Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady

by Mark Jackson

Every spring, summer, and fall it descends on us, bringing rounds of sneezing, headaches, and stuffed noses. It attacks through foods, animals, plants, and innumerable chemical combinations. It is among the most common and potentially lethal afflictions known. It has a unique history as both a medical condition and a cultural phenomenon. It is the allergy, the subject of Mark Jackson’s fascinating chronicle.

Only a century ago, allergies as we know them didn’t exist. Ailments such as hay fever, asthma, and food intolerance were considered rare and non-fatal diseases that affected only the upper classes of Western society. Yet, as Jackson reveals here, what began in the early 1900s as a scorned subfield of immunology research in Europe and America exploded into great medical, cultural, and political significance by the end of that century. Allergy traces how the allergy became the archetypal “disease of civilization,” a fringe malady of the wealthy that became a disorder that bridged all socioeconomic boundaries and fueled anxieties over modernization. Jackson also examines the social impact of the allergy, as it required new therapeutic treatments and diagnostic procedures and brought in vast economic rewards.

Whether cats, crabgrass, or cheese is the source of your daily misery, Jackson’s engaging and in-depth historical narrative is an invaluable addition to the history of medicine as well as to the history of culture. In Allergy , sneezing readers can discover themselves at the center of deep cultural currents.

Genres: Nonfiction, Health

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Mark Jackson is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments and Health at the University of Exeter. After qualifying in immunology in 1982 and medicine in 1985, he pursued research on the social history of infanticide and the history of `feeble-mindedness’ at the Universities of Leeds and Manchester. More recently, he has been researching and writing on the history of allergies and stress in the modern world, from an international perspective. His major publications include New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England (1996), The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain (2000), Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady (2006), Asthma: The Biography (2009), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (ed., 2011), The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability (2013), The History of Medicine: A Beginners Guide (2014, shortlisted for the Dingle Prize), Stress in Post-War Britain, 1945-85 (ed., 2015), and The Routledge History of Disease (ed., 2016). He is currently writing a cultural history of the midlife crisis and health in middle age.

He has a strong interest in developing the undergraduate medical curriculum, creating opportunities for wider public engagement activities, and collaborating with health practitioners and policy-makers to enable health and well-being. He was Senior Academic Adviser (Medical Humanities) to the Wellcome Trust (2013-16), has served as Chair of the Wellcome Trust History of Medicine and Research Resources Funding Committees, (2003-13), and was a member of the History sub-panel for REF 2014. He is Chair of the WHO Europe Expert Advisory Group on the Cultural Contexts of Health and a member of the WHO European Advisory Committee on Health Research.