#WorldAsthamaDay – Asthma - A Brief History.
To mark the upcoming World Asthma Day we though a brief history would be appropriate.
Today Asthma is defined as
“A disease characterized by recurrent attacks of breathlessness and wheezing, which vary in severity and frequency from person to person. In an individual, they may occur from hour to hour and day to day.
This condition is due to inflammation of the air passages in the lungs and affects the sensitivity of the nerve endings in the airways so they become easily irritated. In an attack, the lining of the passages swell causing the airways to narrow and reducing the flow of air in and out of the lungs.”
- World Health Organisation
The definition of Asthmawas not always so clear.
Before we get to that here are two historical mentions of treatments for asthma.
Asthma was first mentioned in Ancient Egypt. The Georg Ebers Papyrus contains hieroglyphic prescriptions for more than 700 remedies. One, in particular, was the heating of a mixture of herbs on bricks and inhale their fumes.
Then in China, only a couple of hundred years ago, asthma suffers were being given herbs containing ephedrine thus inhaling beta-agonists.
Asthma - The Evolution of a Definition
The term Asthma itself comes from Greek Aazein which means to exhale with the open mouth/to pant or sharp breath and the term Asthma appeared in literature for the first time In The Iliad.
The Greeks were also the first to use Asthma as a Medical term. This occurs a few hundred years after the Iliad and is attributed to Hippocrates (460 - 370 BC). His early diagnosis of asthma was as a spasm more likely to occur among anglers, tailors and metalworkers.
Continuing in Greece Aretaeus of Cappadocia (100 AD), an early clinician, wrote a clinical description of asthma. “If from running, gymnastic exercises or from any other work, the breathing becomes difficult, it is called asthma” Another ancient Greek physician, Galen (130-200 AD), added to his predecessors describing asthma as bronchial obstructions which he treated with owl's blood in wine.
The philosopher and Rabbi Moses Maimonides (1135-1204 AD), was also a physician who practiced medicine in Egypt. In one of his many medical texts, Treatise of Asthma, he noticed that Asthma sufferers’ symptoms could start as a cold from dampness but could soon find themselves gasping for air and coughing up phlegm. He noticed thatt asthmatics fared better in the dry months. His prescribed fluids, cutting down on sexual activity and chicken soup!
Next to Belgium where Jean Baptiste Van Helmont 1579-1644, a physician, chemist and physiologist recognised that the pipes of the lungs was where asthma originated.
Known as the Father of Sports medicine, Bernardino Ramazzini 1633-1714, recognised that there was a relation between asthma and organic dust as well as physical effort.
Early in the last century there was a small back-lash to the medical reasons for asthma as some saw it as a psychosomatic disease.
It was not until the 1960s that Asthma was recognised as an inflammatory condition when anti-inflammatories were then prescribed.