Medical history

The Centre for Medical History is part of Exeter’s College of Humanities. The Centre was set up in 1997 to enhance the University's reputation for research within the field of medical history and for the social study of contemporary medical and health-related activities. Work is supported by the Wellcome Trust. Recent scholarship has yielded significant results in fields such as the history of insanity, contraception, mental disability, fertility, infanticide, medical statistics and the development of institutional care.

Tracing the rise of allergies

Dust, wheat, cats, pollen – enough to bring a tear to the eye of many sufferers of allergies. About a third of the UK population will develop an allergy of some sort during the course of their lives, according to a recent House of Lords report. Allergic diseases have trebled in the last 20 years to the point where the UK has one of the highest incidences in the world.

As this rise takes place in rich countries, allergies are less common in developing countries, and experts fail to agree on where to point blame. Medical historians at the University of Exeter have traced the rise of allergy in the past few hundred years, and a book by Professor Mark Jackson feeds this debate by suggesting that class, fashion and socio-economic factors can also help to explain this rise.

“Allergy truly is a modern malady”, said Professor Jackson, Director of the Centre for Medical History. “As well as the biological and environmental explanation for modern preoccupations with allergy, there are cultural elements. Allergy acts as a metaphor for other issues – it reflects and feeds wider anxieties about climate change, modern urbanisation and use of chemicals in homes and foods. Popular interest has created a lucrative market for international pharmaceutical, cosmetic and cleaning industries.”

The term ‘allergy’ did not exist one hundred years ago. Diseases now identified as allergic were then considered to be rare and non-fatal, and were seen as desirable by the civilized classes, suggesting sensitivity and culture. By the end of the twentieth century, society’s obsession with allergy had created a billion dollar business and a distinct clinical specialism.

Allergy resonates with other cultural aspects of modern life to gain greater medical, political, socio-economic, and cultural significance. Now allergies are reported on a much wider scale, particularly when deaths occur after asthma attacks, bee stings or from reactions to food.

Hay fever is identified as an archetypal allergic disease, and was first described as recently as 1819. The general consensus at that time linked hay fever with education, learning and sensitivity – it was seen as a male, aristocratic disease, even in medical writing as well as literature. In EM Forster’s Howards End the upper class Schlegel family has it, while a lower class clerk does not. In the nineteenth century 2% of the population reported suffering from hay fever; this figure had risen to 30-40 by the 1980s.

Professor Jackson maintains that although it is more difficult to make the class distinction with larger numbers, there are still supposedly higher figures among the upper classes. “Hay fever still operates as a mark of educational superiority and as a badge of honour, not unlike gout in the eighteenth century. Some people still believe that if you are clever you have hay fever, while people of less educational standing may be diagnosed as having a summer cold instead.”

Professor Jackson rejects critics who claim he is unsympathetic to allergy sufferers, citing personal experience of a severe seafood intolerance and his asthmatic sons. He adds: “In arguing that there is a cultural element to the development and perception of allergy I am not suggesting that people are making it up. However, there is sometimes limited medical evidence for food allergies, for example, and citing allergy has become a convenient, respectable explanation for avoiding some practices or foods.”

A stressful project

The Centre for Medical History team are now turning their attentions to stress, following a £450,000 grant from the Wellcome Trust. A critical history of stress will be researched, which traces the emergence and proliferation of stress research from its origins in the early twentieth century through to it being recognised as a field of research in the 1980s.

With an estimated 13 million working days being lost through stress each year, costing the UK economy over £3.7 billion per annum, the four year project will have a wide impact.

Professor Mark Jackson says: “Despite the centrality of the stress concept in contemporary life, we lack an overarching historical account of the intellectual, political and cultural origins of stress and the various forms in which the condition has been identified and explained.”