4/1/2023 0 Comments Histera outbreak![]() ![]() I look forward to reporting on this archive more fully I wish I’d had more time before now to look into this history.) The intrepid archive-spelunkers who scavenged these documents have pulled together a treasure trove of original source material. (Also, since last summer, a twitter account has been posting a steady drip of documents about the Royal Free outbreak from what appears to be a voluminous collection of news articles, internal reports and other archival material. The authors, Rosemary Underhill and Rosemarie Baillod, were themselves both medical students at the Royal Free at the time of the epidemic. But a recently published paper in the journal Medicina provides some interesting details and fresh insights based on first-hand testimony from informants present during the 1955 events. It will never be possible to fully reconstruct or determine what went on—and what caused whatever went on. Given that sixty-five years have passed since the Royal Free outbreak, general awareness of it has receded from view, although for many in the patient and advocacy communities the event has attained almost mythic status. This paper helped lay the groundwork for the successful efforts 20 years later to divert the field away from biomedical examination and toward psycho-behavioral interventions. The first piece of evidence they cited to support this theory was that the majority of those reporting symptoms were women. They likened the outbreak to a reported episode of “hysterical over-breathing†among schoolgirls. In 1970, the British Medical Journal (now The BMJ) published a paper from a leading psychiatrist and his junior colleague that reinterpreted the entire phenomenon as an episode of “epidemic hysteria.†In other words, they questioned whether a viral outbreak occurred at all—not just whether some patients had neurological complications or long-term sequelae. (Such inflammation could perhaps explain much of the reported symptomology of the illness, but evidence for its presence remains inconclusive.) Some of the controversy over the term has focused on whether those with the illness actually experience “encephalomyelitisâ€â€”that is, inflammation of the brain and central nervous system. Although no pathogen was ever identified, key investigators at the time believed it was possibly or likely an enterovirus.Īfter the outbreak, investigators assigned the name “benign myalgic encephalomyelitis†to the observed clinical entity. More than 200 people, most of them female staff and students, fell ill. The name myalgic encephalomyelitis is inextricably linked with an outbreak of what appeared by all accounts to be a viral illness at London’s Royal Free Hospital in the second half of 1955. ![]()
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