OLD MEDICAL TERMS: if you look at death certificates or parish records from the 18th and 19th centuries, the causes of death can read like a work of gothic fiction rather than medical science. Before the late 1800s, when the “germ theory of disease” (the understanding that microorganisms cause specific illnesses) took hold, doctors named diseases based on what they could see, hear, or feel. A person didn’t die of a localized bacterial infection; they died of “corruption of the blood.” Medical professionals and town clerks grouped entirely different underlying pathologies together simply because they shared a single striking symptom, creating a historical record filled with poetic but clinically vague terminology.
Perhaps the most famous of these archaic terms is “consumption,” a word that perfectly captured how the illness seemed to literally consume a patient from the inside out. Today, we know this as tuberculosis, a bacterial infection of the lungs, but to our ancestors, it was a slow, wasting disease marked by weight loss, a ghostly pale complexion, and coughing up blood. Similarly, “dropsy” was a common killer, describing an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the body’s tissues that caused severe swelling. Historically treated as a primary disease, modern medicine recognizes dropsy not as a sickness in itself, but as a visible symptom of congestive heart failure, kidney failure, or liver cirrhosis.
Other common causes of death from older eras sound downright bizarre to modern ears. An infant who passed away from unexplained convulsions or sudden infant death syndrome was often listed as having died of “fits” or “visitation of God.” If someone succumbed to severe, bloody diarrhea—often caused by amoebic dysentery or cholera from contaminated water—the record would likely state they died of the “bloody flux.” Even emotional states were codified as fatal; dying of “grief” or a “broken heart” was a legitimate diagnosis for an elderly person who passed away shortly after their spouse, a phenomenon we now occasionally recognize as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (a temporary weakening of the heart muscle triggered by severe emotional stress).
Old Medical Terms and Causes of death:
- Ablepsy – Blindness
- Abscess – Abscess or boil found on internal organs and external tissue
- Ague – Used to describe intermittent fever and chills; usually, but not always, associated with malaria. Also called febrile intermittens
- Aphonia – A suppression of the voice; laryngitis
- Apoplexy – A disease in which the patient falls down suddenly without other sense or motion; stroke
- Atrophy – Degeneration of tissue, muscles, organs or bones
- Bilious remitting fever – Dengue fever
- Black Tongue – discoloration of the tongue often indicating typhoid or diphtheria
- Break-bone or Break-heart fever – Dengue fever
- Bright’s Disease – Kidney disease
- Biliousness – Jaundice
- Bloody Flux – Dysentery; an inflammation of the intestine causing diarrhea with blood
- Brain Fever – An inflammation of the brain, used to describe one of several different brain infections including encephalitis, meningitis and cerebritis
- Camp Fever – Typhus
- Chlorosis – Anemia; also called green sickness
- Cholera infantum – Infant diarrhea; sometimes called “summer diarrhea” or “summer complaint”
- Chorea (aka Saint Vitus’s Dance) – affects the nervous system causing sudden uncontrolled movements of the face and extremities. Huntington’s disease
- Catarrh – This term is still in use today to describe excessive buildup of mucus in the nose or throat, associated with inflammation of the mucous membrane. However, in the 19th century the term was used more generally to describe upper respiratory ailments such as bronchitis or the common cold
- Consumption – Tuberculosis
- Creeping paralysis – Syphilis
- Croup (aka Cynanche Trachealis) – Usually found in infants and children under five; swelling of the larynx and upper airways
- Debility – Used to describe “failure to thrive” in infancy, or in old age due to loss of weight from undiagnosed cancer or other disorder
- Dirt Eating – Anemia, internal parasites, vitamin imbalance or mineral deficiency
- Dropsy – Edema; often caused by congestive heart failure
- Dyspepsia – Acid indigestion or heartburn
- Erysipelas (aka St. Anthony’s Fire or Rose) – bacterial skin infection causing fever, redness, swelling, inflammation and a burning sensation
- Falling sickness – Epilepsy
- French pox or French disease – Syphilis
- Green sickness – Anemia; also called chlorosis
- Grip or Grippe – Influenza
- Hydrocephalus (aka water stroke) – the accumulation of fluid deep within the brain
- Hydrophobia – Rabies
- Leprosy (aka Hansen’s Disease) –
- Marasmus – A wasting of the flesh without fever or apparent disease; severe malnutrition
- Mercury Poisoning – Considered toxic to the nervous, digestive, and immune systems, mercury causes tremors, mouth sores, loss of peripheral visions, swollen gums, muscle weakness, speech impediments, memory problems, loss of movement, and death
- Milk sickness – Poisoning from drinking milk from cows that have eaten the white snakeroot plant; found only in the mid-west United States.
- Mortification – Gangrene; necrosis
- Nostalgia – Homesickness; yes, this was occasionally listed as a cause of death.
- Phthisis – The French word for “consumption”; tuberculosis
- Puerperal Fever (aka Child Bed Fever) – Infection of the uterus
- Quinsy – A peritonsillar abscess, a known complication of tonsillitis
- Rickets – Vitamin D deficiency
- Scrofla (aka King’s Evil) – tubercular, bacterial infection of the lymphatic glands
- Scrumpox – Skin disease; usually an infection caused by the herpes simplex virus
- Tetter – Skin condition causing redness and vesicular outbreaks
- Venereal Disease – sexually transmitted disease like syphilis or gonorrhea
- Visitation by God – Natural causes
- White Swelling (aka bone tuberculosis or Mycobacterium tuberculosis) – bacterial infection of the bones causing swelling, stiffness, and fluid accumulation in the joints especially in the knees and hips
- Whooping Cough – respiratory tract infection causing fever, headache, congestion, and a violent, whooping like cough
- Worms – worms indicated an illness where parasites are found in the faeces