Sunday 25 November 2007

Under the weather

Bilious Flux
A discharge of bile, either by vomiting or by stool, or by both, as in cholera. [Dunglison1868]

Bloody Flux
Dysentery involving a discharge of blood. [Hooper1822]

Chronic Flux
Chronic Dysentery

Coeliac Flux
A species of diarrhea, in which the food is discharged by the bowels in an undigested condition; Lientery. [Dunglison1868]

Hepatic Flux
Bilious Flux. The name given in the East to a variety of dysentery, in which there is a frequent flow of bilious fluid from the bowels. [Thomas1875]

Putrid Flux
Dysentery. If ulcers form, the evacuations assume a dirty-gray or grayish-red color, and a putrid odor, on account of sloughed mucous membrane, and large quantities of pus discharged from the ulcers becoming mixed with them. In epidemic flux, when pus and pieces of sloughed mucous membrane are ejected, the stools become intensely pungent and putrid, resembling sulphuretted hydrogen. [Vogel1885]

A selection of archaic illnesses and causes of death, from this excellent site.