Abstract
Communities of human beings have established themselves throughout the habitable regions of the globe, and, apart from some very isolated pockets of humanity, they have experienced outbreaks of influenza wherever they were living between the North and South Poles. Influenza has been characterized by this ubiquity for at least 400 years and possibly for far longer. One cannot be certain of the nature of the many earlier pestilences recorded in contemporary annals but it is probable that some were influenzal. Medical historians have begun to feel confident that vivid accounts of “epidemic catarrhal fever” and other more fanciful diagnoses in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century describe epidemic influenza. The name “influenza” was first used in England to describe the influenza epidemic of 1743.
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Hope-Simpson, R.E. (1992). The Debate about the Contagiousness of Influenza. In: The Transmission of Epidemic Influenza. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2385-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2385-1_2
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