Eula Biss, “Sentimental Medicine”

Daniel Gilbert, “Immune to Reality”

While Daniel Gilbert is focused on the psychology of happiness in his chapter “Immune to Reality”, Eula Biss is focused on the history of public opinion about vaccines in her Harpers article “Sentimental Medicine”. Although each author is focused on two different subjects, your task in this first essay is to analyze the relationships between Biss and Gilbert to defend a thesis in response to the prompt in bold below.

Towards the end of her article, Biss close-reads the origins of the word toxic and claims “The way we now think about toxicity bears some resemblance to the way we once thought about filth…both allow their subscribers to maintain a sense of control over their own health by pursuing personal purity” (40). Biss’ idea here about the relationship between toxic, filth, and purity make me think of Gilbert’s claims about how our own psychological immune system is triggered by intense or inescapable circumstances, and the control that cooking the facts, allegedly, gives us. When Gilbert says: “Once we explain an event, we can fold it up like freshly washed laundry” it recalls Biss’ discussion of purity, or cleanliness. Biss is focused on physical immunity, or auto-immunity, while Gilbert is focused on psychological immunity.

Respond to the following prompt in bold with an independent thesis that relies on synthesis of Biss’ and Gilbert’s direct quotes to prove:

How might the psychological immune system influence individual concepts of purity?