James Cummins Bookseller

St. Petersburg: 1903.

Price: $2,000.00

About the item

First edition in Russian. Text in Russian, translated from the original French. 1 vols. 8vo. Inscribed Classic of Immunology. Original wrapper spine and rear cover present, front wrapper perished.

Item #25789

First Russian edition of a classic of immunology, for which the author won a Nobel Prize in 1908, sharing it with Paul Ehrlich. This copy is inscribed (in Russian): "To Joseph Mankovich Krauzman in fond remembrance from Elia M. Paris 1903."

According to the DSB, Metchnikoff, while in Paris in 1900, "began to write a large and comprehensive book, L'immunité dans les maladies infectieuses (1901). This book was a magnificent review of the entire field of both comparative and human immunology. The work was also, of course, a defense of the theory of phagocytosis, which the humoral theory of immunity seriously challenged. The work of the German bacteriologists, especially Emil Behring, Paul Ehrlich, and Robert Koch, which led to discovery of many new bacteria, toxins, and antitoxins, strengthened the beliefs of those who held to a noncellular theory of immunity ... In 1908 Metchnikoff and Ehrlich shared the Nobel Prize for their researches illuminating the understanding of immunity ... "