The War Within Us: Everyman's Guide to Infection and Immunity

  • Cedric Mims
Academic: 2000. 228 pp. $39.95, £24.95
Life in all its vulnerability: Hans Baldung's The Three Ages of Man and Death. Credit: ARCHIVO ICONOGRAPHICO/CORBIS

On the eve of the presidential election, The New York Times found some small space in its editorial columns to praise the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for its attempts to lessen the burden of infectious diseases throughout the world. With US$21 billion in assets, the foundation could easily have distributed computers rather than vaccines to the remotest parts of the developing world. But as Bill Gates said: “The mothers are going to walk right up to that computer and say, 'My children are dying, what can you do?'. They're not going to sit there and, like, browse eBay or something.” It was as if Gates had just finished reading Cedric Mims' The War Within Us.

Mims has written an attractive and brief overview of the current understanding of immunity and infectious disease. The book is clearly intended for educated lay readers with a minimal background in science. The first third of the book is a reasonably accurate and simple discourse on the components of the immune system and how they work. Although rendered in plain English, it is not oversimplified to the point of introducing gross inaccuracies. The remainder of the text discusses various infectious diseases and the wily pathogens that cause them. Although the way in which immunological specificity is generated must be among the greatest wonders of the natural world, it always evokes striking images of war, and attack and defence, and a whole vocabulary more appropriate to the Pentagon or any other government war ministry. Mims has totally succumbed to this type of imagery. Perhaps he feels it makes the contents more dramatic, and maybe it does.

Scattered throughout the text the reader will find boxed vignettes of fascinating bits of history: how the cook who became known as Typhoid Mary, and who was herself immune to the typhoid bacillus, infected a long succession of her unwitting employers; how Carelton Gajdusek brazenly entered the New Guinea highlands and discovered kuru; how Ignasz Semmelweis, who introduced antisepsis into medical practice, died in an insane asylum of the very disease he spent his life trying to eradicate; and how the physician John Snow traced the source of a London cholera outbreak to the Broad Street water pump.

Those of us who grew up before the Second World War have vivid memories of the summer terrors brought on by polio epidemics, of relatives and neighbours dying of tuberculosis, of the ravages of syphilis among the gentry, and of children with whooping cough who were obliged by the health department to wear red armbands. Mims reveals in the course of this book his own medical history, from his mother's death from puerperal sepsis to the time he contracted rift valley fever in the laboratory. His interest in infection and immunity is, it seems, well founded.

Rather disappointingly, no more than two pages of the book are devoted to a discussion of AIDS. Targeted as it is to a lay audience, the book might have been a good vehicle for saying more about the subject. Nonetheless, the reader is left with a broad understanding of the insidious destructiveness of infectious diseases, and also, no doubt, with a new appreciation of the Gates Foundation's efforts.