Relapsing fever has been described since the days of the ancient Greeks. After an outbreak in Edinburgh in the 1840s, relapsing fever was given its name, but the etiology of the disease was not better understood for a decade. Physician David Livingstone is credited with the first account in 1857 of a malady associated with the bite of soft ticks in Angola and Mozambique. In 1873, Otto Obermeier first described the disease-causing ability and mechanisms of spirochetes, but was unable to reproduce the disease in inoculated test subjects and thereby unable to fulfill Koch's postulates. The disease was not successfully produced in an inoculated subject until 1874. In 1904 and 1905, a series of papers outlined the cause of relapsing fever and its relationship with ticks.