Blackley and the development of hay fever as a disease of civilization in the nineteenth century.

Recent surveys have estimated that the prevalence of hay fever among modem populations is between 2 and 15 per cent.1 Yet there are few references to the condition in any literature before the nineteenth century. Despite this fact, by 1900 hay fever was described as a common and fashionable disease. In this paper I outline the first descriptions of hay fever and how ideas about it developed through the nineteenth century. I then examine in some detail how thoughts about hay fever progressed so that it came to be described as a disease of civilization.