tuberculosis

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   A serious infectious disease that mainly attacks the lungs, causing coughing, fever, and weight loss.

   With smallpox gone, tuberculosis is today the deadliest infectious disease on the planet.

To international scientific vocabulary from New Latin tūberculōsis, from Latin tūberculum (diminutive of tūber (“lump”)) + Latin -ōsis (“diseased condition”); by surface analysis, tubercul(um) + -osis; named for the encapsulated colonies of Mycobacterium tuberculosis within the lungs in pulmonary tuberculosis, which can look like small tubers (tubercles) on gross pathology. The disease has existed throughout human experience and had other names for millennia before scientific medicine renamed it with a New Latin term in the mid-19th century (1840s); in English it was called consumption because…

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