from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. A disease characterized by the wasting away or atrophy of the body or a part of the body.
- n. Tuberculosis of the lungs. No longer in scientific use.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. An atrophy of the body or part of the body, especially pulmonary tuberculosis.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. A wasting or consumption of the tissues. The term was formerly applied to many wasting diseases, but is now usually restricted to pulmonary phthisis, or consumption. See consumption.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A disease of the lungs, characterized by progressive consolidation of pulmonary tissue, with breaking down and the formation of cavities.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- n. involving the lungs with progressive wasting of the body
The term phthisis, consumption, appears first in Greek literature.
We were accused and convicted of pulmonary phthisis, which is equivalent to the plague in the prejudices regarding contagion entertained by Spanish physicians.
At last I discovered a cure for phthisis, which is also known as Phthoe, a disease for many centuries deemed incurable, and I healed many who are alive to this day as easily as I have cured the
For this kind of phthisis there is no hope of cure.
When "phthisis" came they all sprang up, and vowed the man who rung
All I remember is that it claimed to cure a whole host of ailments, including “phthisis”of which I had never heardand boasted, “Makes children fat as pigs.”
Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but phthisis is there.
Monasticism, such as it existed in Spain, and such as it still exists in Thibet, is a sort of phthisis for civilization.
The p, I should add for your guidance, is silent, as in phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan.
+ Cardan in his Encomium Podagrae reckoneth this among the Dona Podagrae, that they are delivered thereby from the phthisis and stone in the bladder.