The Root of all our Allergies

As far as we know, he didn’t suffer from allergies. Nor, as a doctor, did he treat anyone for allergies. As a researcher, he didn’t focus on allergies. Yet Clemens von Pirquet made a huge contribution to the study of allergies: he coined the word.

A noted Austrian pediatrician at the turn of the last century, von Pirquet was treating diphtheria patients with a horse serum antitoxin and observed them break out with strange, non-disease-related symptoms. He believed that this “acquired, specific, altered capacity to react to physical substances on the part of the body was caused by external influences such as food intake, the air breathed, or direct skin contact. “For this general concept of the changed capacity for reaction,” he wrote in 1906, “I propose the term ‘allergy.’” He also introduced the word “allergen” to describe a substance that effects these chemical changes.

Von Pirquet coined the word from the Greek “allos,” meaning changed or altered state, and “ergon,” meaning reaction or reactivity. Today, we know allergies to be the result of the body’s change when it reacts adversely to a harmless substance.

Funny…we know through writings that in ancient Greece , Hippocrates had recognized the presence of allergic reactions in people. Yet it took more then 2,000 years for an Austrian to come up with a Greek-based name for it.

Copyright GlaxoSmithKline. Used with permission

Back to Allergy Contents.

Back to Home Page.