpses into how much we don’t know.

If you enjoy intellectual history—sometimes called “the history of ideas”—you will enjoy my conversation with Dave “Doc” Kirby, host of the On the Bookshelf podcast.

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