![]() I will then track preceding and competing theories of immunity, highlighting tensions between the French and German schools and exploring disagreements within the French tradition about whether the internal body is passive or active. These investigations led to the articulation of biological immunity, the prophylactic force inherent in the body that stops illness before it takes hold. This interpretation of earthbound human existence – its end and its meaning – sparked an intense interest in the body’s internal workings, particularly its ability to lengthen life by resisting disease. intactness and integrity, organismal and otherwise – to fundamentally disharmonious man, whose very constitution harbors agents undermining his survival.ĥ I will begin broadly by discussing how secularization in Europe during the nineteenth century resulted in an eschatological reformulation of man’s condition. His inquiry rejoins discourses of decadence in its ontological anxiety about what determines self from other and how to go about restoring “harmony” – i.e. Metchnikoff founded a new discipline on the back of a small, ravenous actor, positing the “eater cell” (etymology of phagocyte) as both the solution to and problem exacerbating the body's lack of synchronicity with itself and its surroundings. 5Ĥ In what follows, I will analyze the imaginative and linguistic work at play as I trace immunity in late nineteenth to early twentieth century France, culminating with Elie Metchnikoff and his phagocyte. The language of scientists is limited by what they learn to think and say as individuals, as members of a discipline, and as members of one or, more usually, several larger communities it is simultaneously limited by what they can do, individually and collectively, in their ongoing material interactions with the objects of their inquiry. It also helps shape the ends toward which science aims, if only because we gravitate to problems we’re equipped to formulate and solve. Language simultaneously reflects and guides the development of scientific models and methods. 5 Evelyne Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science, New (.).As Jon Turney remarks, “much of the adaptive immune system is now discussed in terms of conversation, negotiation, cooperation, even diplomacy” 3. According to Alfred Tauber, physician and leading theorist of immunity, the new field of eco-immunology views protection as just one of the immune system’s functions its foremost duty is to process information so as to sort and coordinate responses 2. Over the last fifty years, a number of phenomena ‒ HIV, autoimmunity, the appearance of novel viruses (Ebola, SARS, Zika and most recently COVID-19), not to mention the miracle of organ transplants and the successes of immunotherapies – have challenged this widely accepted paradigm. Indeed, Metchnikoff was the first to describe the body’s encounter with the microbe as a defensive, bellicose reaction immunity marked the hard-fought triumph over the invader. 3 Jon Turney, “Beyond Cell Wars,” Aeon, 28 March 2016, consulted 17 July 2020, on-line: (.)Ģ Clearly, Shaw had read Elie Metchnikoff, or at least knew of his “discovery” of the phagocyte, the superstar cell patrolling the “front lines” of the organism.Tauber, Immunity: The Evolution of an Idea, New York, Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 1 (.) Here, medical vocabulary - vaccination, virus, microbe, inoculation, and even the newly christened phagocyte - have spilled over from the medical domain and entered the literary imaginative stream. Shaw’s usage of the contemporary medical lexicon demonstrates how medical and literary discourse intermingled at the turn of the twentieth century. Peering over his patient’s pallid corpse, the blundering practitioner wonders if he hasn’t administered too much “anti-toxin”, inadvertently expanding the voracious phagocyte’s palette: “Have we over-stimulated the phagocytes? Have they not only eaten up the bacilli, but attacked and destroyed the red corpuscles as well? ave they finally begun to prey on the lungs themselves? Or on one another?”(52). But, as the good doctor learns, stimulation requires a light touch. hey devour the disease and the patient recovers”, instructs Doctor Bonington in The Doctor’s Dilemma, George Bernard Shaw’s 1906 satire that raises the question of who, in the face of limited resources, deserves treatment, which treatment, and at what cost 1. 1 George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Middlesex, Echo Library, 1906, p. 15.ġ “Stimulate the phagocytes.
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