‘Lyme disease’, so called since Steere et inquired into an arthritis epidemic among young children in the community of Old Lyme, Conn., USA, in the late 1970s, has a very long European history. Its cutaneous manifestations, the most frequent signs of the disease, had already been described at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century by physicians like Buchwald, Pick, Herxheimer, Hartman, Afzelius and Lipschütz. Additionally, two French physicians in a landmark paper published in 1922, Garin and Bujadoux, reported a patient who developed erythema chronicum migrans followed by painful meningoradiculitis. Shortly
before the symptoms began, this patient was bitten by a tick and he had a positive Bordet-Wasserman test, which was used at this time to diagnose syphilis. They stated, however, that although this test was positive, this patient did not have syphilis, and concluded that this patient had a tick-borne disease that induced cutaneous and neurological manifestations caused by a spirochete different from Treponema pallidum. It was not until the early 1980s that their prediction proved to be correct, when Burgdorfer were able to isolate a bacterium belonging to the family of Spirochaetaceae, first from ticks and then from humans. Interestingly, the first North American observation of Lyme disease, a patient with erythema migrans, was only published in 1970.