The first description of hayfever?

Abstract

Under the section ‘Series’ in June's JRSM, Manoj Ramchandran and Jeffrey K Aronson published an article indicating that John Bostock's malady and description is the first for ‘summer catarrh/ catarrhus aestivus’.1 I will like to point out that a case of nasal allergy has been described before. We have to go back to the early 10th century and to Razi (Abubakr Mohammad Ibn Zakaria). He explicitly describes the illness of Abu Zaid Ahmad Ibn Sahl Albalkhi (850–934) who suffered from ‘coryza’ every spring when the roses bloomed. Though now there is not a universal agreement that roses' pollinosis cause the symptoms but no doubt that the symptoms described and the lengthy treatments and prevention of Razi points to hay fever/nasal allergy. There are two points of note in this description. The paper describing this was first published by Friedrun R Hau in Medizinhistorisches Journal2 in the German language and later translated into English and printed in Pakistan Journal of Otolaryngology3 which I was editing at the time. The second point is the fact that Razi's writing was not presented as an independent writing but included in Al-Fusul-almuhimma fi tibqalumma present in Oxford Codex Huntingtonianus 461, p 78-80. It will be worth having a look at these papers.