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

See Examples For:

hospital gangrene

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

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

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

After my third week, an epidemic of hospital gangrene broke out in my ward.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 by Various

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

From Victorian Worthies Sixteen Biographies by Blore, George Henry

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