Studies in Specific Hypersensitiveness

[摘要] The assumption that hay-fever could be explained on the basis of anaphylactic hypersensitiveness (1) and the suggestion (2) that the dyspnea of the asthmatic patient resembles the bronchospasm of the guinea pig in severe anaphylactic shock, were the starting points of a number of investigations into the mechanism of human hypersensitiveness.Many workers claim to have demonstrated anaphylactic antibodies in the serum of human individuals afflicted with the diverse forms of hypersensitiveness (3, 4, 5, 6, 7), but the results are in general unconvincing (8, 9).In 1921 Prausnitz and Küstner (9) discovered an important feature of atopic hypersensitiveness in a case of an individual sensitive to fish. They were able to demonstrate sensitizing substances in the blood of this individual by local passive transfer not to the skin of the guinea pig but to the skin of another human individual not sensitive to fish.A most interesting and suggestive case was reported by Ramirez (12).

[学科分类] 生物科学（综合）