Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes

by Gregg Mitman

Allergy is the sixth leading cause of chronic illness in the United States. More than fifty million Americans suffer from allergies, and they spend an estimated $18 billion coping with them. Yet despite advances in biomedicine and enormous investment in research over the past fifty years, the burden of allergic disease continues to grow. Why have we failed to reverse this trend?
Breathing Space offers an intimate portrait of how allergic disease has shaped American culture, landscape, and life. Drawing on environmental, medical, and cultural history and the life stories of people, plants, and insects, Mitman traces how America’s changing environment from the late 1800s to the present day has led to the epidemic growth of allergic disease. We have seen a never-ending stream of solutions to combat allergies, from hay fever resorts, herbicides, and air-conditioned homes to numerous potions and pills. But, as Mitman shows, despite the quest for a magic bullet, none of the attempted solutions has succeeded. Until we address how our changing environment—physical, biological, social, and economic—has helped to create America’s allergic landscape, that hoped-for success will continue to elude us.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, Environment

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 5 out of 5]

“By the 1880s, hay fever had become the pride of America’s leisure class and the basis for a substantial tourist economy that catered to a culture of escape” (11). “Hay fever tourism not only reinvigorated weary bodies and landscapes but also reinvented nature into an economic resource for health and pleasure. Like axe and plow, hay fever left a mark upon the landscape, visible to this day.” (13) Treatment for hay fever then shifted from therapeutic wilderness to urban clinics through pollen vaccines and “a partnership between doctors and botanists created by the necessity to address the ecology of hay fever as a disease” (54). “Through the spaces of the laboratory, clinic, and field, new ecological relationships between people and plants were forged” (54-5).

“In turning pollen into poison, allergists and patients transformed more than botanical knowledge. They forever altered the place of certain plants in American life.” (65)

“In isolating emotions from the complex of environmental factors that contributed to the severity of asthma and in adopting a rehabilitation program focused on a closed, institutional model of medical care, clinical allergists banked on biomedical technology to engineer a breathing space once sought in the healing places of nature. It was a space located not outside the body but within it.” (120)

“But the desire to be free of nature through the creation of an artificial environment was an unrealistic quest. The home, it would be discovered, had its own ecology, shaped by changing relationships of building materials and design, home furnishings and décor, and behavior patterns of human and nonhuman residents. It was an ecology not so easily ignored.” (171)

“How much easier to take a pill or a puff than to move to the mountains or lakeshore or desert—so much easier than addressing issues of land use, rethinking building construction, or confronting structural inequities in housing and health care in American society. We take a pill or a puff, feel better, and conveniently ignore how that chemical moving inside our bodies connects us to a larger political economy and ecology of allergic disease.” (249)

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree with another a reviewer that this book was, at times, a bit of a snooze-fest and took me a very long time to get through.

However, the thesis of book (that the modernist attempt to overcome our biological and physiological vulnerabilities via technological innovation ultimately obscures and neglects responsibility for the complex and interconnected relationships between and among humanity and the natural world) is an important one that stretches far beyond the area of medicine and epidemiology.

I was impressed at how the author’s exploration addresses not just historical and medical developments but also economic, social, racial and political realities.

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book. Mitman looks at essentially the social construction and response to allergies. Starting with mountain retreats for the well to-do, he then moves through Western escapes and the self-sabotage of those Western cities built on the concept of good health. I really appreciated his overview of how industrial momentum during the big wars was integral to the current allergy industry.

[Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's a review I wrote for a history class, but it kind of gives the gist of the book:

“A low-grade headache, right at the line of my eyes. And a scratchy throat.” I whine to my mother on the other end of the line. Throughout Gregg Mitman’s Breathing Space: How allergies shape our lives and landscapes, I scoffed the physical weakness of hay fever suffering elitists turned scientists or entrepreneurs or druggists. That is, until today when I was reminded of my own allergy to the mitigated air quality of my town, which is not unlike any other town in the United States: it borders a more “wild” area, is gridded with Bermuda and Kentucky grasses, and finds financial support in a sundry of industries. This town has housing projects and climate-controlled offices and immigrants, both herb and hominid, all ordinary places and spaces and people which Mitman unveils as somehow marginalized by a drive to eradicate that which ails us: allergens.

Though he blows plot secrets in the introduction, Mitman’s surprises are in his prose and humor, despite the high stakes: that the “increased technological optimism [made] Americans confident in their ability to rid the landscape of allergy” also enabled the population to believe and to consume as if they could create a pristine, non-combative interior landscape, both in their homes and within the bounds of the body (7). These major themes are best played out in the chapters “On the Home Front,” a history of the innovations to cleanse our personal and private spaces, “Choking Cities,” a stab at the hypocrisy of American indifference to their own inner-city citizens’ suffering while sending children from all over the world to high-cost, remote “scratch test centers,” both bastions of relief and experiment. Though the theme of environmental justice runs like a nose throughout the book, beginning with a hilarious anecdote on a chain-wielding Mr. T, he takes a stronger critical look at the governmental institutions that enabled the architecture and bureaucracy of interior allergy than other texts in the field. Like the terrible movie John Q., there are moments where Mitman seems to say lets take it to the streets, as in 1964 New York, because health is worth fighting for (155)!

Mitman’s ability to synthesize not only the complex political, economic, and social climates but the history of medicine and technology make this text useful for pre-med and post-medicated people alike. An undergraduate course might find specific chapters useful for grounding what is now the post-modern perspective: there is no outside. As an ecology student, I longed for more extensive histories on plants, production, and a kind of Pollanesque perspective, as well as denser chemical discussion in lieu of drawn out stories of obscure poets sniffling. Also, the rhetorical links of ragweed, also called “river-rat” and “slum dweller,” to less-desirable human populations, as Peter Coates has made opaque, seemed under utilized (55). Still, Mitman’s collection of images, affection for irony and overwhelming knowledge of medicine legitimate this book as a supporter of what is most important: “the evolving relationship of body and place” (250).

So change your AC filters, pop a non-drowsy Claritin (though you won’t need the pseudoephedrine) and settle into your microbial, pollen, lice, mite, cockroach, dander, mystery-free world for a read that will have you wondering if it is even possible.

[Zachary G. Augustine · Rating 4 out of 5]

It sits at the blurry intersection of the history of technology, anthropology, and sociology. This field has come into its own in the last twenty years,and I believe can be more properly called a history of the senses, perhaps first popularized by Corbin's The Foul and The Fragrant in 1988. Works by Leora Auslander, Jan Goldstein, Emily Thompson, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch--among other modern historians--also overlap into this emerging specialization.

Breathing Space represents the genre's ideal. It is objective yet speculative. It brings a fine lens to detail yet one can always see what point is being made. Best of all, it makes the mundane extraordinary. That's all history can ever hope to do.

The goal is not to find how past thinkers were wrong--for example, how they considered allergies as a racial symptom or smell as the source of disease, both ideas now discredited--but rather to find out why they thought that way and what that says about us. How enlightening those two "unscientific mistakes" then become!

[Ashley Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

You know, this book is more or less what you think it's going to be. Lots and lots of information on the history of allergies and how they have developed in our lives, in the media, in medicine, etc. Theoretically, it's neat and as an allergy sufferer I found the premise of the book very interesting.

However, I do think it fell short. I really wasn't following Mitman's organizational strategy. Halfway through the book I really began to question "what is the point of this?" and to be honest, he never really gave one. Ultimately it read as a detailed timeline of history from the eyes of allergies. Some parts were interesting, but truthfully it took me five months to read it because it just kept putting me to sleep.

It's an okay book - well written, interesting subject, but in the end I think you /really/ need to be into allergies or you won't enjoy the book.

[Chi Dubinski · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a scientific history of asthma and its treatments in the United States. Mitman draws on environmental, medical, and cultural history. He argues that medical science has "misunderstood the complex environmental relationships that produce allergiy responses--and sometimes even kill." Solutions to allergies have included hay fever resorts, herbicides, air-conditioning, and potions and pills. "Allergy is the sixth leading cause of chronic illness in the United Stes. More than fifty million Americans suffer from allergies, and they spend an estimated $18 billion coping with them."

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting look at the emergence of allergies in America and the various ways in which they have been treated (which break along class and racial lines). Quick read.

[Kevin Kosar · Rating 2 out of 5]

My review of this very uneven book appeared in The Weekly Standard...