Glastonbury Holy Thorn
Story of a Legend
Adam Stout
Green & Pleasant Publishing 2020
Hb, 154pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781916268609
Not all historians approach a legend as Adam Stout does, with such a fusion of critical acumen and human sympathy. The Thorn turns out to be a late thread in Glastonbury’s mythic tapestry, first appearing in 1520, long after the saints and the Grail. But unlike the banished monks or the bones of Arthur, it is actually there; you can see it, touch it and, unfortunately, you can hack it down.
That is how a Civil War zealot treated the first Thorn – or was it the first? The tree can easily be perpetuated by grafting, so it may have had ancestors, and has certainly left descendants. “Now is the time to plant the holy thorn” is not, as you might think, the opening of a sermon, but advice from the catalogue of G Chislett, nurseryman. A work of faith in the age of botanical reproduction, the Thorn owes more of its sacred reputation than you might think to business sense, but isn’t that true of Glastonbury itself?
People obsessed by the Thorn look at a tree and see miracles worked by the Crown of Thorns, or evidence of a pure evangelisation of England, or proof of the wickedness of calendar reform; any theory, as long as it is against the grain. Stout has a fondness for these epistemic resistance movements, so that the actual Crataegus monogyna soon becomes a MacGuffin in the search for appropriations of the Glastonbury legacy. Meanings multiply faster than cuttings, until it seems that a new version of the Thorn will shoot in any intellectual soil – royalist or republican, Catholic or Protestant, Christian or Pagan.
Who owns the Thorn today? There is one in the ruined abbey, another outside the parish church, many more in the surrounding villages, while the Pagans have their own branch at Chalice Well. In 1936, 1,000 nonconformists were gathering piously at the site of the original, which would have surprised the original nonconformist who cut it down. But Glastonbury thrives on contradictions. Invented traditions, like the despatch of a flowering sprig to the monarch on Christmas Day, get caught up in the interlace of fact and fancy, and next thing you know, the Christmas gift appears in
The Mists of Avalon as an ancient Goddess tradition.
So awesome is the 2,000year antiquity claimed for the Thorn as a relic, that it seems bathetic to record the brief lifespan of actual thorns. These shrubs peg out after decades rather than centuries, especially when struggling on the holy but meagre soil of the Avalonian hills. The Thorn, like those Japanese temples that have been rebuilt every generation since the remotest antiquity, is ever old and ever new: a vegetative relic that can be multiplied indefinitely to meet the needs of piety and commerce.
Just as there is no one true Thorn, there is no primary, authentic meaning behind its story. Adam Stout, a natural nonprophet, celebrates the polysemic power of the Thorn to signify, regardless of what is being signified. He concludes with a glorious image of the tree as a type of Hope, which is so very Avalonian that we are swept up in it without ever quite gathering what it is that we are hoping for.
Jeremy Harte
★★★★★
The Doctor who Fooled the World
Science, Deception and the War on Vaccines
Brian Deer
Johns Hopkins University Press 2020
Pb, 416pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781911617808
Dr Andrew Wakefield, a young gastroenterologist doing research into inflammatory bowel disease, developed a fascination with viruses, believing that vaccination with the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine might cause Crohn’s disease or even autism. Egged on by the parents of autistic children, he performed a clinical study on 12 autistic youngsters, who were subjected to a series of medical procedures. He concluded that the MMR vaccine had triggered a syndrome of enterocolitis and autism, holding a press conference and spreading the word to the international press, striking fear into parents of young children and effectively reducing the vaccination rates in both Britain and the US.
There was soon controversy about Wakefield’s 1998 research paper about the link between MMR and autism, published in the prestigious Lancet. Other researchers could not reproduce his findings, and many people expressed reservations regarding both the low number of participants in the study and Wakefield’s lack of qualifications in pædiatrics and virology. Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer became a leading critic, accusing Wakefield of scientific dishonesty in articles and TV documentaries. The case histories of several of the participating children had been falsified, and they had not been randomly introduced into the study. Wakefield had illicitly been taking money from a solicitor representing the parents of autistic children. In 2010 the General Medical Council found him unfit to practise medicine. His 1998 Lancet paper was retracted as the result of fraudulent research, and several of his other academic contributions were also withdrawn. Other, more reputable researchers have since conducted a number of larger and better planned clinical studies, looking for a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, but found none.
After being struck off, Wakefield managed to land on his feet. He received a hero’s welcome from the transatlantic antivaccination movement. Many American parents of autistic children had greatly welcomed his study, since his hypothesis provided not only a convenient explanation to their condition, but also a ticket to ride on the profitable gravy train of compensation claims against the vaccine manufacturers. Wakefield regularly speaks at antivaxxer rallies and is lauded by his supporters.
Deer’s book contains everything you would ever want to know about the Wakefield MMRautism fraud, and then some. He is the great expert on this matter and has obviously felt the need to include every detail about the controversy. His book is overlong at more than 400 pages, with a rambling narrative and many unnecessary anecdotes and asides; a shorter and more focused book would surely have attracted a wider readership.
Jan Bondeson
★★★