While we may think that allergies are a common issue that humans have always dealt with, Western doctors may have only first diagnosed allergies in 1870.
And for anything that goes back earlier in history, whether that is hay fever, food allergies, or asthma, the story gets murkier due to a lack of reliable records. In fact, some researchers think allergies may not have even existed in ancient times and were instead an unintended side effect of the overly sanitized industrial societies that some of the world lives in today.
Allergies in Ancient Societies
According to Johannes Ring from the Technical University of Munich in Germany, there is some evidence of allergies in ancient times.
“Although probably much rarer — the actual symptoms and clinical conditions of allergic diseases already existed 2,000 years ago,” wrote Ring in History of Allergy in Antiquity.
Some of the examples Ring mentions vary in degrees of ambiguity, including an ancient Egyptian who treated the nose diseases of kings in the Fifth Dynasty. There is also a record of therapeutic treatments for breathing that might have been related to asthma, and Pharaoh Menes may have been the first recorded person to have died from a wasp sting allergy in 2641 B.C.
Roman emperors Augustus and Claudius, and Claudius’ son Britannicus, also apparently suffered from hay fever-like symptoms, which affected their breathing and caused runny noses. This may be an early case of atopy — the genetic tendency to develop allergic diseases like asthma and allergic rhinitis.
But these and other cases that Ring highlights are uncertain.
Read More: Ancient Medical Treatments Still Used Today
Western Medicine Discovers Allergies
Charles Blackley published one of the first known investigations of hay fever in the 1870s after conducting several experiments on grass pollen, and Morrill Wyman published research in 1872 that investigated ragweed pollen and the causes of what was called “Rose Cold” or “June Cold.”
This hay fever, as it was then known in England, had been described several decades earlier by physician John Bostock. These may be the earliest scientific descriptions of this kind of allergy, says Thomas Platts-Mills, a physician at the University of Virginia who compiled a history of allergies since 1870.
By the 1890s, knowledge of hay fever, and ways to avoid it, were common. People in Boston escaped ragweed seasons at the Bretton Woods resort in New Hampshire while those in other cities had similar escapes.
Read More: Everything to Know About Allergies
Have Allergies Increased in Recent Decades?
“We know that the incidence of clinical food allergy has been on the rise in the last 20 to 30 years,” says Jeff Wilson, an immunologist at the University of Virginia who studies allergies.
Allergy symptoms appear to be much rarer in ancient times than they are today. In fact, this is true of symptoms even a few decades ago — especially when talking about food allergies.
“The interesting thing is how and why they have increased,” Platts-Mills says. Textbooks in the early 1900s barely mentioned it, if at all. Meanwhile, in January 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data that showed more than a quarter of U.S. adults and children had at least one allergy.
Allergies to things like peanuts, milk, eggs, and other common food allergies, all increased in the 1980s and 1990s, Wilson says — in the 1960s they were still uncommon. And like most allergies, “food allergy doesn’t look the same in all parts of the world,” he says.
Asthma has also increased, rising especially high in industrialized countries starting in the 1960s. “Prior to 1960, most textbooks of pediatrics did not regard asthma as common, let alone [an] epidemic,” Platts-Mills wrote. Asthma continued to increase until the early 1990s, at which point it began to plateau.
Read More: Food Sensitivity Tests Are on the Rise – But How Legit Are They?
The Root Cause of Allergies
Researchers are not certain about what causes allergies. Wilson says there are various running theories, and many of them fall under the broader category of the hygiene hypothesis.
This theory posits that the level of hygiene achieved by many industrialized societies has led to a drastic change in the microbiomes of our bodies. The specific causes are in dispute, whether they are antibiotics, cleaning products, or other chemicals, but the result is that our immune system is out of balance.
This means that all the bacteria — some harmful and some not — as well as parasites affect people in industrialized societies a lot less than they used to. While this has boosted our survival, it also means our immune system has nothing better to do than attack problems that aren’t problems — like peanut butter, pollen, or other allergies that affect people today.
Read More: Why Bacteria are the New Disease Fighters
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
History of Allergy. History of Allergy in Antiquity
Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. The allergy epidemics: 1870-2010
Immunologist at the University of Virginia who studies allergies. Jeff Wilson
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More Than a Quarter of U.S. Adults and Children Have at Least One Allergy
Joshua Rapp Learn is an award-winning D.C.-based science writer. An expat Albertan, he contributes to a number of science publications like National Geographic, The New York Times, The Guardian, New Scientist, Hakai, and others.
