Are Allergies Fashionable?

Filed in archive Living with Allergies on August 2, 2006

Having a bout of allergies? There's a feel-good perspective at looking at your allergies, you know. Professor Mark Jackson, author of the new book Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady, suggests allergies have become fashionable; a way to indicate you are a refined individual.

Doesn't that sound nice? Well, I've actually heard it being put that way quite often. Afterall, there is a belief that the word allergy came along with the modern contraptions of life we enjoy nowadays: clean living and exposure to environmental factors that weren't there a hundred years ago. Whether people back then really didn't suffer from allergies, or indeed had but were never diagnosed or named as such, is difficult to determine, though.

Each time you reach for a tissue, or worse, when you're swelling and catching your breath, aristocratic and fashionable may be the last thing you'd feel. But guess what:

"To be allergic to something was an indicator that you were sensitive", says Professor Jackson. "Hay fever was diagnosed most frequently among the middle- and aristocratic classes, some of whom believed that having this affliction was evidence of their superiority.

"Hay fever acquired a specific character as a disease of the educated elite... a sign they were sensitive to their surroundings, that they were delicate and refined."

At the very least, Prof. Jackson's theory that there is a cultural element into allergies is thought-provoking. Read the full story from BBC News. Scroll down to the end, and you'll see a lively discussion going on as well.