a loose popular term which includes congestion of the brain and its membranes, delirium tremens, and inflammation of the brain substance itself.
Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary (1908)
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basically encephalitis or meningitis
► uses
Uses:
Poor child, the subject evidently enthralled her with a terrible fascination; and I feared that the excitement she was in might bring on a brain fever.
Grant Allen. Strange Stories.
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But Emma, awaking, cried out—
"The letter! the letter!"
They thought she was delirious; and she was by midnight. Brain-fever had set in.
Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary
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he fainted, and had brain fever and convulsions. A month after, when he had hardly recovered, he went off to the Crimea, and there he was shot.