Myalgic encephalomyelitis, Princess Aurora, and the wandering womb.

A British disease Myalgic encephalomyelitis is a new name for an old disease with an impressive history of synonyms. It's a British disease, unknown in the New World; but North America is in the grip of chronic EpsteinBarr virus infection, and Australasia has repetitive stress injury, which unkind people say is myalgic compensationitis. Myalgic encephalomyelitis and chronic EpsteinBarr virus will be endangered species of illness when antiviral drugs become a reality. These diseases have almost ousted hypoglycaemia, Candida albicans, total allergy syndrome, and allergy to the twentieth century, which will soon be out of style, replaced by twenty first century disease. The attraction of allergy to the hypochondriac is its personal uniqueness: if I say I've got an allergy you can't say I haven't, whatever your private opinion may be. Total allergy syndrome's most recent predecessor was chlorosis, the "green sickness" of well to do young women at puberty. It probably included anaemia and anorexia, was usually cured by marriage and childbearing, and was occasionally found in men. Though chlorosis was recorded as early as 1781, it made a major come back early this century, replacing the more exciting neurasthenia-which is exhaustion ofthe brain and spinal cord-launched by the American neurologist George Miller Beard.' Beard described neurasthenia as the most common nervous disease in America, a disease ofmodern civilisation encompassing cerebrasthenia (brain exhaustion) and myelasthesia (spinal cord exhaustion). Clever physicians and interested patients could have a stab at the differential diagnosis. Like myalgic encephalomyelitis neurasthenia was surprisingly common among doctors, and Beard suffered from it himself. He compared himself with Aristotle, Plato, Copernicus, and Darwin for discovering it. As Beard explained, it had not been previously described because it was rare in the public wards of charity hospitals; any doctor, however, who "should ever engage in private practice among the better classes of any of our larger cities . . . will meet these diseases every day and every hour, and his Edgar Allan Poe, 180949, American poet, short story writer, and critic, who in 1848 was "desperately ill with brain fever"2