Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady

Extract

This informative book narrates the changing identification and medical management of allergy as a twentieth-century preoccupation, with a concentration on developments in Britain situated in broader European and supranational circuits. It aptly tracks the medical research that gave birth to allergy as a diagnosis, an object of study and a site for pharmaceutical intervention and commodification. The book will certainly be of interest to historians of twentieth-century medicine and to doctors who participate in this field.

Jackson's account insists on the importance of understanding the history of allergy as a history of contestation in which what counts as allergy was ambiguous and changing, remaining today in a state of negotiation. The book begins with the Viennese paediatrician Clemens von Pirquet who first coined ‘allergy’ to describe ‘altered biological reactivity’ to foreign substances, to vaccinations and also to scattered reports of idiosyncratic heightened reactivity in experimental animals in serum theory research. Pirquet's research marked a turn from understanding reactions as the body's success or failure in battling infectious agents, to an understanding of antibody reactions themselves as potentially causing illness. By the 1920s, the term allergy had travelled widely in European and American medical discourse, yet it continued to compete with divergent aetiologies of hay fever, asthma and other conditions that pointed to nervous systems, emotional states or hereditary predispositions.