Tuberculosis is a serious infectious disease of the lungs. Treated for tuberculosis.
It killed one European in seven in the nineteenth century and is still among the world's biggest killers. Tuberculosis is curable with a long course of drugs, and the resistant strains are the real problem.
1nountuberculosisA serious infectious disease of the lungs.
“The whole sanatorium was built for tuberculosis and closed within thirty years.”
tuberculosis is a disease.
New Latin tuberculosis comes from tuberculum, a little swelling, from tuber, a lump.
Proto-Indo-European
*tewh₂-
Latin
tūberculum
New Latin
tūberculōsis
English, today
tuberculosis
Built from
To international scientific vocabulary from New Latin tūberculōsis, from Latin tūberculum (diminutive of tūber (“lump”)) ōsis; by surface analysis, tuberculum + -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 of the wasting away that consumed health and seemed even to consume flesh in some cases (for example, causing fistulas and tissue breakdown).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA