Bharat B. Aggarwal · Bokyung Sung
Subash Chandra Gupta
Editors

2014

It was Aulus Cornelius Celsus, a physician in first-century Rome, who first defined inflammation as calor (heat), dolor (pain), rubor (redness), and tumor (swelling). However, it was Rudolf Virchow who in the mid-1800s linked inflammation with atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, asthma, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases. The suffix “-itis” was introduced to indicate inflammation in words such as bronchitis (inflammation of the bronchus) and colitis (inflammation of the colon).