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A Brief History of Celiac Disease

A Brief History of the Disease

As far back as 250 A.D., Aretaeus of Cappadocia included detailed descriptions of an unnamed disease in his writings. When describing his patients he referred to them as "koiliakos," which meant "suffering in the bowels." Francis Adams translated these observations from Greek to English for the Sydenham Society of England in 1856. He thus gave sufferers the moniker "celiacs."

In 1888, Dr. Samuel Gee, of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in the United Kingdom, presented a set of clinical accounts of both children and adults with the disease. In one prophetic account he stated: "to regulate the food is the main part of treatment. The allowance of farinaceous foods must be small, but if the patient can be cured at all, it must be by means of diet."

Dr. Willem Karel Dicke, a Dutch pediatrician, recognized in 1952 that the disease is caused by the ingestion of wheat proteins. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the subject for the University of Utrecht in 1950. By 1954, Dicke, Charlotte Anderson and a number of their colleagues, working in Birmingham, England confirmed the treatment and described the histologic damage to the intestinal mucosa as being directly related to celiac disease.

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