Blackley and the development of hay fever as a disease of civilization in the nineteenth century

Abstract

Recent surveys have estimated that the prevalence of hay fever among modem populations is between 2 and 15 per cent.1 Yet there are few references to the condition in any literature before the nineteenth century.Despite this fact, by 1900 hay fever was described as a common and fashionable disease.In this paper I outline the first descriptions of hay fever and how ideas about it developed through the nineteenth century.I then examine in some detail how thoughts about hay fever progressed so that it came to be described as a disease of civilization.Early References to Hay Fever It is claimed that the first known hay fever sufferer may have been Hippias the Athenian traitor who guided the Persian fleet to its landing at Marathon and finally commanded part of the army in the subsequent battle.2Rosen concludes from his researches that there are numerous allusions in the Bible and Talmud which point to the presence of nasal allergy and hay fever.However these claims are somewhat tenuous.A more concrete description is given by Rhazes in a Arabic text entitled 'On the reasons why the heads of people swell at the time of roses and produce catarrh'.3References to aversions to roses are documented from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and have already been well described by Wood, Mackenzie and Emanuel.4Many of the early authors on the subject of hay fever were themselves sufferers.There are other accounts of rose fever during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it appears likely from the symptoms given that this ailment was what we term hay fever.