Rubella in Europe

Abstract

Postnatal rubella is a mild illness, a disease which was considered to be of only minor importance for many years. The first authors to write about the disease as distinct from other exanthemata were German physicians; they differentiated rubella from measles and scarlet fever in the latter part of the eighteenth century and called the disease Rotheln. Hence the common English language eponym is ‘German measles’. Some consider that the term ‘German’ in German measles is probably of literary rather than of geographical significance and that it came from the old French ‘germain’ (derived from the Latin ‘germanus‘), meaning ‘closely akin to’ measles [1]. That it is not generally called by its German name, Rotheln, is due to Veale, a Scottish physician who in 1866 described 30 cases of rubella in the Edinburgh Medical Journal, and proposed ‘rubella’ as a short and euphonius name that could be easily pronounced [2].