« Stimuler les phagocytes » : controverses autour de la naissance de l'immunité cellulaire à Paris à la fin du XIXe siècle au début du XXe siècle

Abstract

This article traces the imaginative and linguistic work at play in the history of immunity from late nineteenth to early twentieth century France, culminating with Elie Metchnikoff, the “father” of immunology, and his discovery, the phagocyte. Metchnikoff founded a new discipline on the back of this small, ravenous actor, positing the “eater cell” as both the solution to and problem worsening the body's lack of synchronicity with itself and its surroundings. His inquiry rejoins discourses of decadence in its ontological anxiety about what determines self from other and how to go about restoring “harmony” - i.e. intactness and integrity - to fundamentally disharmonious, modern man, whose life, stripped of transcendence, is inexorably bound by time and biology.