From the meagre descriptions of diseases, usually of the epidemic type, which have come down to us from the past, it is difficult to recognize many of the diseases described.

The single diseases are recognized by comparing the causes, the lesions and the symptoms with those of other diseases, and new diseases are constantly being separated off from other diseases having more or less common features.

Many new diseases have been recognized and named, but it is always more than probable that previously they were confounded with other diseases.

Smallpox is such a characteristic disease that one would think it would have been recognized as an entity from the beginning, but although the description of some of the epidemics in remote times conform more or less to the disease as we know it, the first accurate description is in the eighth century by the Arabian physician Rhazes.

Cerebro-spinal meningitis was not recognized as a separate disease until 1803, diphtheria not until 1826, and the separation between typhoid and typhus fever was not made before 1840.