This is such an interesting - and such a frustrating - book to read. It's well-written and well-researched, not really popular science but an exploration of how a group of people (specifically mothers) react to science... or don't. We've all heard of those parents who are determined to believe that vaccines cause autism, or that pharmaceutical companies are in cahoots with the government for financial gain because the money they earn from vaccinating a child is clearly more than what they'd earn from a lifetime of billing for care after that child comes down with polio (yes, I'm being sarcastic) and so on. And I'm trying to be open-minded, really I am, but Biss' story of how she had a child and basically started running about like a chook with her head cut off is in some ways very hard to sympathise with. I tend to think that if you've spent decades of your life not-dying from smallpox and diphtheria and the like you might want to give vaccination some credit in keeping you alive, but apparently motherhood makes logic die. (Seriously, I've never seen much appeal in having a kid, and this book underlines yet again how unattractive the prospect is.)

But credit where it's due: Biss is aware that her risk-assessment was off and that her fears were often trumping good sense and science, and she works through them carefully and with empathy for mothers like her. (In this she is better than me. When she writes of how she went to her child's paediatrician to ask, for instance, what the purpose of the Hepatitis B vaccine was, I actually bellowed at the text "SO YOUR CHILD DOESN'T GET HEP B!") And the exploration of science history, of health practices, is genuinely interesting... even if sometimes you want to reach through the page and shake both Biss and the mothers she hangs out with - like the woman who is genuinely astonished at the thought that her unvaccinated Petri dish of child could pass on diseases to other children. Or the one handing out lollipops infected with chicken pox. (I feel like offering up lollipops laced with contraception after this, myself.)