Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

1878) The latter being urticaria.
1880 Virchow mentions ‘mystery of individuality’ and ‘ it is the individual
peculiarities which the tissues of certain persons evince in regard to
medicines.’ (Virchow, 1880).
1883 Lewin refers to symptoms, which are not poisonous effects, simply
because they may not occur in 999 cases and yet appear in the
thousandth and he called them ‘that natural peculiarity of each
individual’. (Lewin, 1883).
1885 Morrow in 1885 referred to some rashes as idiosyncrasy, which he
defined as ’abnormal susceptibility to external impressions which is
manifest in certain individuals, a condition which has been regarded
as inexplicable as it is mysterious, as an ultimate fact, unknown and
unknowable.’ He later refers to ‘erythematous and urticarial eruptions
of arsenic, belladonna, bromide of potassium, chloral, copaiba,
digitalis, hyoscyamus, opium, morphia, quinine, strammonium,
salicylic acid, etc., as angio-neurotic phenomena, caused by the
specific action of the drugs in question upon the vaso-motor system’.
(Morrow, 1885).
1902 Portier and Richet first used and defined the term ‘anaphylaxis’ ‘as
that curious property which certain poisons possess of increasing
instead of diminishing the sensibility of the organism to their action.’
(Goodall, 1912).
1903 Serum sickness was first described (Hamburger, 1903).
1905 CF Von Pirquet and B Schick described serum sickness on giving
diphtheria antiserum from horses to man and coined the word
‘allergy’ (Pirquet & Schick, 1905).
1909 Dorland’s Medical Dictionary defined ‘anaphylaxis’ as ‘The state of
excessive susceptibility to the action of a toxin or a drug which
sometimes follows infection or continued administration of a drug.’
1912 In an article entitled ‘Hypersensitivity’ in 1912 it says that anaphylaxis
appears to be confined to proteins, and vegetables, e.g. serum, milk
and bacterial cells, but there is no mention of drugs. Goodall also
described anaphylactoid reactions (Goodall, 1912).
1914 There were cases of anaphylaxis to various drugs including
morphine (Silvestri, 1914).
1914–1915 There was a case of anaphylaxis with mercury which occurred ‘some
years’ before 1917 (Robertson & Fleming, 1918) and this case is the
earliest concerning a drug in man that I have found.