It also makes it a duty, for historical purposes, to write down the sellectchem record, even if possibly biased by personal prejudice. In my eyes, the IAA has gone through several distinct periods��distinct on the one hand through the rapid evolution of allergology and immunology and on the other hand under the impulse of some of its presidents. 1951 to 1965: Toward an International Clinical and Scientific Association Around the end of World War II, under the impulse primarily of physicians such as Robert Cooke, Mary Loveless, and Fred W. Wittich and scientists such as Merrill Chase in the United States, William Frankland in the United Kingdom, Pasteur Val��ry-Radot and Bernard Halpern in France, and Mauricio Rocha e Silva in Brazil, the concept of allergic diseases based on similar pathophysiological mechanisms emerged.

These diseases affected different organs, such as the nose (rhinitis), the lungs (asthma), the skin (urticaria, atopic eczema, and contact dermatitis), the eye (conjunctivitis), or the cardiovascular system (anaphylaxis). Hence, various medical specialists (dermatologists, internists, otorhinolaryngologists, and ophthalmologists) were primarily involved in their diagnosis and treatment. Around 1950, nobody had been primarily or exclusively trained as an allergist. And it is the discovery of various biological phenomena (reaginic antibodies: Prausnitz and K��stner; antigens and antibodies: Landsteiner and Heidelberger; allergens: Blackley and Haurowitz; and sensitized lymphocytes: Chase) underlying the various clinical phenomena that really created some unity of thinking and provided the emergence of allergy as a medical and scientific discipline.

Among the biologists involved, many had been trained in microbiology because that field had already been familiar for half a century with the notions of antigens, antibodies, and immunity. These were exciting times because each year provided some new building blocks to add to what soon seemed as a new pyramid of knowledge and as a coherent system. I became personally involved early in 1953 because in view of a medical experimental thesis,5 I became one of the first to reproduce and document histologically the classical transfer of contact dermatitis by sensitized lymphocytes in guinea pigs, originally described by Merrill Chase in 1942. This was the first experimental demonstration that lymphocytes are involved in immunological allergic sensitization.

It is this work that launched my own interest and career in allergy and immunology. But at that time, a number of AV-951 older and scientifically renowned people had already generated the vision of allergy and immunology, responsible for some common biological mechanisms and a multitude of clinical consequences. This became the major impulse in the creation of a new international medical and scientific association, the IAA.