Antihistamine Substances

Abstract

As one of those who took part in the recognition of hista- mine in nature and in the first detailed examination of its intense physiological activities, I shall try to avoid the temptation to be unduly reminiscent. I may just remind you that at that time, nearly 40 years ago, much interest in circles concerned with experimental pathology was centred on the syndrome of the anaphylactic reaction and on the curious differences which it presented in the different species. You can imagine that Laidlaw and I (Dald and Laidlaw, 1910, 1911) had to discipline our eagerness as we examined one by one the actions of histamine on the different organs and systems of the dog and the guinea-pig in particular, and found them fitting neatly, like units of a jigsaw puzzle, into the contrasting pictures of the anaphylactic reactions in those two species as others had then recently described them. Biedl and Kraus (1910) had already drawn attention to the close correspondence-even closer, in fact-between the contrasted reaetions of the normal dog and guinea-pig to intravenous Witte's peptone and those of the anaphylactic dog and guinea-pig to the reinjection of the antigen. I well remember Biedl's account of this at the International Physiological Congress in Vienna in 1910; and my own decription later in the same programme of the newly discovered and, except for a few points, identical effects of histamine on the same two