The ALLERGY ARCHIVES Pioneers and Milestones Sheldon Cohen, MD, Editor
Oren C. Durham Born in a sod house on the western edge of Kansas, Oren C. Durham (1889—1967; Fig 1), like many of the early pioneers in allergy, cultivated a childhood interest in botany and natural history into a professional career that greatly influenced the development and practice of allergy as a clinical field. In a rapidly changing world of medicine, in which advances in laboratory research and increased specialization left little room for the amateur, Durham successfully fashioned a career, ‘‘partly in the laboratory and partly out among the weeds,’’ that led to prestigious personal and professional interactions with leading allergists and experts in the field of aerobiology in America, as well as honor and recognition, including the 1948 Abbott Award for Scientific Achievement.1 Trained as a physiotherapist at the Hinsdale Sanitarium in Hinsdale, Ill, after graduating from Union College in Lincoln, Neb, Durham worked as a nurse, teacher, carpenter, and tinsmith among other occupations before he stumbled upon a fledgling career as a pollen hunter. In Galena, Kan, Dr R. Claude Lowdermilk, an uncle to Durham by marriage, first began treating patients with hay fever through active immunizations in 1913,2 just 2 years after Leonard Noon and John Freeman published the initial results of their immunotherapy research in the Lancet. Within a few years, Lowdermilk was alone unable to collect the quantities of pollen needed for the therapeutic treatment of his patients. Durham set out to help, gathering the pollen of ragweed, marsh elder, and other suspected hay fever plants during their blooming seasons. Although Durham originally pursued pollen collecting as a side income, by 1923 the price of pollen, which at $300 an ounce for certain plant species was more than 14 times the price of gold, enabled Durham to abandon his job at a photographic studio in Kansas City to take up pollen prospecting full time.3 That same year, William Duke, a Kansas City physician and early president of the American Association for the Study of Allergy, hired Durham for $3000 to conduct an extensive vegetation survey of approximately 50 wind-pollinated plants in Kansas City and the surrounding region to be used in the
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FIG 1. Oren C. Durham, 1889—1967.
assessment and treatment of his patients with hay fever. The survey, which appeared in JAMA in 1924, marked the beginning of a distinguished research career devoted to the study of the abundance and distribution of allergenic pollens across North America.4 In 1925, Swan-Myers Co of Indianapolis, which merged with Abbott Laboratories in 1930, hired Durham as a ‘‘pollen gatherer for their allergenic products line.’’5 Unlike Roger P. Wodehouse, who held a doctoral degree in plant systematics from Columbia University and would become Associate Director of Research in Allergy at Lederle Laboratories, Durham had no advanced scientific training. However, Durham became a highly respected member of the profession through the assistance and cooperation of some of the leading pioneers in allergy, including Karl Koessler, Samuel Feinberg, and George Piness. Through his scientific exhibits held at the medical meetings of the American Medical Association, state medical societies, the American Public Health Association, and the Academy of General Practitioners, Durham helped increase awareness of allergy treatments among general practitioners, which in turn generated increased sales for Abbott. In 1946, revenues for Abbott’s pollen extracts and other allergens reached an all-time high of $223,878. It was the same year Parke Davis introduced Benadryl, which, along with other antihistamines, would significantly curtail the sales of allergenic extracts. Three years before Durham retired from the position as Chief Botanist at Abbott Laboratories in 1955, company
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officials recognized that the success of their allergenic products line was attributable largely to 1 person, Oren C. Durham. That success was a result of a unique combination of sales and enterprising scientific research. At the time of his death in 1967, Durham had authored, coauthored, or collaborated on more than 50 articles and 11 books in aeroallergen research. A member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Sociedad Espanola de Allergia, an honorary member of the Societe´ Francaise d’Allergie, and an affiliate member of the American Academy of Allergy, as well as an active participant in the Allergy Unit at the University of Illinois College of Medicine and a lecturer at the University of California School of Medicine, Durham, through meticulous research and organizational skill, did more than any other investigator to establish a sophisticated pollen surveillance network reaching across Canada, the United States, Mexico, Cuba, and Ecuador that has become an integral part of daily weather reporting and led to greater medical and public awareness of seasonal allergy and its causes. The comprehensiveness of the surveillance network he helped establish is clearly reflected in the 1955 book he coedited with Max Samter, Regional Allergy of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba.6 As Technical Chairman of the Pollen Survey Committee of the Research Council on Aeroallergens of the American Academy of Allergy from 1944 to 1960, and in cooperation with the Committee on Aerobiology of the National Research Council, Durham pioneered the development of a standardized technique and sampling device—the Durham Gravity Sampler—for obtaining accurate, reliable, and comparative data on pollen counts and indices for particular geographic regions within the United States. Beginning in the late 1940s, under the auspices of the Pollen and Mold Committee of the Research Council of the American Academy of Allergy and Abbott Laboratories, he compiled the popular booklet Hay Fever Holiday to help the person with allergy make summer travel plans. In the early 1950s, more than 10,000 copies were printed annually and distributed to physicians, motor clubs, travel agencies, pharmaceutical firms, air conditioning manufacturers, and the public.7 Durham also helped initiate the first instructional course on pollen and mold identification held in conjunction with the 1951 annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy in New York. Because of the large physician demand for such information, a course on the identification and biology of fungi and pollen and on survey techniques was developed as part of the preannual Academy meeting postgraduate course offerings beginning in 1952. The success of the Pollen Survey Committee helped initiate further sections of the Research Council of the American Academy of Allergy, including the Council on Food Allergy, the Council on Contactants, and the
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Council on Drug and Biologicals. Despite Durham’s indefatigable efforts on behalf of the Academy, his lack of a medical degree or doctorate limited his status to that of an Affiliate Member. In 1963, the American Academy of Allergy found a way to honor Durham for his long-standing contributions to the Academy and the profession through the creation of its Distinguished Service Award, with Durham its first recipient.8 I thank Alice Holst for sharing unpublished papers of Oren Durham. Gregg Mitman, PhD Department of Medical History and Bioethics University of Wisconsin Madison, Wis
REFERENCES 1. Durham OC. A prairie boy’s home-made adventure—mostly outof-doors. Unpublished manuscript. 2. Lowdermilk RC. Hay-fever. JAMA 1914;63:141-2. 3. Kent G. Sneezes on the breezes. Am Mag 1936;122:70,72,74. 4. Duke WW, Durham OC. A botanic survey of Kansas City, Mo., and neighboring rural districts. JAMA 1924;82:939-44. 5. Retirement doesn’t stop war against hay fever. Courtesy of Abbott Laboratories. 6. Samter M, Durham OC, editors. Regional allergy of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba. Springfield (IL): Thomas; 1955. 7. General Report of the Pollen Survey Committee-1953. Research Council Committee Reports, 1948-1969. Box 32. American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology Archives. Golda Meier Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, PO Box 604, Milwaukee, WI 53201. 8. Cohen SC. The American Academy of Allergy: an historical review. J Allergy Clin Immunol 1979;64:332-466.
A history of pollen mapping and surveillance: The relations between natural history and clinical allergy In 1929, Oren C. Durham published in the founding issue of the Journal of Allergy the first national atmospheric pollen survey conducted in the United States. Through the cooperation of 28 physicians in 22 locations across the United States, Durham was able to discern the ‘‘outlines of a picture of the invisible pollen storm, which like a summer blizzard, fills the air of the eastern half of the United States each year with billions of toxic particles and lasts from twenty-five to fifty days.’’ Ragweed pollen was the specific toxic particle Durham had in mind. The national surveillance network of pollen sampling stations Durham helped establish became an integral part of the diagnostic and therapeutic methods of clinical allergy that persist to this day.1 The picture of geographically and seasonally differentiated atmospheric pollen loads now integral to allergy clinics, daily weather reporting, and the antihistamine Web sites of pharmaceutical manufacturers reveals the extent to which allergy as a medical specialty has relied on the expertise and methods of
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