Rheumatoid Arthritis in an Icelandic Textbook from 1782
In 1782, Jon Petursson, a district physician in Northern Iceland, published a textbook on arthritis and its remedies intended for common use. Working within a very simple diagnostic system, essentially comprising osteoarthritis (arthritis h a ) and inflammatory arthritis (arthritis vaga), he describes arthritis vaga as a common, chronic, symmetric, destructive, inflammatory polyarthritis, sometime
