A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body Mary E. Wood (bio) Ed Cohen. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 384 pp. Clothbound, $89.95. Paperback, $24.95. Medicine and war are usually thought of as distinctly separate. If anything, they are seen as opposites: medicine cures the physical and emotional traumas of war and certainly plays no part in systematically inflicting widespread injury and death. Ed Cohen’s provocative new book A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body calls the separation between medical and military ideology into question by tracing the history of “immunity,” a complex metaphor that binds biological science to politics and the defense of the state. As he adroitly delineates the development of the concept of immunity from late antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century, with frequent reference to present-day microbiology, Cohen takes his reader on a journey whose byroads are often unexpected, at times startling. The main road in this journey is the development of immunity as a contradictory medical concept in which the human body is posited as disconnected from a hostile environment and in need of defense against the microscopic intruders that constantly threaten to destroy it. Tracing biological immunity to the ancient Roman concept of legal immunity as an exception to the rules and responsibilities of citizenship, Cohen maintains that “immunity” to disease reaffirms the vulnerability of human life by asserting itself in contrast to that fragility. Cohen maintains that the stage was set for Elie Metchnikoff’s 1881 “discovery” of immunity as bodily self-defense by a series of significant shifts in conceptions of the body and its relationship to the state. In the seventeenth century, in the context of the bloody English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, among other thinkers of the period, broke from the Christian idea that personhood rests in the soul, developing instead a notion that human existence resides in the body. For these thinkers the body contained and signified an individual separated from a hostile external world. For the first time, a person could be said to “have” a body; the body was the property of the individual and had to be defended against outside forces. In the wake of the phenomenally destructive Thirty Years’ War in Europe, with the realignment of nation-states and establishment of a tentative peace among hostile political entities, a similar reconception of the human body was underway. By the end of the eighteenth century, medicine replaced religion as mediator between living persons [End Page 219] and the state. In Germany, “medical police” regulated the health and well-being of large groups of individual bodies in order to ensure not only the health of the state but its readiness for war and self-defense. At the same time, in England, Thomas Malthus was developing theories focused on the good of populations rather than individuals. The larger group must be defended against the external threats of poverty and disease. The whole must resist the destructive incursions from without in order to protect the aggregate health. Eighteenth-century American Protestant Cotton Mather reinforced this notion when he supported inoculation against smallpox despite the fears of his contemporaries. In a significant new development, Mather and, later, Edward Jenner conceived the body as having the potential for immunity to disease, even as they saw it as being inherently vulnerable to attack. As with Malthus, the larger population needed to be inoculated against the disease of the few, which was conceived as hostile enemy. As he traces this history, Cohen avoids simplifying generalizations by pointing out contradictions and nuances along the way. For example, the focus of Malthus and German “medical police” on the health of large populations seems to contradict the liberal privileging of the individual above all else. Cohen does not ignore this contradiction or attempt to explain it away, but instead draws attention to its function: this double representation of the body as both absolutely individual on the one hand and collective on the other serves to reinforce the idea that the...