Blessed Grandma

Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring with breast cancer eating through her, hid it from everyone but her closest friends so the chemical industry could not use it against the book, and testified to the Senate in a wig because the radiation had taken her hair. She was a government biologist who wrote pamphlets about fish for the Fish and Wildlife Service and sat up at night writing about the sea. Her first book came out a few weeks before Pearl Harbor and sold almost nothing. Her second, in 1951, sat on the bestseller list for 86 weeks and bought her out of the civil service. She never married. She buried her father, her sister and then her mother, and at 50 she adopted her orphaned great-nephew, Roger, aged five, and raised him alone. In 1958 a friend wrote to her about the birds dropping dead in her garden after the mosquito spraying. Carson had been collecting the evidence on DDT since 1945, when the magazines turned her down. She started the book that winter. In the spring of 1960, with the manuscript half written, the surgeon took her left breast off and told her it was benign. It was not. The tumour had spread, and she found out months later, from another doctor, that the first one had decided not to tell her. She wrote the rest of Silent Spring between radiation sessions, through nausea and a crumbling spine, with her hair falling out and an arthritic grip on the pen, and she told almost nobody. If the industry learned the author had cancer, the book would be read as a dying woman's grievance rather than a case. The book came out in September 1962. The industry spent an estimated quarter of a million dollars answering it. Velsicol, which made two of the pesticides she named, wrote to her publisher threatening to sue and suggesting sinister influences wanted American farming reduced to Soviet levels. Monsanto printed a parody called The Desolate Year, in which the insects inherit the earth, and sent out 5,000 copies. A former Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, was reported to have asked why a spinster with no children was so worried about genetics, and to have concluded she was probably a communist. In April 1963 she went on CBS to face the industry's man, Robert White-Stevens of American Cyanamid, who told 10 million viewers that if mankind followed Miss Carson it would return to the Dark Ages. Two of the programme's sponsors had pulled out. Carson, upright in a wig, quietly took him apart. A month later President Kennedy's own science advisers reported that she had been right. In June she sat before a Senate committee, barely able to walk to the chair, and the chairman greeted her with the line Lincoln is supposed to have given Harriet Beecher Stowe. "Miss Carson, you are the lady who started all this." She died on 14 April 1964, aged 56, of the cancer she had hidden for four years so that it could not be used to discredit her work. America banned DDT in 1972. In 2015 the daughters of the women sprayed in her lifetime turned out to carry 3.7 times the breast cancer risk when their mothers had carried the most DDT. Rachel Carson spent her last four years proving the chemical killed birds, and died of the disease it would later be found to have passed down through the daughters of the women who stood in the fog. The industry called her hysterical. She never once mentioned her own body in the argument. She did not need to.

The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure. The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe. The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table. The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties. The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in. The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior. The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right. The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house. The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse. The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it. Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help. You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time. The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody. The next one is being drafted now.