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.
