The illness were probably bacterial meningitis date back as long ago as the Middle Ages, from approximately 1300 to 1500.
An ancient Mesopotamia incantation mentions a headache that roams through the desert, striking down men with scorching pain and confusion and inevitably resulting in death.
Doctors first identified bacterial meningitis as a specific disease during an outbreak in Switzerland in 1805, but they did not known what caused it. Meningitis was called cerebrospinal fever, or brain fever, during the 1800s.
Throughout the 19th century, there were cases described of this episodic fever, mostly among children and military recruits.
In the United States the first recorded epidemic of meningitis was in Massachusetts in 1806. It was called spotted fever at the time, because of a skin rash associated with the infection.
Attacks on the nervous system from bacteria and viruses can cause permanent central nervous system damage or death.
If meningitis is caused by a virus the illness is quite mild. Meningitis cause by meningococcus bacteria is very dangerous and the patient can die within 12 hours.
The first treatment for the disease came in the early 1900s when German and US scientists developed anti-sera that could b injected intrathecally and thereby decrease the mortality rate of this disease to 25 percent.
History of Meningitis
