Simon Schama is best known as a chronicler of art and European history, so it is perhaps surprising to find him immersing himself in the subjects of pandemics and immunology and their resulting fallout.
The Intriguing History of Cancer Immunotherapy – The Greanville Post greanvillepost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from greanvillepost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
January 16, 2021
We tend to think that immunotherapy is a very recent medical achievement, originating no later than a couple of decades ago. As a matter of fact, the very beginning of immunotherapy sensu lato might be traced back to the China’s Qin dynasty period, around the third century BC. Although difficult to prove, scarce written resources mention purposeful inoculation with variola minor virus in order to prevent smallpox disease (1, 2). Many centuries later, in 1718, this practice was also reported in the Ottoman Empire by Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the wife of the British ambassador residing in Istanbul (1). Inspired by local custom and its positive outcome, she tried to popularize inoculation on her return to England but met with no success due to the resistance and general disbelief of British physicians. Nevertheless, in 1765, Dr. John Fewster presented a similar report in front of the London Medical Society members . Not long after that, in 1796, Edward Jenner demon
The Beginnings
From ancient Egypt, some 3,000 years ago, to the early nineteenth century there have been multiple anecdotal reports of tumors disappearing spontaneously or after an infection with concomitant high fever (3, 4). The similarity between cancer and inflammation was described for the first time by the Greek physician, Galen, who noted that cancer might evolve from inflammatory lesions (5). The first scientific attempts to modulate patients immune systems to cure cancer can be attributed to two German physicians, Fehleisen and Busch, who independently noticed significant tumor regression after erysipelas infection (4). They both described their observations and tried to repeat them later on, with little success (4). Eventually, Fehleisen managed to properly identify the bacterial strain responsible for the erysipelas and tumor shrinkage as