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 word asthma is older than almost anything else in respiratory medicine, but for most of its history it did not mean what it means today. The term comes from an ancient Greek verb, azein, meaning to breathe hard, and Hippocrates was the first to use the word in a medical sense, to describe a symptom, severe shortness of breath, rather than a disease with a cause of its own. He is also credited with linking the condition to a sufferer's environment and occupation, noting connections to work such as metalworking centuries before anyone understood what an occupational trigger was.
Descriptions of breathlessness and wheezing appear earlier still, in ancient Chinese texts from around 2600 BCE and in the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus from around 1500 BCE, though neither used a word that survived into modern medical vocabulary the way Hippocrates' did. What changed only in the final decades of the twentieth century was the underlying model: asthma stopped being treated as a nervous or muscular spasm and came to be understood as a chronic inflammatory disease of the airways, a shift that reshaped how the condition is treated rather than just what it is called.