According to historian Adrian Johns, the idea of compulsory licensing "seems to have originated as a serious proposition in the 1830s, although predecessors can be traced back into the eighteenth century," and it was popular in the British anti-patent movement of the 1850s and 1860s. More recently an area of fierce debate has been that of drugs for treating serious diseases such as malaria, HIV and AIDS. Such drugs are widely available in the western world and would help to manage the epidemic of these diseases in developing countries. However, such drugs are too expensive for developing countries and generally protected by patents.