Humoral theory of immunity

“But the failure of the cellularist doctrine to gain adherents in the scientific community meant also that many approachable problems in cellular immunology were neglected as being ‘uninteresting’ in the humoralist context of the times. . . . one might reasonably have expected slow but substantial progress in cellular immunology over the next 40 to 50 years. Thus, instead of endless searches for circulating antibody associated with tuberculosis and tuberculin reaction, and contact dermatitis, histopathological studies and their resultant conclusion might have been obtained many decades earlier rather than awaiting the important descriptions of Gell and Hinde, Turk, and Waksman in the 1950s. Such studies might have pointed up much earlier the importance of the lymphocyte in immunological phenomena” (Silverstein, 55).