Envy is the greatest blight of all

Hippocrates is known as the father of Western medicine and he discovered and named a disease known as ‘micropoulaki’ during the Periclean period, in around 430 BC. He did not call it a virus, but a sickness of the brain. Some years later, Aristotle described micropoulaki syndrome as a disease but one that was not contagious, ‘no more than a fool can influence an intelligent fellow to act foolish’.

Micropoulaki in classical Greek translates as having a tiny willy. Women should, by definition, be immune from the disease. But they are, strange as it may seem, known to suffer from it, although not as often and as badly as men do. The symptoms are terrible: feverish envy, raging periods of jealousy, hysterical fulminations, foaming at the mouth, howling at the moon, blustering, and so on. And inventing facts.

The irony of this sickness is that although man has invented the printing press, conquered various deadly diseases, dreamed up the bikini, flown to the moon and back, and crossed the oceans underwater, he has not made a scintilla of progress against micropoulaki.