The natural history of hay fever and asthma.

Abstract

DR. John Freeman was a pioneer. When Sir Almoth Wright,1 in 1897, found antibodies in the blood of people inoculated with killed typhoid bacilli, the idea that immunity to other organic material might be produced was a logical sequence. Two young men working in his laboratory, Leonard Noon and John Freeman, became interested in hay fever. They had read the remarkable book, Experimental Researches on the Causes and Nature of Catarrhus Aestivus (Hay-Fever or Hay-Asthma), written in 1873 by Charles H. Blackley.2 It was back in 1819, and fifty-four years before Blackley, that John Bostock3 had described his own . . .