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What does the word typhoid mean?

• 1. Typhus- like; stuporous from fever. 2. Same as t. fever.

• [ Greek] Of or resembling typhus; characterized by stupor and depression. T. condition, T. state( Status typhosus), a condition occurring in typhus, t. fever, and other diseases, and indicative of profound prostration; characterized by great muscular feebleness, a tendency to slip down in bed, subsultus tendinum, sordes in the teeth, dry, brown tongue, feeble and rapid pulse, low muttering delirium, with floccitation( picking at the bed-clothes), and involuntary passage of feces and retention of urine. T. fever, abdominal typhus, enteric fever; a specific exanthematous fever, due to the Bacillus typhosus, and characterized by inflammatory enlargement or ulceration of Peyer’s patches and enlargement of the mesenteric glands and spleen. Sometimes the changes are confined to the spleen( Splenotyphoid) or spleen and mesenteric glands( Adenotyphoid), or consists chiefly in inflammatory or degenerative changes in the lungs( Pneumotyphoid) or kidneys( Nephrotyphoid). T. fever is communicated by the stools, which become contagious after stagnation and decomposition, and by the urine; the contagion being conveyed through the emanations from sewers and through contaminated water, food, or milk. The period of incubation id from one to four weeks, after which the stage of invasion sets in, usually insidiously, with malaise, headache and backache, epistaxis, cough, ilio-caecal tenderness, and fever which rises higher and higher each day, remitting always in the morning. In the beginning of the second week the fever reaches its acme, and an eruption appears, consisting of lenticular rose-colored papules, which appear on the abdomen and flanks in successive crops, each crop persisting for two or three days. The ileo-caecal tenderness becomes marked, and is accompanied with gurgling; diarrhoea now sets in, the evacuation resembling pea-soup in color and consistence; there is tympanites, and the spleen becomes distinctly enlarged. This stage of acme lasts a week or so, and is followed by a stage of gradual decline of the temperature and other symptoms, and very gradual convalescence, which is often interrupted by one or more relapses. In the stage of acme the patient frequently passes into the t. state( q. v. above). Death may occur from exhaustion, or from the continued high temperature, or from the complications, the most important of which are intestinal haemorrhage, intestinal perforation with peritonitis( often occurring during convalescence), pneumonia, pleurisy, and bronchitis. Other complications are thrombosis of the veins, bad-sores, parotitis, otitis, keratitis, noma, and permanent mental disorder. Treatment: prophylaxis( disinfection of drains and all materials contaminated by the urine and feces); careful nursing, with milk or other unirritating liquid diet; cold baths for hyperpyrexia; vegetable astringents and sulphuric acid for diarrhoea; turpentine internally for intestinal haemorrhage; opium in perforation; prevention of bed-sores by avoidance of pressure and attention to the state of the skin; stimulants in the t. state or when other signs of prostration develop. Cholera-t., a typhoid state often following the algid stage in cholera; attributed to the blood-changes in the latter, and consequent interference with tissue metamorphosis, or to the renal changes. Often associated with a cutaneous eruption( roseola, etc.) T. spine, a painful state of the spine occurring after t. fever.

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