Eleventh century

Chinese experience

Smallpox.

To Turkey

Lady Mary Montagu.. w./o ambassador in Constantinople

Children, portrait, her chaplain..

VARIOLATION

Variola = smallpox (Latin)

To ENGLAND Queen Anne son..

In 1879 in France, Louis Pasteur was studying the bacterium that causes a
disease of chickens called fowl cholera. (The bacterium is now called
Pasteurella multocida.) Pasteur possessed a culture of this bacterium that,
when injected into chickens, consistently caused an infection that killed them.
One afternoon he told his assistant, Charles Chamberland, to infect some
birds with the culture. Since it was late in the day and he was about to go on
vacation, Chamberland decided to postpone the experiment until he
returned. As a result, the chickens eventually received an injection of the
bacterial culture that had remained on the bench for several weeks. The
inoculated chickens remained healthy. Pasteur then decided to inject these
chickens with a second dose of bacteria from a fresh bacterial culture. To
Pasteurs surprise, the birds survived this second dose without becoming ill.
Pasteur, with remarkable insight, recognized that this phenomenon was
identical in principle to vaccination. By injecting his chickens with the aged
culture of bacteria (a vaccine), he had protected them against disease caused
by a fresh culture of the same organism.

In 1884, a Russian scientist Elie Metehnlkoff described phagocytosis while

studying infection of the common waterflea, Daphnia. by a fungus.

Based on these studies, Metchnikoff propounded the phagocytic theory.

Inflammatory responses in the body were the result of cellular

reactions rather than vasculogenic reactions as proposed by Julius
Cohnheim.

Metchnikoffs contention was that inflammation is in fact, a protective

rather than a destructive process.

It is now recognised that the phagocytic activity of human WBCs is a primary

line of defense against invasion of the body by pathogenic organisms.

Actually, the importance of activated MACROPHAGES

By the turn of nineteenth century, many scientists preferred to accept the

humoral doctrine based upon the action of circulating Ab s

Because of discovery of bacterial agglutination, immune haemolysis and the

precipitin rxn

Based upon precipitin reaction. Ehrlich proposed his famous side-chain

theory suggesting production of antibodies as polypeptide chains by
lymphocytes when suitably stimulated.

A few years later, the phenomenon of allergy was described and was shown
to be mediated by circulating antibodies

Almorth Wright in 1903 proposed a Theory of opsonisation.

Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato demonstrated that the

protection induced by vaccination was not due to removal of nutrients but
was associated with the appearance of protective factors in the blood

Both antibodies and phagocytes are important in immunity to

infectious diseases, and supplement each other in the destruction of
pathogens.

Called these factors antibodies.

At the turn of 20th century, a greater understanding of immunological

concepts emerged with the discovery of blood group antigens by Karl
Landsteiner in 1900.

Landsteiner discovered A-B-O blood groups which was used for

successful blood transfusions in humans.

This sensational discovery won Landsteiner a Nobel price in 1930.