Should public libraries stock dangerous medical disinformation?

Awful Library Books is an amusing website where librarians display pictures of – well, awful books they’ve discovered in their collections and are considering culling or have already discarded. Most of these are old, battered, and hopelessly out of date, and the librarian’s perspective is often interesting.

Despite the discrediting of a fringe idea and the exposure of its chief proponent as a fraud, there are still gullible parents who are afraid of vaccines. This has led to the recent phenomenon of pediatricians “firing” patients who refuse to vaccinate their children. It is also partly, or perhaps entirely, responsible for the recent resurgence of childhood diseases once thought conquered.

Why do people believe weird things? Autism is mysterious, and people are afraid of it. There is a vague correlation, darkly suggestive of causation to the uncritical mind, arising from the fact that the first observation of autistic symptoms tends to occur around the time that the child is receiving multiple vaccinations. And, of course, there are the persistent voices of shady operators who try to profit from the intersection of a vague distrust of the medical establishment with a gullible faith in “natural” remedies, which they happen to have for sale in abundance.

Should a public library keep a copy of this book on its shelves? I don’t know. The author of the article on Awful Library Books leans toward a neutralist stance, serving the community anything it seems to want access to. This is the predominant view among librarians, who, the in US, have been consistently courageous in resisting both government attempts at censorship and surveillance, as well as nipping their own editorial tendencies in the bud. But if there is such a thing as a dangerous book ¹, this would be an example. A certain number of people will read this, be persuaded by it, and wind up killing or injuring their own children. I have the greatest sympathy with the librarians’ traditional neutralist stance, but we should keep our eyes open to its probable consequences in particular cases. And in this particular case, I suspect that it is allowed to operate only because of an admixture of the belief that the book, while disgraceful and a public health hazard, is not completely without some “value,” if perhaps only as a cultural or historical artifact. My ideas about this are informed by my certainty that, confronted with the most militantly neutralist librarian available, I could produce a book that would not under any circumstances find a way onto his shelves, despite the existence of a niche community who would be eager to check it out.