A History of Post Viral Syndromes

New Piece in Think Global Health

I was working on a piece, which is a modified excerpt from my book, Invisible Illness, when I connected with Phil Finkelstein, a journalist and graduate student at London School of Economics. Phil published a wonderful piece in Salon on Long Covid and had been thinking about the historical context in which we might think about the virus for some time. I shared a working piece with Phil, and we engaged in some really fascinating back and forth about the history of Long Covid and related post viral conditions. Yesterday our first piece together was published in Think Global Health.

Here is an excerpt:

“A pattern woven throughout history reveals an unsettling truth: Although acute infections such as influenza and COVID-19 can devastate populations in the short term, their lingering effects—the so-called long flus of previous generations—have proven to be quiet killers.

Chronic conditions stemming from infections, whether labeled influenza nervosa, myalgic encephalomyelitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, or long COVID, haunt individuals well after the initial illness subsides. Time and again, society has failed to reckon with these conditions, relegating their sufferers to the fringes of medical understanding and societal concern.

This trend is ancient. In 412 BCE, Hippocrates documented the Cough of Perinthus in a port city in northern Greece—the first known long flu, entailing "impaired night vision" and "paralysis of limbs." Many at the time perceived these symptoms as spiritual in nature, but Hippocrates was convinced that they were the physical manifestations of imbalanced humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.

Five centuries later, another Greek physician, Galen, built on this idea, categorizing human temperament based on the four humors: melancholy (black bile), hot tempered (yellow bile), laid back (phlegmatic), and hopeful (blood). The ancient Greeks may have been wrong on the fundamentals—lacking thousands of years of medical insights or comprehension of germ theory—but their instinct to connect illness and temperament can help frame how we think about health today.”

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