The invitation to speak at this international conference on the chronic fatigue syndrome came as an all but forgotten echo of the past. Epidemic neuromyasthenia-the candidate name which Alexis Shelokov and I proposed for the syndromes we had studied was a recurrent preoccupation for us both over a number of years, as I shall relate. There weren't many who shared that interest three decades ago. In fact, a meeting of North American scientists interested in the problem in the late 1950s could be and usually was held in my hotel room. However, my interest had to be put on hold somewhat over one-quarter century ago when the Surgeon General decreed that I should devote my time to coping with smallpox.
After 11 years as an eradicator, I returned to the United States and the preoccupations of a dean at Johns Hopkins University. Then, in the mid-1980s, newspaper accounts appeared of a mysterious epidemic on the California-Nevada border. The epidemic sounded suspiciously like those that we had investigated and reviewed. The investigators of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC, Atlanta) alluded to certain other outbreaks with similar characteristics but made no reference to the epidemics of the 1950s. I suggested to colleagues at the CDC that the investigators might benefit from reading our 1959 review article in the New England Journal of Medicine. They had not seen it. As they said, "We did not know it was that long ago. In the literature search, we only went back to 1965." Although I do appreciate the fact that I am not so young as I used to be, I do not appreciate my earliest papers being treated as some form of prehistory. Whatever, you have asked for reflections on certain prehistorical outbreaks and I shall do my best aided, in part, by certain dusty files that were reread after several decades of quiet moldering. I should note, in passing, that you have done irreparable damage to my wife's campaign to chuck at least a few of those ancient files that "have not been looked at in years."
