FREE NEJM E-TOC    HOME   |   SUBSCRIBE   |   CURRENT ISSUE   |   PAST ISSUES   |   COLLECTIONS   |   Search Term  Advanced Search

Sign in | Get NEJM's E-Mail Table of Contents — Free | Subscribe

Previous Volume 330:1397-1398 May 12, 1994 Number 19

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

	Full Text Purchase this article Add to Personal Archive Add to Citation Manager Notify a Friend E-mail When Cited

Edited by Constantin A. Bona, Katherine A. Siminovitch, Maurizio Zanetti, and Argyrios N. Theofilopoulos. 795 pp., illustrated. Langhorne, Pa., Harwood Academic, 1993. $175. ISBN 3-7186-0555-4.
Edited by Antonio Coutinho and Michel D. Kazatchkine. 459 pp. New York, Wiley-Liss, 1994. $84.95. ISBN 0-471-59227-7.

The skepticism that once prevailed when the topic of autoimmunity came up in a discussion, or when a "so-called" autoimmune disease entered the differential diagnosis, is difficult to appreciate today. The dogma of the time -- an era that began around 1930 and ended, finally, around 1960 -- was that an antibody could not be an autoantibody. This assumption swayed otherwise reasonable people to invent labels like "erythrocyte-coating substances," even though they knew that those "substances" were antibodies.

"So-called" began disappearing from the beginning of "autoimmune disease" about 35 years ago; one interesting reason for the new attitude was the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

HOME  |  SUBSCRIBE  |  SEARCH  |  CURRENT ISSUE  |  PAST ISSUES  |  COLLECTIONS  |  PRIVACY  |  HELP  |  beta.nejm.org Comments and questions? Please contact us. The New England Journal of Medicine is owned, published, and copyrighted © 2008 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.