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Asthma & more
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A brief peek into history...when was asthma first discovered and where?
So when was asthma first discovered? No one knows for sure. The word asthma has Greek roots. It is derived from a Greek word called 'aazein', which means 'sharp breath'. Although the word asthma occurs in the Iliad (by Homer), it was Hippocrates, the Greek physician, who first used it to describe the medical condition, around 450 BC. He pointed out the symptoms of the disease, including spasms. Another Greco-Roman doctor, Galen, (130-201 BC) found out that asthma symptoms were caused by bronchial obstruction. He had the idea that it should be treated with wine laced with owl's blood. Asthma medication used to be delivered via smoke into the patients lungs, till the last decade of the nineteenth century. In the 1860s, animal dander was identified as one of the common triggers for asthma attacks. During the early years of the 20th century, an Italian physician named Bernardino Ramazzini discovered that the incidence of asthma was connected to the kind of work the patient was engaged in. Back in 1901, Jokici Takamine, a scientist from Japan, isolated adrenaline to a level of purity sufficient to be used as a bronchodilator. This was the first effective bronchodilator used by modern medicine. It was only during the 1960s that the link between inflammation and asthma was discovered. This represented a quantum leap in understanding of the disease, which till then, was considered to be the result of constricted airways. With that discovery, anti-inflammatory drugs began to be used in treating asthma. Some studies have also linked the use of modern medication to the increased incidence of death from asthma, particularly during the second half of the twentieth century. So there is no definitive answer to the question "When was asthma first discovered?" However, our understanding of the disease has progressively grown, particularly in recent decades.
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