ABSTRACT
Cultural critics and medical historians have revealed how socio-political values find their way into seemingly neutral scientific concepts like immunity. The concept of a system-wide immunity allowed immunologists to understand the human body as a totality, one whose underlying self drives the developmental processes that culminate in immunity. The origins of autoimmunity began with the early work of German immunologist Paul Ehrlich who first theorised the concept of horror autotoxicus or the body's intrinsic resistance to its own immunological self-destruction. Autoimmunity, as a condition in which the body's own defences turn upon itself, thus had few adherents prior to World War II because the body was presumed to be self-tolerant. Immunity, as a biomedical concept derived from a civic status of exemplarity or exemption from the law, continues to perpetuate this exceptionalism of the immune self that quite literally should "think" for itself.
