The generation of diversity: clonal selection theory and the rise of molecular immunology

Several of the authors point out that while the origins of medical holism (as an oppositional movement) go back to the late nineteenth century, it attracted particular attention between the world wars. Although surprisingly few of them attempt to explain this renaissance, in aggregate these essays none the less tell us quite a lot about the conditions which fostered interwar holism. To begin with, the usual characterization of German holismthat it was mainly rooted in right-wing communitarian ideologies-is highly misleading. As Harrington's essay shows, Kurt Goldstein was on the liberal-left, and he was not alone. (Nor was holism elsewhere tied to communitarianism; in Britain, elite London clinicians championed an individualist political order.) Moreover, it is clear that the ideologized holism common in Germany was not typical of holisms elsewhere. In France and the United States, as Weisz and Brown make clear, holists largely stuck to medical evidence, without appropriating either general antireductionist arguments from biology or cultural criticism from the political arena. Nor were most medical holists in most countries concerned to link their arguments to wider anti-science movements. If we are to account for the intensification of interwar holism, it is probably important to specify which kind of holism is to be explained. If we consider constitutionalist theories, for example, several authors suggest that one reason why they flourished in so many countries is that they could draw support, not only from the limited therapeutic successes of scientific medicine, but also from findings in immunology or eugenics which suggested that "soil" was as important as "seed". This argument is stated most forcefully by Mendelsohn, who argues that bacteriologists' experience of the peculiar properties of epidemics during and after the war made it very difficult to sustain the older view that the germ was all-important in disease. On the other hand, if we want to explain the ubiquity of clinicians' calls for an integrated knowledge of the body, then the prime candidate would seem to be Lawrence's thesis that clinicians' holism was a response to the threatened reorganization of medical work after 1918.