Metchnikoff’s Emerging Concept of Inflammation

Abstract Three broad avenues of scientific inquiry merged in Metchnikoff’s phagocytosis theory: (a) the embryological definition of mesodermal origin, structure, and function,(b) an intellectual infrastructure of evolutionary dynamics applied to the organism, and (c) the emerging concepts of parasite-host interactions on a pathological level. We have considered the first two problems; now we must turn to the third problem, specifically the inflammatory reaction to microbial pathogens, whose investigation became Metchnikoff’s primary arena of study (1).