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 Anderson himself twenty years ago, with an emphasis on the archetype disorder of immunology, autoimmunity, and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, childhood (type 1) diabetes, and multiple sclerosis.
It begins with fever. The authors consider fever in the nineteenth century to be the conceptual equivalent of autoimmunity in our time, because both of them have great influence on identity and sense of self. While autoimmunity could be explained as a destructive reaction of the immune system against the body's own tissues, fever happened when normal functions and regulatory mechanisms went awry, when the system became overexcited and began to damage itself. Whether conceived as a disease of the nerves in the eighteenth century or attributed to an essential disturbance of the blood in the nineteenth century, fever is a disease with its own biography but without any specific lesion, closely related to suffers' own temperament and predisposition, that is, personal diathesis. It was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century, with the advent of germ theory, that practitioners began to view fever as
