Facing Toxicity (New York City Health Department 2019; Health Canada 2010; FDA 2018)

With its focus on environmental toxicity, this vignette is an illustration of what epidemiology can do for us. It tracks down the source of poisoning but it is also what redirects our eyes toward relations that a certain version of realism had relegated to the background. In turn, and because it draws attention to the invisibility of backdrops against which stories ought to take place, more or less independently, epidemiology returns us to the images we entrust the story of our lives to.