The era between the Golden Age of Microbiology in the 1880 and the onset of the Antibiotic Revolution in the 1940's has been characterized, historically, as a barren time for therapeutic attacks upon infectious diseases (especially in view of the emerging findings of basic science), as though scientists and practitioners """"""""awaited"""""""" such an inevitable Revolution. The proposed manuscript, relating the history of the treatment of pneumonia with antiserum between 1892 and 1942, would be an attempt to challenge such a characterization, with several consequences: 1) Through relating the rise of antipneumococcal serotherapy atop the support of applied immunology and controlled clinical trials in the first four decades of this century, it would demonstrate the tensions that accompanied the reformulation of the treatment of infectious diseases, as """"""""specific"""""""" attacks on specific organisms accompanied and then replaced the physiological support of patients themselves. Demonstrating such a reformulation which antedated the onset of the Antibiotic Revolution itself would permit the modem approach to the pneumonia patient (as type for all infectious diseases) to be placed in historical context, identifying the origins of such an approach s eventual narrowing. 2) While utilizing pneumonia to demonstrate such broad therapeutic themes, the manuscript would likewise dissect the historical disease category of pneumonia itself from anatomical to microbiological entity, from private disease to public health issue to demonstrate further the plasticity of such categories and the medical profession s approach to them. 3) Finally, through an analysis of the transition from antiserum to chemotherapy and antibiotics for the treatment of pneumonia in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the manuscript would expose the heterogeneous nature of this """"""""revolution"""""""" itself (and perhaps, to some degree, most therapeutic """"""""revolutions""""""""), as well as the implications of the rhetorical aspects of such a revolution in the first place for the subsequent approach by the medical profession to pneumonia and to its own history.
| Podolsky, Scott H (2005) The changing fate of pneumonia as a public health concern in 20th-century America and beyond. Am J Public Health 95:2144-54 |
