History of Medicine

With the recent fear of a coronavirus outbreak, I thought it would be interesting to trace the history of infectious diseases. Infectious diseases date back to the ancient civilizations. The earliest reference to influenza, which the coronavirus is a form of, came from none other than the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates. As early as 412 B.C.,  Hippocrates described a highly contagious disease with flu-like symptoms afflicting residents of Perinthus in northern Greece. It is the first known influenza epidemic in history. The name, influenza , came much later in 1357 AD, when people in Florence named the epidemic “influenza di freddo”, or influence of cold. Infections spread quickly and widely in the ancient world, and influenza was certainly not the first epidemic in history. The Great Plague of Athens in 430-426 BC, caused by an outbreak of typhoid and other diseases, is the earliest known major epidemic. The outbreak came in the middle of the Peloponnesian War between the S