Hepatitis
Early observations

Initial accounts of a syndrome that we now think is likely to be hepatitis begin to occur around 3000 B.C. Clay tablets that served as medical handbooks for the ancient Sumerians described the first observations of jaundice. The Sumerians believed that the liver was the home of the soul, and attributed the findings of jaundice to the attack of the liver by a devil named Ahhazu.

Around 400 B.C., Hippocrates recorded the first documentation of an epidemic jaundice, in particular noting the uniquely fulminant course of a cohort of patients who all died within two weeks. He wrote, "The bile contained in the liver is full of phlegm and blood, and erupts...After such an eruption, the patient soon raves, becomes angry, talks nonsense and barks like a dog."

Given the poor sanitary conditions of war, infectious jaundice played a large role as a major cause of mortality among troops in the Napoleonic Wars, the American Revolutionary War, and both World Wars. During World War II, estimates of soldiers affected by hepatitis were upwards of 10 million.

During World War II, soldiers received vaccines against diseases such as yellow fever, but these vaccines were stabilized with human serum, presumably contaminated with hepatitis viruses, which often created epidemics of hepatitis. It was suspected these epidemics were due to a separate infectious agent, and not due to the yellow fever virus itself, after noting 89 cases of jaundice in the months after vaccination out of a total 3,100 patients that were vaccinated. After changing the seed virus strain, no cases of jaundice were observed in the subsequent 8,000 vaccinations.
detectable_content:postscript