Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity

This is a book that resulted from long-term fermentation. It not only provides a concise history of autoimmunity but also aims at telling an unnatural story of immunology. In 1994, as a young scholar in the history of medicine with clinical experience in the 1980s in Australia, Warwick Anderson, along with other scholars, had argued the need to render the history of immunology unnatural, the need to move beyond the evolution of immunological theory carefully delineated by prominent immunologists like Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Niels K. Jerne, the need to look into the clinical, institutional, and cultural spaces of immunology, and the need for prehistories and alternative histories of immunology. Coauthored by Anderson and Ian R. Mackay, a senior clinical immunologist and an important contributor to autoimmunity studies, this book could be read as a reply to the task raised by...