A history of autoimmunity that validates the experience of patients
while challenging assumptions about the distinction between the normal
and the pathological.
Winner of the NSW Premier's History Award of the Arts NSW
Autoimmune diseases, which affect 5 to 10 percent of the population, are
as unpredictable in their course as they are paradoxical in their cause.
They produce persistent suffering as they follow a drawn-out, often
lifelong, pattern of remission and recurrence. Multiple sclerosis,
lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and type 1 diabetes--the diseases
considered in this book--are but a handful of the conditions that can
develop when the immune system goes awry.
Intolerant Bodies is a unique collaboration between Ian Mackay, one of
the prominent founders of clinical immunology, and Warwick Anderson, a
leading historian of twentieth-century biomedical science. The authors
narrate the changing scientific understanding of the cause of
autoimmunity and explore the significance of having a disease in which
one's body turns on itself. The book unfolds as a biography of a
relatively new concept of pathogenesis, one that was accepted only in
the 1950s.
In their description of the onset, symptoms, and course of autoimmune
diseases, Anderson and Mackay quote from the writings of Charles
Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Heller, Flannery O'Connor, and other
famous people who commented on or grappled with autoimmune disease. The
authors also assess the work of the dedicated researchers and physicians
who have struggled to understand the mysteries of autoimmunity.
Connecting laboratory research, clinical medicine, social theory, and
lived experience, Intolerant Bodies reveals how doctors and patients
have come to terms, often reluctantly, with this novel and puzzling
mechanism of disease causation.
