Colloquial names for cholera?

November 6, 2010 4:09 PM

What colloquial names/terms were given to cholera?

Thousands of Americans died from cholera who might not have known it by that name. What did they call it?

posted by John Borrowman to Science & Nature (5 answers total)

Dysentery. Cholera is caused by Vibrio cholera, but causes a dysentery-like diarrhea (like Shigellosis).
posted by amelioration at 4:11 PM on November 6, 2010

Surprisingly, the term cholera has been in use since the time of Hippocrates though this book argues that what they used to call cholera (cholera morbus) wasn't exactly the same thing as we call cholera now (cholera ire). This book is much more clear about other names for cholera though those are mostly words for it in other languages. This page seems to say that the other English words for it were: plague in the guts, cramps, spasms and unbloody dystentery. This page has a few more including my favorite: crapulosa.
posted by jessamyn at 4:24 PM on November 6, 2010

A phrase for one of the more, ah, unfortunate symptoms: "ricewater stool," characterized by floating white specks that were actually bits of lining from the small intestine.

Also, apparently many believed it was caused by a "miasma," or thick cloud of death formed by rotting matter. Others just called it a "pestilence" or "the cramps."

There was also a gastrointestinal disease known as "cholera infantum," or the "summer complaint," which was apparently just gastroenteritis of varying origin. This page has a whole bunch of other fun variants.
posted by limeonaire at 4:56 PM on November 6, 2010

I think I remember an episode of The Tudors where it was called "the bloody flux."
posted by 4ster at 6:38 PM on November 6, 2010

The Bloody Flux: Dysentery in eighteenth-century naval and military medical accounts.

To add further complication, dysentery was sometimes confused diagnostically with another acute disease of the bowels, 'cholera morbus’, as well as with simple diarrhoea. Cholera morbus, also known as 'English’, 'European’, 'Summer’ or 'Autumnal’ cholera, was a bilious disorder, and must be clearly distinguished from Asiatic cholera, which did not appear in England until 1831. Asiatic cholera is, in fact, an extreme form of dysentery, and not cholera (i.e. a bilious disorder) at all. Although it was a relatively common (if declining) early modern European affliction, cholera morbus received few contemporary monographs. The similarities between these disorders of the gut were such that one seventeenth-century doctor observed that there was sufficient similarity between dysentery, cholera and diarrhoea, 'in so much that sometimes it may be a doubtful business, how to distinguish the one from the other.’

posted by zamboni at 6:46 PM on November 6, 2010