History of Medicine in Context

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 result of discoveries about the immune system. Working outside the narrow confines of laboratory histories, Crafting Immunity is the first attempt to set the problems of immunity into a variety of social, technological, institutional and intellectual contexts. It will appeal not only to historians and sociologists of health, but also to social and cultural historians interested in the biomedical creation of modern health regimens.