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The Idiot vocabulary
5 outdated vocabulary words
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consumption
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synonyms: scrofula, kingʼs evil, struma, phthisis, ~tisick ???
tags: [dated] [pathosis]
► definition
Definition:tuberculosis, which is a very common, highly infectious disease of (primarily) the lungs. It is usually spread via saliva when those with the active form of TB sneeze or cough. Healthy people who contract the disease normally carry an asymptomatic, latent form (LTBI) and have a 10% chance of developing an active form of the disease sometime later in life if their immune system becomes weakened.Smokers and patients with AIDS are at higher risk of developing the active form.
image: By Children's Bureau Centennial - 3f05369r, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66670442
► uses
Uses:
He looked into his sickly, consumptive face, and he was more and more sorry for him,
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Her consumption was so advanced, and she was so weak, that she used to sit with closed eyes, breathing heavily. Her face was as thin as a skeleton's, and sweat used to stand on her white brow in large drops.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Idiot (1887)
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the doctor says missis must go: he says she’s been in a consumption these many months. I heard him tell Mr. Hindley: and now she has nothing to keep her, and she’ll be dead before winter.
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She was not, I was told, in the hospital portion of the house with the fever patients; for her complaint was consumption, not typhus: and by consumption I, in my ignorance, understood something mild, which time and care would be sure to alleviate.
Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre (1847)
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his lapse was an anticlimax somewhat resembling that of St. John Long's death by consumption in the midst of his proofs that it was not a fatal disease.
Thomas Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
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Mrs. Miggins: Ooohh, you do have a way of words with you, Mr. Shelley!
Lord Byron: To Hell with this fine talking. Coffee, woman! My consumption grows ever more acute, and Coleridge's drugs are wearing off.
Mrs. Miggins: Ohh, Mr. Byron, don't be such a big girl's blouse!
BBC. Blackadder, season 2: Ink and Incapability
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