Trivia: Old Medical Terms

Brush up on vocabulary and history with our list of archaic medical terms!

Accouchement: Childbirth and/or the period after childbirth. Confinement or lying-in.

Catamenia: Menses, menstrual discharge.

Chincough (or Chin Cough, kinkcough): Whooping cough.

Cicatrix: A scar left by the formation of new connective tissue over a healing sore or wound.

(the) Clap: A slang term for gonorrhea, dating to the late 1500s in England.

Consumption: Tuberculosis. Untreated, about a third of patients who develop active TB recover, about a third die quickly, and the remaining third linger before dying. "Consumptives" were common characters in European literature from the 1600s to the 1900s.

Cupid's Itch: Slang for sexually transmitted infections.

Dropsy: Edema, the accumulation of fluid in cells, tissues, or body cavities. "Dropsy" is no longer in scientific use.

Fatuity: Once used to mean imbecility or dementia.

Furunculoid: Resembling a boil.

(the) Humors: The Greek physician Hippocrates first postulated that four elemental fluids, or humors, existed in the body and governed the person's health and temperament. The four humors were blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile. Ideally, no one humor should predominate, and an imbalance of the humors caused disease. Each of the four humors corresponded to a personality type, a season, and an element:

The idea of the four humors remained influential in medicine and psychology during the Medieval and Renaissance periods, and was often referenced in Elizabethan literature.

Mortification: In pathology, it referred to gangrene or necrosis.

Phthisic (or phthisis): Once used to refer to wasting illnesses of the lungs, such as tuberculosis, severe coughs, and asthma.

(the) Pox: Syphilis was often called the "pox" or the "Great pox" due to the rash the disease produced in its early stages. An outbreak in the French army gave rise to the term morbus gallicus, or "the French disease." The French preferred to call it la maladie anglaise ("the English disease"), the "Neapolitan disease," or the "Italian disease." In a classical example of international blame-shifting, the Italians called it "the Spanish disease," the Russians called it the "Polish disease," and the Arabs called it the "disease of the Christians." Syphilis was also known as "Cupid's Disease" and the "lues."

Pultaceous: Semi-fluid or pulpy.

(the) Vapors: An archaic term for a range of mental and physical states attributed to women, including hysteria, mania, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, PMS, mood swings, hypochondria, and fainting.

Venus's Curse: Slang for sexually transmitted infections.

The White Plague: Tuberculosis. From the 1600s to the 1900s, tuberculosis ravaged Europe and was responsible for one in five deaths.

Primary source: Dictionary.com Also see our article Expired Medicines and our trivia on odd historical medical treatments.

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