Species and Specificity

An Interpretation of the History of Immunology
Erscheinungsjahr 2002
ISBN: 978-0-521-52523-7
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 473 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 766 g

In the first hundred years of its history, the problems of species and specificity were the core problems of research and practice in immunology. The old botanical dispute about the nature of species reappeared in the late nineteenth century in the disputes of the bacteriologists, to be followed by their students, the immunologists, immunochemists and blood group geneticists. In the course of this controversy, Mazumdar argues, five generations of scientific protagonists make themselves aggressively plain. Their science is designed only in part to wrest an answer from nature: it is at least as important to wring an admission of defeat from their opponents. One of those on the losing side of the debate was the German immunochemist Karl Landsteiner, whose unitarian views were excluded from the state health and medical institutions of Europe, where specificity and pluralism, the legacies of Robert Koch and Paul Erlich, were entrenched.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mazumdar, Pauline M. H.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte
• Naturwissenschaften Chemie Chemie Allgemein Geschichte der Chemie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Geschichte der Psychologie
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biochemische Immunologie
• Naturwissenschaften Physik Physik Allgemein Geschichte der Physik
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Human- und Sozialwissenschaften
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Part I. Specificity and Unitarianism in XIX Century Botany and Bacteriology: 1. The Unitarians; 2. The Linnaeans; 3. The dominance of specificity; 4. The history of XIX century bacteriology from this point of view; Part II. The Inherited Controversy: Specificity and Unitarianism in Immunology: 5. Dichotomy and classification in the thought of Paul Erlich; 6. Max von Gruber and Paul Erlich; 7. Max von Gruber and Karl Landsteiner; 8. Unity, simplicity, continuity: the philosophy of Ernst Mach; Part III. Chemical Affinity and Immune Specificity: The Argument in Chemical Terms: 9. Structural and physical chemistry in the late XIX century; 10. Erlich's chemistry and its opponents: the dissociation theory of Arrhenius and Madsen; 11. Erlich's chemistry and its opponents: the colloid theory of Landsteiner and Pauli; 12. Erlich's chemistry and its opponents: the new structural chemistry of Landsteiner and Pick; 13. The decline and persistence of Erlich's chemical theory; Part IV. Absolute Specificity in Blood Group Genetics: 14. Immunology and genetics in the early XX century; 15. The specificity of cells and the specificity of proteins; 16. The last confrontation; Conclusion.