phthisis

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   dated medicine: a progressive wasting disease, especially pulmonary tuberculosis

   The nineteenth-century report recorded the worker's death from pulmonary phthisis.

2. 2
   noun

   medicine: wasting or atrophy of the body or of a particular organ

   The old casebook used phthisis for severe wasting of the affected tissue.

Borrowed in the sixteenth century from Latin phthisis, from Greek phthisis, 'wasting away or decline,' from phthinein, 'to waste away.' Physicians applied it broadly to consumptive wasting and especially to pulmonary tuberculosis, the disease long known in English as consumption.

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