Inflammation in the eye of the observer. Since its origins, inflammation has frequently been viewed as a collection of signals (a). In this context, what is studied is not a biological process but the results of a process that remains ignored. According to Metchnikoff, however, inflammation and immunity are particular instances of a broader process of animal harmony generation ((b), adapted from Tauber [37]). Because the same mechanisms involved in pathology were also involved in embryogenesis, Metchnikoff coined the term physiological inflammation, which he claimed preceded the problem of pathological inflammation. A modern reinterpretation of this developmental contextualization of inflammation could be represented as in (c). Thus, the genesis of form, its conservation, and its regeneration are problems of the same nature, which deal with the construction of an organism even when examining the animal/microbiota interaction.
