This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The clinical separation of rheumatoid arthritis from every other kind of joint disease has a surprisingly precise birthdate. In 1800, French physician Augustin Jacob Landre-Beauvais published the first recognized clinical description of the condition, though he gave it an awkward name, primary asthenic gout, that tied it to a disease it is not. His observations were sound even if his label was not: he documented the condition's tendency to affect women, its chronic course, and its involvement of multiple joints at once, features that still define the disease today.
It took British physician Alfred Baring Garrod until 1859 to give the condition the name that stuck, rheumatoid arthritis, formally distinguishing it from gout. The final piece of the puzzle came a generation later and from within the same family: Garrod's own son, Archibald Garrod, formally separated osteoarthritis, the mechanical wear-and-tear form of the disease, from its autoimmune cousin in 1890, ninety years after Landre-Beauvais's first description and the point at which arthritis, as a single ancient word, finally began splitting into the distinct diseases modern rheumatology treats separately.