Episode 151: Sick to Death
The History of English Podcast
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Colds and Coldness in the Early Modern Period
Colds were also common, and there are references to the ailment as a cold as early as the 1400s. The illness might have been called a cold because it produced symptoms that resembled long-term exposure to the cold. Another theory is that colds tended to produce a lot of flim, and during this period people associated flim with cold. By the way, an accumulation of excess flim in the throat was sometimes referred to as flobbage in the early 1500s.
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