Hippocrates advocated breathing in plant vapours, and the ancient Egyptians puffed black henbane evaporated on hot bricks. Treating wheezing at source is intuitive but, from the earliest times to the first 18th-century "inhaler" (a pewter tankard adapted for sucking opium fumes) and the Edwardian "asthma cigarette", hot-air treatments frequently did more harm than good. Even as promising drugs emerged, asthmatics lacked reliable relief to carry around, and so lived in fear of attacks that could strike at any moment. The breakthrough came in the 1950s with a pressurised aerosol that dispatched a metered dose. Postwar pioneers such as Roger Altounyan (the real-life asthmatic who achieved fame as Roger in Swallows and Amazons) and Tony Dornhorst (the physician who divided breathless patients into "pink puffers" and "blue bloaters") respectively refined the technology and encouraged its take-up by testing it out on themselves. The portable puffers were soon everywhere, becoming still more important as rates of asthma rose. The dinky canisters get squeezed in every school, and Ventolin has been deployed in pop culture by Manny in Black Books as well as by Big Man in the hip-hopera Trapped in the Closet. Now that David Beckham has been snapped taking a half-time puff, the devices suddenly seem rather sporty. Thanks to inhalers, for today's wheezers the protest of Piggy in Lord of the Flies – "I can't, on account of my asthma" – has now given way to an Obamaesque "Yes, we can!"