In 1966, a severely asthmatic child named Gregg
Mitman was one of an estimated 12.6 million allergy sufferers in
the United States. Today, allergic asthma and hay fever affect more
than 50 million Americans – roughly 20 percent of the population.
In Breathing Space, Mitman, now a medical
historian, traces the causes and effects of this national allergy
boom.
His fascinating history shows how the evolution of
modern life exacerbated allergies: As people moved from country to
city, developed pollution-spewing industries, and spent more time
indoors, allergy, once thought to be a rarefied affliction of the
upper classes, became a clearly democratic disease.
While
civilization fosters allergies, Mitman writes, allergies also shape
the society that breeds them. His entertaining history of hay fever
documents how, beginning in the late 1800s, the disease drove a
resort craze, helping turn the White Mountains of New Hampshire and
the shores of Lake Michigan into posh getaways where the rich could
breathe free. When allergy sufferers turned to the Rockies and the
Southwest, ill newcomers fueled the development of several
hospitals and treatment centers in Denver – by 1920, cure-seekers
made up an estimated 40 percent of the city’s population- and
kicked off a similar building boom in Tucson. Allergy sufferers
such as writer Joseph Wood Krutch, who moved to Tucson in the 1950s
to cure his asthma, were especially sensitive to the natural assets
of the West, and were among the region’s first conservationists.
But in the West, as in the East, modern life soon intruded,
bringing ornamental trees, pollution, and other allergens into
once-pristine climes.
With the development of
antihistamines and other drugs, Mitman argues, the complex
environmental causes of allergies were pushed aside, while the
social injustices of allergy treatment endured. Today, pricey
asthma drugs are just as inaccessible to the poor as a hay-fever
holiday in New Hampshire or Colorado. “We can continue to grope at
individual causes and remedies, one after another, hoping to
fortify our bodies against an ever-changing environment with an
ever-changing barrage of drugs,” Mitman concludes. “Or we can learn
from history and do better.”
Breathing Space:
How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes Gregg Mitman
312 pages, hardcover: $30.
Yale University Press,
2007
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The hidden history of a sneeze.
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