Vaccination and the Public Good

Eula Biss’s On Immunity: Vaccination and the Public Good

With Saiba Varma and Barry Saunders

Following a public reading on Thursday evening, November 6, 2014, author Eula Biss, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the author of the recently published book On Immunity: An Inoculation, participated in a moderated discussion at the Forum for Scholars and Publics that addressed the intersections of vaccination, public health, metaphor and art — some of the topics taken up in Biss’s book. Biss was joined by Saiba Varma, PhD, Lecturing Fellow in Duke University’s Thompson Writing Program, and by Barry Saunders, MD, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Social Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill. The discussion was moderated by CDS writer-in-residence, Duncan Murrell. The FSP event concluded Biss’s two day residency at Duke, which was the first in the new Kenan-CDS Visiting Writers Series in Ethics, Society, and Documentary Art.