Our Immune System: Humanity’s Greatest Battle

It is much more than a book about humanity’s discovery of the immune system. The memory of the enemy by Arnaldo D’Amico (il Saggiatore editions) is in fact a novel, and the novel has a captivating plot and language and the desire not to break away until at least the difference between gray and black rats in the spread of the plague has been discovered. the casual discovery of the importance of quarantine, or trivially of washing your hands.

The story of the great epidemics

D’Amico, who is a doctor and has long been a journalist for the Republic and indeed a science reporter, in this book also holds the reader’s hand little accustomed to medicine and guides him, attracting him with historical reconstructions and anecdotes, along the life of man grappling with great epidemics, with sudden and unstoppable deaths, and diseases of which little was understood and even less managed to intervene. D’Amico tells of long journeys by ship and the forced closeness between men, together with poor hygiene and rules of daily life, which acted as a detonator for any infectious disease that even casually arrived on board. But not only ships: the diseases arrived with caravans, with conflicts, with the movement of human beings, neither more nor less than what is happening now: just think of the Covid that arrived in the blink of an eye too with a plane line.

The epidemics, therefore, of plague, cholera, smallpox, leprosy that have scourged and decimated humanity for centuries. That humanity that has tried in every way to find a cure, sometimes coming across it by chance, as often happens in medicine and as happened in the case of cinchona roots for malarial fever. A journey, well, this book is a long journey across continents and time, through knowledge that didn’t exist and the hypothesis that stars or other natural events cause diseases.

But that’s not all: by chance men discover that the plague in the fourteenth century was slowed down by quarantine and sanitary cordons which, by loosening contacts between men, slowed down the progression of the disease and therefore worked. Even if not everyone is willing to respect them in order not to lose money. What was needed – then as now, just think of the lockdown – were public health regulations, then as now the only and effective system to stop the pathogens from spreading.

Two thousand years to discover the immune system

But The memory of the enemy, the result of seven long years of research and study by the author, is also something else. And in that other there is not only the journalist’s curiosity, but that of the doctor: the discovery of the immune system, and why it took two thousand years to discover it (subtitle of the book). And the birth of the first vaccines, with the development of the scientific method by Pasteur up to the “birth” of immunology with the consecration of the first Nobel Prize for Medicine, the one awarded in 1901 to Emil von Behring and Paul Ehrlich, the first for demonstrating, using the tetanus bacillus, that immunity occurs in animals treated with tetanus cultures because a substance that destroys toxins has appeared in the liquid part of the blood, an antitoxin whose effectiveness is tested – after verifications about animals – about a child doomed to die, saving him. And the second, Ehring, for discovering that an antibody is specific, that is, it hooks and neutralizes only the toxin for which it was produced by the body.

Vaccines and the smallpox case

From now on, there really isn’t a sector of Medicine that doesn’t use the tools developed by immunology to create smart drugs that only hit their target. And using that knowledge to develop vaccines which, however, despite the commitment of research “still remain ineffective or unsafe and therefore unsuitable for mass prevention”. Except in the case of the first truly exterminated enemy: smallpox. Which not surprisingly concludes the author’s novel-essay.