Why those pesky allergies follow us wherever we go

"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.

Portions of "Breathing Space" appeared earlier in a journal called "Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Medical Studies," plus another journal called "Bulletin of the History of Medicine." Those references on the copyright page made me quake, but from the first page of the text, Mitman hooked me — and I am not an allergy sufferer.

The overarching revelation of the book is that allergies are not simply linked to cat hair or playroom dust or a type of weed. Instead, allergies tend to follow their sufferers, because their causes are linked to the quality of the air, the quality of the water and the overall environment (both human-made and nature-made).

Consider Tucson, Ariz., long considered a haven for allergy sufferers because of the warm, sunny, dry climate. During the 1920s, civic leaders began advertising Tucson as the place to reside to shed allergies. The city grew like crazy. By the early 1930s, it included 21 sanatoriums, four hospitals and four luxury hotels, plus expensive single-family residences springing up everywhere.

Inevitably, all that building, all those extra people and all their automobiles altered the desert landscape. Air-pollution levels rose precipitously, with new industrial employers contributing heavily. The lawns of the well-to-do and the imported trees lining new streets emanated pollens. Bermuda grass, thought of as attractive, "was the first of the most potent allergens to be introduced into the desert landscape."

Mulberry trees planted to spruce up low-rent trailer parks carried allergens. So did olive trees placed at new shopping malls and expensive apartment complexes. Both the poor and the wealthy who had moved to Tucson to escape allergies began to suffer all over again.

Other cities, once promising for allergy sufferers, mirrored the Tucson experience. Mitman seems to cover them all, thereby presenting overwhelming evidence that geographic cures last only briefly, because the sufferers carry with them the seeds of destruction.

Mitman demonstrates just as vividly that hiding inside a home is rarely a magical remedy, either. He recounts the rise of air conditioning, a seemingly promising development for allergy sufferers. But shutting homes tight while the air conditioning ran led to indoor air pollution.

"Tightly sealed homes now tightly contained the vapors given off by synthetic building materials like particleboard and wall-to-wall carpeting, as well as any household chemicals, tobacco smoke and combustion products of gas cook stoves and heaters that might be present," Mitman notes. "The home environment, once considered a safe haven, became an ecological nightmare."

Naturally, Mitman covers medical treatments for various allergies. He understands that such treatments offer temporary relief, and sometimes lifelong relief. For most allergy sufferers, though, no magic medical formula exists.