Medical school does not leave much time for casual reading, let alone parsing popular science books. After hours spent staring at Anki cards or attempting to decipher the inscrutably dense jargon of specialist textbooks, the last thing most people want to do is further exhaust their eyes with a light bit of popular nonfiction1, particularly when it deals with heavy topics like infectious diseases and health disparities affecting immigrant communities.
For those leery of buzzwords like “disparity” and “inequity”, I recommend Daisy Hernandez’s The Kissing Bug. Published in the past year, it is an interesting, accessible investigation into Chagas Disease and its effects. Her writing is not preachy, nor does it have pretensions to either the clinical or anthropological. It is straightforward, conversational, at moments discomfitingly personal, but always grounded. Readers are not being barraged with statistics and maudlin sensationalism, but instead invited to consider and understand the experiences of different people living with a parasitic infection that is still considered undertreated and underdiagnosed, despite CDC estimates that nearly three hundred thousand people are currently carrying Trypanosoma cruzi in their blood.
Part memoir and part cultural cross-section, the book draws multiple narrative threads to weave a singular portrait of Chagas Disease. Paragraphs of personal reminisces flow seamlessly into scientific explanations which in turn provide a framework for the reader to appreciate that uniquely journalistic angle – the topical interview turned human interest story.
Humanity is at the center of this book. Hernandez was originally driven to investigate Chagas after learning that it was the many-named malady that had plagued her beloved Tia Dora in much of their shared memories. The journalist spent years speaking with people living in different stages of Chagas Disease, in dramatically different circumstances that shaped their experiences of the disease. The chapters are kaleidoscopic, taking the same disease and reframing it through the perspectives of physicians, activists, researchers, patients and their families both here in the United States and abroad.
The fluid interweaving of global perspectives and historical developments with her own life reminded me tangentially of Trevor Noah’s memoir and Ocean Vuong’s prose novel. But whereas they wrote with the voices of a comedian and poet, respectively, Hernandez is the consummate journalist. When interviewing people living with Chagas Disease, she explores the limits of different healthcare modalities and the histories (familial and international) that can determine outcomes. But she also shows us a path forward by documenting the efforts of people working towards solutions, healthcare workers and community advocates alike.
I particularly appreciated how Hernandez ensconces her observations within rhetorical flourishes that flesh out the settings without detracting from the rigor of the facts they frame. Less strident than Eduardo Galeano2, but just as intimately aware of the tangled threads of postcolonial injustices and neglected/marginalized perspectives, Hernandez shows the messy, human realities behind the numbers.
As Galeano presciently wrote, these ”holocausts are not made known in the sensational press but in…[government] statistics” — statistics which track only what is reported and subsequently recorded. Hernandez unearths these statistics, and the stories of the people they represent. Through her capable prose and investigative work, we see the way Chagas infections ripple outward, affecting both the people bearing the burden of disease and their communities.
Our ability to recognize how integral a person’s community is to their health, and to show compassion to the un(der)paid, unsung labor that brought them into our care. One of the first memories Hernandez includes is the way her mother and aunts organized to ship medical equipment overseas and pull together the funds needed to pay for Tia Dora’s flight and hospitalization. She also recalls their difficulties navigating the insurance system, having to play translator at the tender age of six, and how much of a difference an empathetic doctor can make amidst the confusion and stress of an uncertain hospitalization.
Without an intimate recognition of these realities, healthcare becomes little more than a graveyard of good intentions.
I will end by admitting my slight bias in the book’s favor, for one very specific reason: a good portion is set in New Jersey. From my earliest encounters with Judy Blume’s books to more recent binge-readings of the original Ms. Marvel run, I have a soft spot for stories that shed light on the sides of the state not immortalized in The Sopranos or relegated to the indifferent footnotes of high school history textbooks. On the lives of the filmographically unglamorous, which are no less rich in their dramatic depth and historical context for that.
Because those are the people who come through the doors of our hospitals and clinics, some carrying parasites in hearts already heavy with histories beyond those recorded in their charts.
Endnotes:
1 At best they provide a way for important insights to be accessible to non-scientists. At their worst, these books are hotbeds of hot takes evaluated by predictive text generators that are little more than a glorified derivative of my phone’s vaguely racist autocorrect, let alone remotely deserving of being considered “intelligence”. I refuse to uncritically read something that could end up being little more than a teetering pile of unsubstantiated assumptions and misrepresented premises that somehow held together long enough to make it onto a printing press.
2 He’s most famous for The Open Veins of Latin America, but I personally recommend his essay collections. Much like Jane Austen, his writing holds up really well. Unlike Jane Austen, his timeless observations on social norms/mores3 do not inspire desires to dress up in nineteenth century European finery and take tea on sprawling countryside estates. Quite the opposite, really.
3 Before anyone nitpicks my liberal uses of slashes, they should go read David Foster Wallace’s essays. It’s a deliberate stylistic and syntactical choice, not a sign of indecisiveness or editorial oversight.
Name: Aaradhana Natarajan (she/her)
Cohort: 2022
Bio: Aaradhana Natarajan has been an avid reader of non/fiction since she first fell in love with Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Her interests include medical history, science communications, SFF and world literature. You can find her other reviews on the Rutgers University Libraries and the East Coast Asian American Students Union websites, while her science writing is hosted on Medium @aaradhana.natarajan. She currently attends Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine.
