Respiratory
Circa 1550 BCE, ancient Egypt (Ebers Papyrus)
Asthma was among the earliest respiratory conditions to receive detailed written attention in the ancient world, with physicians from Egypt, Greece, and China all producing accounts of episodic breathing difficulties. Historical healers attributed its causes to everything from cold humors and miasmatic air to nervous system dysfunction, and the treatments prescribed across centuries reflected those shifting theoretical frameworks. The condition's history traced a long arc from supernatural explanation through chemical and mechanical theories before arriving at the immunological models of the modern era.
Historical Narrative
Among the oldest surviving medical texts in the world, the Ebers Papyrus of ancient Egypt, dated to approximately 1550 BCE, contained prescriptions for breathing difficulties that many historians have interpreted as descriptions of asthmatic episodes. The remedies recorded there involved heating mixtures of herbs on hot stones so that patients could inhale the resulting vapors, a therapeutic logic that persisted in various forms across many subsequent centuries and cultures.
Ancient Greek medicine gave the condition its enduring name. The word asthma derived from the Greek verb meaning to pant, and the physician Hippocrates and his followers used the term to describe paroxysmal episodes of difficult breathing. Hippocratic texts associated these episodes with damp, cold environments and understood them as products of humoral imbalance, particularly excess phlegm accumulating around the lungs and impeding the passage of pneuma, the vital breath thought to animate living bodies.
Galen of Pergamon elaborated on these ideas in the second century CE, describing the bronchial passages and speculating that mucus obstructing these channels produced the characteristic labored breathing. His anatomical and humoral explanations became canonical in both Islamic and European medical traditions, shaping therapeutic approaches for well over a millennium. Physicians following Galenic principles prescribed expectorants, dietary modification, and changes in the patient's climate or living environment.
Moses Maimonides, the twelfth-century philosopher and physician, wrote a dedicated treatise on asthma for a patient among the Egyptian royal court, believed to have been a son of Saladin. The treatise recommended dietary regimens, air quality considerations, and emotional moderation, reflecting a sophisticated if still largely humoral framework. Maimonides emphasized the relationship between climate, digestion, and respiratory health in ways that made his text one of the most detailed pre-modern discussions of the condition.
The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century opened new interpretive possibilities. Thomas Willis, the English physician whose neurological investigations gave his name to the circle of arteries at the base of the brain, proposed in the 1670s that asthma originated not in the lungs themselves but in the nervous system, with spasmodic contraction of the bronchial passages driven by nervous irritability. This was a significant reorientation, moving the explanatory center from accumulated humors to mechanical and neurological dysfunction.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, physicians including Sir John Floyer, who himself experienced the condition and wrote extensively about it, and later Henry Hyde Salter, contributed careful clinical observations that refined the understanding of the episodic, spasmodic nature of the attacks. Salter's 1860 treatise argued forcefully for the nervous and spasmodic character of asthma and described a variety of provocative triggers including exercise, emotion, and exposure to particular substances.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries introduced chemical investigations. The isolation of epinephrine around 1900 and its observed relaxing effect on bronchial smooth muscle helped confirm the mechanical picture Willis had sketched two centuries earlier. Simultaneously, the emerging field of allergy research, stimulated by the work of Charles Richet and others studying hypersensitivity reactions, began connecting asthmatic episodes to immune responses against environmental substances. By the mid-twentieth century, these two threads — bronchospasm and immunological hypersensitivity — were being woven into a more unified framework that replaced the ancient humoral accounts entirely.
Key Historical Figures
Historical narrative only — this page describes how Asthma was understood historically. It is not medical advice and does not describe current diagnosis or treatment. Sourced from verified medical history references (NIH, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and standard medical history texts). See our medical disclaimer.