Medical Terms
- septicemia
- Blood poisoning.
- scarlet fever
- A contagious disease characterized by a red rash, sores and very high fever. The person's temperature can get so high naturally curly or kinky hair can be permanently straightened.
- scarlatina
- See: scarlet fever.
- scurvy
- A disease marked by spongy gums, loosening of the teeth, and a bleeding into the skin and mucous membranes and caused by a lack of ascorbic acid.
- shingles
- Viral disease with skin blisters. Related to Chicken Pox.
- ship's fever
- See: typhus.
- sloes
- See: milk sickness.
- smallpox
- A contagious disease that includes a high fever, chills or rigors, dorsal-lumbar pain, and nausea and vomiting. After 2 or 3 days a rash may appear over the entire body. These lesions form pustules and eventually dry out to scabs and fall off. Blindness, through corneal infection, is possible. One statistic indicates as much as 10% of the deaths from disease in the 18th century were from smallpox.
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Smallpox is thought to have first appears 10,000 years BCE in agricultural settlements in Africa. The first recorded smallpox epidemic occurred in 1350 BC during the Egyptian-Hittite war.
- spotted fever
- Cerebrospinal meningitis fever.
- St. Vitus Dance
- See: chorea.
- summer's complaint
- See cholera infantum. In many cases this could have been food poisoning, from poorly handled or spoiled food.
- stroke
- See apoplexy.