Hypochromic anemia

 ( Anemias ) 

In addition to "green sickness", the condition was known as morbus virgineus ("virgin's disease") or febris amatoria ("lover's fever"). Francis Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defined "green sickness" as: "The disease of maids occasioned by celibacy." 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose

In 1681, English physician Thomas Sydenham classified chlorosis as a hysteria affecting not only adolescent girls but also "slender and weakly women that seem consumptive." He advocated iron as a treatment: "To the worn out or languid blood it gives a spur or fillip whereby the animal spirits which lay prostrate and sunken under their own weight are raised and excited".

Daniel Turner in 1714 preferred to term chlorosis "the Pale or White Sickness ... since in its worst State the Complexion is rarely or ever a true Green, tho' bordering on that Hue". He went on to describe it as "an ill Habit of Body, arising either from Obstructions, particularly of the Menstruation, or from a Congestion of crude Humours in the Viscus, vitiating the Ferments of the Bowels, especially those of Concoction, and placing therein a depraved Appetite of Things directly preternatural, as Chalk, Cinders, Earth, Sand, &c". One of his case studies was that of an 11-year-old girl who was found, on investigation, to have been eating large quantities of coal.

Chlorosis is briefly mentioned in Casanova's Histoire de ma vie: "I do not know, but we have some physicians who say that chlorosis in girls is the result of that pleasure onanism indulged in to excess".

In 1841, the Bohemian doctor and pharmacist Albert Popper published a treatment for Chlorosis containing Vitriolum martis (sulfuric acid and iron) and Sal tartari (potassium carbonate) in Österreichische medicinische Wochenschrift which was republished and refined in the following years.

In 1845, the French writer Auguste Saint-Arroman gave a recipe for a treatment by medicinal chocolate that included iron filings in his De L'action du café, du thé et du chocolat sur la santé, et de leur influence sur l'intelligence et le moral de l'homme Louis E. Grivetti, "From Aphrodisiac to Health Food: A Cultural History of Chocolate" Karger Gazette 6 no. 68. and in 1872, French physician Armand Trousseau also advocated treatment with iron, although he still classified chlorosis as a "nervous disease". Disease of Virgins; Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty by Helen King The appetite as a voice, by Joan Brumberg, pages. 164-165.

In 1887, physician Sir Andrew Clark of London Hospital proposed a physiological cause for chlorosis, tying its onset to the demands placed on the bodies of adolescent girls by growth and menarche. In 1891, Frank Wedekind's play Spring Awakening referenced the disease. In 1895, University of Edinburgh pathologist Prof Ralph Stockman built upon experiments demonstrating that inorganic iron contributed to hemoglobin synthesis to show that chlorosis could be explained by a deficiency in iron brought on by loss of menstrual blood and an inadequate diet. Despite the work of Stockman and the effectiveness of iron in treating the symptoms of chlorosis, debate about its cause continued into the 1930s. A character in T. C. Boyle's The Road to Wellville has chlorosis, and the narrator describes her green skin and black lips.

In 1936, Arthur J. Patek and Clark W. Heath of Harvard Medical School concluded that chlorosis was identical to hypochromic anemia. More recently, some people have suggested that it may have been endometriosis, but the historical descriptions cannot easily be mapped on to this condition.