Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady

290 Pages·2006·1.74 MB·English

by  Mark Jackson

Allergy
The History of a Modern Malady
Mark Jackson

Allergy

Allergy
The History of a Modern Malady
Mark Jackson
reaktion books
For Siobhán
Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,
Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.
John Donne, ‘The Sunne Rising’
Published by
reaktion books ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London EC1VODX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2006
Copyright © Mark Jackson 2006
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wiltshire
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Jackson, Mark, 1959–
Allergy: the history of a modern malady
1. Allergy 2. Social medicine
I. Title
614.5’993
isbn–10: 1 86189 271 3
contents
Preface 7
1 Histories 9
2 Strange Reactions 27
3 Allergy in the Clinic 56
4 The Global Economy of Allergy 103
5 Civilization and Disease 148
6 Resisting Modernity 185
7 Futures 216
Glossary 222
References 224
Bibliography 274
Acknowledgements 278
Photo Acknowledgements 280
Index 281
‘elixirAnti-Asthmatique’, a French medicine label of 1920.
preface
This book is fuelled by a close personal, as well as professional, interest in the
dramatic emergence and astonishing tenacity of allergies in the modern
world. At the turn of the millennium, an English independent commission on
the organization of the school year strongly recommended adopting a six-
term, rather than the traditional three-term, academic year. Within this frame-
work, the new fifth term, stretching from early April until the end of May, was
to be devoted largely to assessing and examining pupils. In addition to ‘ratio-
nalising the process of assessment’ and making greater space in term six for
induction into the following year’s programmes, this innovative educational
policy was also intended to ‘create more equitable assessment arrangements
for 1.4 million to 1.8 million hay fever sufferers by moving assessment and
examinations out of the main pollen season for grass, which is the major
cause of hay fever’. Drawing strength from concurrent attempts to reform
curricula and modes of assessment throughout the educational system, the
commission believed that the rhythm of school life should be determined, at
least in part, by the prevalence of a minor, albeit distressing, allergic disease.1
Such an educational strategy was not new. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s
and ’80s contributors to the British medical and popular press regularly advo-
cated removing examinations from the peak pollen season on the grounds
that pupils with hay fever suffered both from the symptoms of their condition
and from the sedative effects of medication.2While such arguments failed to
initiate reform 30 or 40 years ago, ongoing efforts to revise the curriculum
may well benefit the next generation of school pupils. In part, the greater
chances of success at the start of the new millennium can be traced to
dramatic shifts in the politics of education since the 1960s and ’70s. More
particularly, however, they can also be explained in terms of a remarkable
global surge in allergic diseases, such as hay fever, asthma, food allergies and
eczema, over the last century. At the start of the twentieth century, when
allergy had no name, hay fever was considered to be a rare disease largely
confined to the educated classes of the Western world. By the 1930sand ’40s
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approximately 1in 30people in developed countries was suffering from the
major manifestations of allergic reactions. In the immediate post-war decades,
it was estimated not only that 10 per cent of the population in the modern
industrialized world was experiencing the symptoms of allergy but also that
the prevalence of allergic diseases was rising rapidly in the developing world.
By the turn of the millennium, 1in 5British children was thought to exhibit
some form of allergy, and allergic diseases had been identified as a significant
threat to global health.
My own family history bears out this broad temporal trajectory. My paternal
grandparents, born in 1898and 1904, ostensibly exhibited no evidence of allergy,
although my grandmother’s older sister did suffer from asthma and eczema.
While my father suffered from hay fever as a child (and indeed was treated for
the condition by John Freeman, one of the leading British allergists) and devel-
oped both asthma and shellfish allergy as a young adult, his sister demonstrates
no signs of allergic reactions except the commonly experienced reactions to
horse serum. On my mother’s side, not only is there a stronger tradition of
allergic reactivity but allergies have also become more prominent over time.
My maternal grandparents, born in 1898 and 1899, exhibited mild allergic
sensitivity: in later life, my grandfather was allergic to penicillin and my grand-
mother had mild hay fever and reacted to certain soaps. Significantly, both
children (although interestingly not their cousins) were allergic: my mother
has suffered from hay fever since the age of eleven or twelve, and her brother
(who died in early adulthood while exploring previously uncharted territory
in Canada) had eczema during the hay fever season.
Given such a prominent family history of allergy as well as the nascent global
configuration of allergies during the twentieth century, there was perhaps no
prospect of escape for my own (or indeed the next) generation: my five siblings
and I all enjoy some form of allergic sensitivity, whether it is hay fever, asthma,
food sensitivity or skin reactions, and our children are beginning to demonstrate
the characteristic rashes, wheezes and sneezes of the allergic constitution. Stim-
ulated in part by the gradual eruption of allergic diseases within the convergent
histories of the Mayhew, Haywood, Griffin, Jackson and Deehan families, this
book is about the emergence of allergy in the modern world. It stretches from the
first tentative formulations of the concept of allergy at the dawn of the twentieth
century through to the exuberant flowering of allergy as a plague of global
proportions at the turn of the millennium.
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