Semantic confusion caused the great Emile Littré, who translated Hippocrates' works into French in the first half of the 19th century, to make a nosologic error. Hippocrates described what is known today, since the work of Littré, as the Cough of Perinthus. This account can be found in Epidemics book VI. Hippocrates described coughs that started toward the winter solstice and were accompanied by many symptoms: sore throat, leg paralysis, peripneumonia, problems with night vision, voice problems, difficulty swallowing, difficulty breathing, and aches. When Littré published his translation and commentaries on Epidemics in 1846, he mistakenly considered the Cough of Perinthus to be a single disease (5) . This error made retrospectively diagnosing the diseases of Perinthus difficult, if not impossible. Moreover, as Littré saw this collection of illnesses as a single disease, he essentially turned it into an epidemic, probably because he had the modern sense of the term in mind and thought that Hippocrates had observed and described an epidemic illness unknown to modern medicine (5).