412 BC - Hippocrates, the father of medicine, describes influenza for the first time. 9 Diodorus Siculus records a flu-like epidemic that swept through the Athenian army in Sicily.
Popular belief blames the development of flu on the influence of the stars.
The Royal Navy cannot leave port. The Lord Mayor of London, his successor, and six aldermen die. Doctors desperately prescribe tobacco juice, lime juice, emetics, cathartics, and bleeding in attempts to cure their patients. Mortality is extremely high, perhaps because doctors treat their feverish patients by bleeding them. Historians compare it to the Black Death of the Middle Ages - Bubonic Plague.