This paper focuses on the literary representation of asthma in Louise DeSalvo’s Breathless: An Asthma Journal (1997). Taking the cue from her personal and family history, DeSalvo describes asthma as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traces its ‘literary history’: from Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu to Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover, passing through Pat Barker’s The Regeneration Trilogy and Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. In Breathless, and then in Writing as a Way of Healing (1999), DeSalvo goes further and even argues that one can write ‘through’ (and not only ‘despite’) illness in order to master a trauma, which she has done in her so-called ‘wounded body narratives’. By intertwining Trauma Studies and the Medical Humanities, this paper aims at analysing DeSalvo’s asthmatic renderings, while making a comparison with the discussions around breath and breathing in the time of Coronavirus.