Immunology

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Before Edward Jenner tested cowpox material on eight-year-old James Phipps in May 1796, the only known defense against smallpox was variolation, deliberate infection with scab material taken from an infected person. Variolation was practiced in China as early as around 1000 CE and reached Europe in the early eighteenth century through travelers arriving from Istanbul. The trial conducted by Jenner showed that cowpox exposure, a far milder disease, produced immunity to smallpox without the risk carried by variolation, and by 1803 the method had been translated into French and Spanish and adopted for vaccination campaigns as far as the Americas and the Far East. Medical historians continue to debate how credit for founding immunization should be divided: the 1796 trial gave the practice a documented scientific method and the name vaccination, but variolation had already demonstrated the underlying principle, deliberate mild exposure producing immunity, for centuries in a tradition Western medicine did not originate. Reading the history honestly means holding both facts at once rather than crediting a single inventor.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Clinical immunology organized slowly in the United States. Two early bodies, the Society for the Study of Asthma and Allied Conditions and the American Association for the Study of Allergy, merged in 1943 to form the American Academy of Allergy, while a separate organization, incorporated in November 1942, later became the American College of Allergists. Before formal certification existed, physicians practicing allergy and immunology typically trained first in internal medicine, pediatrics or otolaryngology, with no unified examination standard. That changed in 1971, when the American Board of Allergy and Immunology formed as a joint board of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Pediatrics, and it has operated since as the specialty's board recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties. Decades earlier, the scientific foundation for the specialty had already been laid by Emil von Behring and Paul Ehrlich, whose work on serum therapy and antibody theory in the 1890s earned von Behring the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1901.