hay fever (n.) Look up hay fever at Dictionary.com
also hay-fever, 1825, from hay + fever. Also called summer catarrh (1828); not much noted before the 1820s, when it was sometimes derided as a "fashion" in disease.
People are apt to sneeze, in hot weather for example; and people do not die of sneezing now-a-days, as they did in days that no one knows any thing about. We cannot give six draughts a-day, at one and nine pence each, for sneezing: call it the hay-fever. What a wonderful man! what a clever man! he understands the hay-fever: call him in! Thus is the hay-fever among the last in the list of fashionables. ["On Fashions in Physic," London Magazine, October 1825]