<italic>This paper examines the use of the medical metaphor in the early theories of crises. It first considers the borrowing of medical terminology and generic references to disease, which, notwithstanding their relatively trivial character, illustrate how crises were originally conceived as...</italic>

<italic>This article examines the literature on the periodical recurrence of economic crises up to the 1840s, illustrating how awareness of this phenomenon was far more widespread than the few existing histories of business cycle theories indicate, that observations of this phenomenon began much earlier...</italic>