In 1715, William Musgrave British physician was credited with the earliest description of arthritis. He published the second edition of his most important medical work, De arthritide symptomatica, which concerned arthritis and its effects.
De arthritide symptomatica and Musgrave later work De artritide anomala (1707) were included in Sydenham’s Opera medica, volume II, as Dictionary of National Biography notes.
Augustin Jacob Landré-Beauvais, a 28-year-old resident physician at Saltpêtrière Asylum in France was the first person to describe the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. Landre-Beauvais, working under Philippe Pinel, titled his doctoral dissertation 'Doit-on admettre une nouvelle espece de goutte sous la denomination de goutte asthenique primitive '(should one acknowledge a new kind of gout under the name of primary asthenic gout?).' He described a chronic deforming polyarthritis characterized by remissions and exacerbations.
He had examined and treated a handful of patients with severe joint pain that could not be explained by other known nosological entities at the time, neither rheumatism, nor osteoarthritis. Unlike gout, which was the disease of the upper class, this condition mainly affected the poor.
Though Landré-Beauvais' classification of rheumatoid arthritis as a relative of gout was inaccurate, his dissertation encouraged others to further study the disease.
The term rheumatoid arthritis was first suggested in 1859 by Alfred Baring Garrod, who emphasized the differences from gout and rheumatic fever. At a public lecture on 8 February 1848, reported in the Medical Chirurgical Transactions, he demonstrated the increase in uric acid in the blood of patients with gout, whereas there was no such increase in acute rheumatism or Bright's disease.
In 1859, Alfred Garrod wrote his Treatise on Nature of Gout and Rheumatic Gout, wherein he describes his observations. This work differentiated arthritis from gout and also categorized rheumatoid arthritis as a distinct condition, which he referred to as “Rheumatic Gout.”
Research on arthritis in modern times
