Breathing Space

More coverage of "Breathing Space" from The New England Journal of Medicine

The November issue of The New England Journal of Medicine recently reviewed Gregg Mitman's book Breathing Space recently published by Yale University Press. 

"In telling the story of allergy in the United States, Mitman weaves a rich tapestry with a variety of colorful characters...This book is a masterful recounting of society's struggles with allergy, and Mitman tells the story with a powerful emphasis on the social and personal factors that influenced the outcomes....The story not only is interesting but also is told with such panache that it is a page turner and at times even a whodunit."
-- Gerald J. Gliech, University of Utah School of Medicine

Read the whole NEJM article (PDF format)

Listen to a Yale Press Podcast with the author.

Major nod from The Journal of the American Medical Association

The November issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reviewed Gregg Mitman's book "Breathing Space," published by Yale University Press. 

"His argument, supported by a well-researched body of data in the book, is that understanding how the human organism interacts with the evolving external environment is crucial and that complete comprehension of allergic disease requires a balanced inquiry into both internal and external human milieus. Mitman’s personal experience with asthma brings a heightened sense of urgency to this rather unique work. This book is a must-read for allergists and immunologists, particularly those still in training. The book will also be of interest to general physicians, who are at the front lines of caring for patients with allergic diseases, and to general readers interested in the complex interplay of environment and human disease."
-- Katherine Gundling, MD
University of California, San Fransciso

Read the whole JAMA article (PDF format)

Listen to a Yale Press Podcast with the author.

The Manila Times & Mitman

(Listen to a Yale Press Podcast of Gregg Mitman.)

CENTER FOR GRAVITY
By Rony V. Diaz

The sociology of asthma

Environmental health, until recently, was a minor branch of epidemiology. The germ theory, being still the dominant orthodoxy, environmental health served merely to explain the economic and social settings of disease outbreaks and their pattern of transmission.

With the increasing prevalence of illnesses that are not directly caused by pathogens or viruses, environmental health has gradually become important in public health policy.

Today, clean water, solid waste management, urban forestry, among others, are aspects of public health policy although they are not taken together with health in government planning and investment.

All this is germane to the subject of my column today. I will deal mainly with the book of Gregg Mitman, a historian of science and medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, that was published this year by Yale University Press. It’s called Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape our Lives and Landscapes.

Christianity Today reviews Breathing Space

The Big Sneeze
What allergies are telling us.
by J. Matthew Sleeth

Lewis Thomas, the noted physician and essayist, mused openly on the allergic tendency of our species. He found the condition without teleological merit, and declared it a "mistake." Now two books—Mark Jackson's Allergy: The History if a Modern Malady and Gregg Mitman's Breathing Space, How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes—are available for those who wish to delve further into this "mistake" that affects 50 million Americans.

Both works are splendidly done. Of the two, Breathing Space is distinctly American while Jackson, a British author, takes a more Continental view. Mitman prefaces his book with a disclosure: he has a personal stake in our allergic landscape. He writes with the authority of one whose childhood was viewed from inside an asthmatic's oxygen tent, and as a parent who, regretfully, has passed this trait on to his son.

Asthma and allergies take root in the new West

Click here for the full article.

Writers on the Range - Writers on the Range - July 30, 2007 by Greg Mitman

Greg Mitman

’Mom, would you really have shipped me off to Denver?’ I asked my mother recently. ’Absolutely,’ she said.

’But imagine,’ I said, ’what it would have been like for a 5-year-old living in an institution, surrounded by doctors and a bunch of asthmatic kids?’

’You were very, very sick,’ she explained.’Nothing helped.’ She told how my doctor had recommended sending me to live at the Children’s Asthma Research Institute and Hospital in Denver. In the 1960s, when I was so sick, this was the best facility for asthmatic children in the United States. For many families, it became a last resort. But, luckily or unluckily for me, it was full up, so I got to stay home.

This talk with my mother helped me understand what propelled thousands of sufferers of asthma, hay fever and consumption, from the 1870s onwards, to abandon family and home to seek relief in the cool mountain air of the Rockies or the dry climate of Tucson.

American writer Helen Hunt Jackson was one such health-seeker. Her decade of seasonal wanderings in search of relief from hay fever ended in Colorado in 1873. Dispatched a year earlier by the New York Independent to write a series about life and landscape on the Western frontier, Jackson found in the Rocky Mountain region ’the divinest air’ she ever breathed. So divine that she was soon saying goodbye to her friend Emily Dickinson and her beloved White Mountains of New Hampshire to take up residence in Colorado Springs. Once settled, she urged her new community to weigh carefully the value of its healthy air against denuded mountainsides and smoke bestowed by the region’s mining and smelting industries.

Runny noses, life in space, voices in our heads and little people

Read the entire Washington Post book review

By Adrian Higgins
Sunday, July 8, 2007; Page BW11

Hay fever got you down? Feel an asthma attack coming on? Drop the inhaler and reach for Gregg Mitman's book instead. His inspired history of these ailments in the United States won't provide a cure but does offer a sort of palliative context. Mitman recounts how, in the 19th century, whole resorts sprang up for gaspers, eye-rubbers and sneezers (with money, of course)...

Mitman's radio tour continues..

Gregg Mitman continues speaking about his recently released book, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape our Lives and Landscapes, with his most recent appearance on WILL AM's weekly radio show Focus 580. Click here to listen in MP3 format, here for RealAudio.

Mitman's recent interview on The Diane Rehm Show

This Tuesday, Yale University Press author Gregg Mitman appeared on 88.5 WAMU's The Diane Rehm Show to talk about the history of allergies and allergy treatments in this country as well as some factors behind today's rising allergy and asthma rates. To listen to his interview, click here to download the segment in Windows Media, or here for Real Audio.

Gesundheit!

(from Chicago magazine -- article published July 2007)

Gesundheit!

A history of allergies reveals some surprising facts about America's past.

Nora O'Donnell

Every summer from 1899 on, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and his family traveled from Oak Park to Walloon Lake in upper Michigan. The retreat inspired Clarence’s son, Ernest, to write the chronicles of Nick Adams. It also gave the elder Hemingway much-needed relief—from his hay fever. A century ago, hay fever sufferers didn’t associate late summer with ragweed’s bloom, says Gregg Mitman, who is documenting the history of allergies. But, he says, “they did associate August 15th as the time their symptoms would appear quite regularly.”

Seasonal allergies, it turns out, didn’t always exist. In his new book Breathing Space (Yale University Press, $30), Mitman, a history of science prof at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, traces their rise back to the railroad expansion of the 1870s, which disturbed soils and sparked ragweed’s invasion.

While sorting through historical and medical archives, Mitman found an urban asthma epidemic from the 1960s—which largely affected Latino and African American communities—that white psychiatrists and clinical allergists at the time attributed to the emotional unrest of the civil rights movement. “That was just . . . shocking to me,” says Mitman, “that physicians and psychiatrists really considered that [as] a viable explanation [for] the first wave of the urban asthma epidemic.” In cities such as Chicago, the epidemic continues unabated to this day.

Click here for the July 2007 issue of Chicago Magazine

Review from The Seattle Times: "...explodes all types of myths about allergies..."

Why those pesky allergies follow us wherever we go
By Steve Weinberg
Special to The Seattle Times

"Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes" by Gregg Mitman, Yale University Press, 312 pp., $30

A university professor who usually writes for highly specialized journals explodes all sorts of myths about allergies in this fascinating book — and does so while avoiding jargon and passive-voice sentences that too frequently infect the prose of academics.

Gregg Mitman teaches medical history and science/technology courses at the University of Wisconsin. His interest in allergies is both professional and personal. He suffered terribly from bronchial asthma as a child, and his son is a sufferer, too.