hospital gangrene

American  

noun

1. Pathology. a contagious, often fatal gangrene, especially involving amputation stumps and war wounds, occurring usually in crowded, ill-kept hospitals, and caused by putrefactive bacteria.

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Etymology

Origin of hospital gangrene

First recorded in 1805–15

Example Sentences

Such terrible scourges as pyaemia and hospital gangrene were rife in all of them.

From Victorian Worthies Sixteen Biographies by Blore, George Henry

Fever, or hospital gangrene, or pyaemia, or purulent discharge of some kind may else supervene.

From Notes on Nursing What It Is, and What It Is Not by Nightingale, Florence

They did not come in scorbutic, like their predecessors; and they had no reason to dread hospital gangrene or fever.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 50, December, 1861 by Various

Surgeons, ignorant of antisepsis, and careless nurses, spread the infection along, until in some instances it reached a virulence which burst into the dreaded "hospital gangrene."

From Preventable Diseases by Hutchinson, Woods

If persons whose systems were reduced by inanition should by chance stump a toe or scratch the hand, the next report to me was gangrene, so potent was the regular hospital gangrene.

From The Boys of '61 or, Four Years of Fighting, Personal Observations with the Army and Navy by Coffin, Charles Carleton