Hay Fever Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HAY FEVER. HISTORY. The earliest reported case of this complaint dates back to the sixteenth century. From that time occasional references have been made b... more »y various writers upon this subject. Little importance seems to have been attached to it, however, as an independent disease until considerably later. During all this period innumerable theories as to its cause were advanced, still its name, " hay fever," in the face of these conflicting opinions, adhered to it. When this name was first applied to the disease is not known. We are informed that as late as 1819,although known to the laity, hay fever was not recognized as a distinct disease by the profession. From that time on, however, it seems to have received more attention, and sunshine, dust, heat, odors, fatigue, also " effluvia and emanations" from flowers, were claimed by various writers as the cause of this condition; every man vicing with the other in hatching out something novel or different as to the cause of this ailment. This work, although individually of little value, when taken collectively, later on began to be of some worth, besides acting as an incentive and stimulus to the different investigators to whom we are indebted for so much of the information we now possess in regard to this disease. The most important of all were the investigations of Blackley, who, by means of an extensive series of scientific experiments, demonstrated the factthat the pollen of grasses and plants floating in the atmosphere was the sole exciting cause of this trouble. In 1876, Beard, by means of voluminous statistics, proved that a nervous temperament, as a rule, existed in the majority of the cases and acted as a predisposing cause in this complaint. In 1877, Marsh called the attention of the profession to ...« less