Crystalline Amylase

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Abstract
"Allergy" implies a defensive reaction against a particular antigen in a prepared subject. It is manifested by more or less violent inflammation, doubtless associated with specific chemical changes. This may be either conservative or destructive for an infected host. But sudden amelioration in the course of disease so frequently follows acute allergic disturbance that immunologists generally have come to regard allergy as itself the protective agency against infection and the concomitant of immunity. Against this view A. R. Rich has recently opposed apposite objections the resultant of which is that allergy as such has no place in the chain of events leading to immunity and that the good or harm it may do is accidental. To the writer it has seemed plausible that all these views may be too narrow. Protective reactions against viable enemies must have been primordial, independent of specific chemistry or mechanism. We find obvious analogues in the psychic sphere. Thus, the sense of pain, and the emotion of fear, wholly extra-physiological as they are, nevertheless are reactions conservative of life. The feeling of national spirit unites communities for mutual defense. Like allergy, these powers in certain intensity and coordination, protective to the host, may, uncontrolled, destroy him.

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