Press release: Allergy by Mark Jackson
The sight of blooming flowers and lush green fields fills some people with dread. Cuddly kittens and puppies cause others to cry instead of smile. And a bumblebee will send many running for the nearest building. Why? It's all due to one of the most subtle yet widespread medical afflictions of our times: the allergy.
In this engaging and groundbreaking social history, Mark Jackson unearths the rich and wide-ranging roots of this "modern malady." Until the early twentieth century, the allergy didn't even exist. And even when it was first diagnosed in the early 1900s, the allergy was merely considered a rare affliction of the affluent and it subsisted as a scorned subfield of immunological research. Yet with advances in medical research and the rapidly increasing number of diagnoses, doctors quickly realized that the allergy knew no bounds of race or class.