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Acknowledgement
I owe thanks to Vicki Kirby who offered guidance and support while developing this research. I am also grateful to Stefan Herbrechter for his early feedback on this material, and his encouragement to explore the relationship between the concepts of autoimmunity and allergy.
Notes
1 Janeway et al., Immunobiology.
2 Mackay, “Travels and Travails,” A252.
3 Cohen, “Autoimmunity and ‘Other’ Paradoxes,” 8.
4 Tauber, The Immune Self.
5 Moulin, “The Defended Body” and Moulin “The Immune System.”
6 Klein, Science of Self-Nonself Discrimination.
7 Pradeu, Limits of the Self.
8 A large literature exists in historical and philosophical studies of immunology dealing with the dominance of the discourse of the immunological self. These accounts include discussions of the metaphor of self, its translation into empirical research, and its relationship to alternative concepts of immune function and identity. For an in-depth analysis of the concept of the immune self, see Tauber, The Immune Self. For an account of how the concept of self has enabled and directed investigations of immune phenomena, see Löwy, “Immunological Construction of Self” and “Strength of Loose Concepts.” For a critical account of how the concept of self has shaped the construction of the discipline’s history, See Anderson et al., “Unnatural History.” More recently, discussions of this discourse have shifted away from the self and toward a more ecological view of immune function; see Tauber, “Immune System and Ecology;” Pradeu, Limits of the Self; Ulvestad Defending Life. On how the conventional discourse of autoimmunity impacts the experience of living with autoimmune disease, see Cohen “Autoimmunity and ‘Other’ Paradoxes;” Andrews, “Autobiography of Defense.”
9 For detailed accounts of how the dominance of self-nonself discourse prevented early acceptance of the concepts of allergy and autoimmunity, respectively, see Jamieson, “Imagining ‘Reactivity,’” and Anderson and Mackay, Intolerant Bodies.
10 Silverstein, A History of Immunology, 214.
11 See note 10 above.
12 Kroker, “Immunity and Its Other,” 273.
13 Silverstein, “Autoimmunity versus Horror Autotoxicus.”
14 Pradeu , Limits of the Self, 52.
15 For more on Macfarlane Burnet’s work on self-tolerance, see Pradeu, Limits of the Self, and Anderson and Mackay, Intolerant Bodies.
16 Pradeu, Limits of the Self, 6.
17 Ibid.
18 For more on the appropriation of immunological discourse in the humanities and social sciences, see Anderson, “Immunology and Philosophy” and Jamieson “The Politics of Immunity.”
19 Derrida, Autoimmunity; Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy.
20 Derrida, Autoimmunity, 188.
21 Andrews, “Autoimmune Illness,” 190.
22 Derrida, Autoimmunity, 94.
23 Jackson, Allergy, 27.
24 Anderson and Mackay, Intolerant Bodies, 36–37.
25 Ibid., 37.
26 For a detailed account of, and references relating to, the historicization or Pirquet’s allergy theory, see Jamieson, ‘Imagining “Reactivity.”’
27 Huber, “100 Jahre Allergie,” 720.
28 Ibid., 719.
29 Pirquet, “Allergy,” 260.
30 Pirquet in Kay, “Allergie,” 558; the term supersensitivity was originally given to hypersensitivity reactions or common allergic reactions.
31 Ibid., 559.
32 This article deals principally with his original article ‘Allergie’ and monograph Allergy. In these texts, and especially the monograph, Pirquet outlines his original investigations of altered reactivity and the development of a scientific schema for interpreting different forms of allergy. Importantly, it is in these writings that the conceptual and philosophical issues raised by Pirquet’s studies – its implications for our understanding of organismic identity and the concept of pathology – are most starkly demonstrated. For a list of other writings by Pirquet, see Huber, “100 Jahre Allergie” and Wagner, Clemens von Pirquet.
33 Pirquet’s monograph was originally published in German in 1910. Its English translation was published in 1911 in the journal The Archives of Internal Medicine. Throughout this article, I refer to the English translation.
34 Pirquet, “Allergie,” 263.
35 Jackson, Allergy, 39.
36 Pirquet “Allergie,” 426.
37 Ibid., 284-285.
38 This classificatory approach to reactivity is summed up in the monograph’s conclusion, where Pirquet organises all forms of altered reactivity in a table titled “Divisions of Allergy,” which distinguishes between reactions on the basis of time, quantity and quality. Pirquet, “Allergie,” 426.
39 Pirquet, “Allergie,” 260.
40 Ibid., 261.
41 Ibid., 268.
42 Examples of Pirquet’s graphs can be found here: http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=653413
43 Jackson, Allergy, 39.
44 Pradeu, Limits of the Self, 5.
45 Tauber, “Immune System and Ecology,” 224-225.
46 Canguilhem, Normal and Pathological, 40-41.
47 Rosenberg, “The Tyranny of Diagnosis,” 242-243.
48 Pradeu, Limits of the Self, 5.
49 Anderson and Mackay, Intolerant Bodies, 139.
50 Parnes, “Trouble from Within,” 448.
51 Ibid., 430.
52 Ibid., 429.
53 Cruse and Lewis, Atlas of Immunology, 347.
54 Golub and Green, Immunology, A Synthesis, 598.
55 Huber, “100 Jahre Allergie,” 721.
56 The issue of recognition goes to the heart of the problem of immunologic specificity – how the organism produces specific antibodies in response to foreign substances, or more basically, how the organism recognises foreignness. This puzzle was a central concern of early immunologist, Karl Landsteiner. Between 1917 and 1918, Landsteiner, who studied the immune response to artificial haptens (partial antigens that bind to carrier proteins), showed that the immune system could produce antibodies in response to a range of artificial or chemically altered antigens. He found that in addition to an enormous number of naturally occurring antigens, the immune system could mount specific responses to an even larger range of artificially created antigens (not existent in nature). He established that the immune system is capable of recognising substances it could not have previously encountered. As such, Landsteiner’s work foregrounds the paradox that immune responsiveness is guaranteed by the fact that a first encounter has, impossibly, already taken place. For more on Landsteiner’s studies of immunologic specificity, see Mazumdar Species and Specificity and Silverstein A History of Immunology.
57 Tauber, “Immune System and Ecology,” 234.
58 Haeckel in Tauber, “Immune System and Ecology,” 229.
59 Mackenzie, “God has No Allergies,” 10.
60 Kay, “100 Years of ‘Allergy,’” 556.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Michelle Jamieson
Michelle Jamieson holds a PhD in sociology and lectures in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University, Sydney. Moving between sociology, science studies and the medical humanities, her research critically engages the assumed division between sociality and biology, especially in relation to illness and medicine. She recently completed a major project about allergy and the politics of immunological discourse. She is the author of ‘The Politics of Immunity: Reading Cohen through Canguilhem and New Materialism’ (2015) Body and Society, and ‘Imagining Reactivity: Allergy Within the History of Immunology’ (2010) Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. Email: [email protected]