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Page: History
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Colds have existed since ancient times, being known in ancient Egypt; where there were hieroglyphs representing the cough and the common cold. The Greek physician Hippocrates gave a description of the disease in the 5th century BC. The common cold was also known among the ancient American Indian Aztec and Maya civilizations. A mixture of chili pepper, honey, and tobacco was one common Aztec treatment for colds.
In the 18th century, John Wesley wrote a book about curing diseases; it advised against cold baths, stating that chilling causes the common cold. The work was widely reprinted in the 19th century. Another book by William Buchan in the 18th century also gave wet feet and clothes as the cause of the common cold.
The idea that microscopic infectious agents cause disease only arose in the second half of the 19th century. Initially, bacteria were suspected to be the cause of the common cold, and vaccines were produced based on this theory; these were still prescribed in the 1950s.
Viruses had been described beginning in the 1890s: infectious agents so small that they could pass through all filters and could not be seen under a microscope. In 1914, Walter Kruse, a professor in Leipzig, Germany, showed that viruses caused the common cold: nose secretions of a cold sufferer were diluted, filtered, and introduced into the noses of volunteers, producing colds in about half of the cases. These findings were not widely accepted, until they were repeated in the 1920s by Alphonse Dochez, first in chimpanzees, and then in human volunteers using a double-blind setup. Nevertheless, in 1932 a major textbook on the common cold by David Thomson still presented bacteria as the most likely cause.
In the United Kingdom, the Common Cold Unit was set up by the civilian Medical Research Council in 1946. The unit worked with volunteers who were infected with various viruses. The rhinovirus was discovered there. In the late 1950s, researchers were able to grow one of these cold viruses in a tissue culture, as it would not grow in fertilized chicken eggs, the method used for many other viruses. In the 1970s, the CCU demonstrated that treatment with interferon during the incubation phase of rhinovirus infection protects somewhat against the disease, but no practical treatment could be developed. The unit was closed in 1989, just two years after it demonstrated the benefit of zinc gluconate lozenges in the prophylaxis and treatment of rhinovirus colds.
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