Abstract
Introduction to the Special Issue on Immunology.
In the 1880s and 1890s, when understandings of the body’s resistance to disease took a great leap forward, scientists drew on a term of exemption from obligation to describe their new findings on the body’s resistance to disease. As most histories of immunology will recount, immunity as a concept stems from ancient Roman law, in which an individual was exempted from particular duties. In medieval Europe, the term immunity designated the placing of the Church outside of civil control. When scientists in the late 19th century sought a word to describe exemption from illness, they borrowed this term of exclusion, thus embedding medical immunity into a legal-political discourse. As Alfred A. Tauber (1994) has proved so well, the story of medical immunity is also the tale of a metaphor.