Crafting Immunity: Working Histories of Clinical Immunology / Edition 1

ISBN-13: 9780754657590 Publisher: Taylor & Francis Publication date: 03/28/2008 Series: The History of Medicine in Context Edition description: 1 Pages: 320 Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.30(d) Immunity is as old as illness itself, yet historians have only just begun to take up the challenge of reconstructing the modern transformation of attempts to protect against disease. Crafting Immunity assembles in one volume the most recent efforts of an international group of scholars to place the diverse practices of immunity in their historical contexts. It is this diversity that provides the book with its greatest source of strength. Collectively, the papers in this volume suggest that it was the craft-like, small-scale, and local conditions of clinical medicine that turned the immunity of individuals and populations into biomedical objects. That is to say, the modern conception of immunity was at least as much the product of the work of healing as it was the systematic resul