Pesthouse
A hospital where people suffering from infectious disease were once confined and sometimes treated. “I discovered the ruin of the pesthouse, a building where anyone with an illness who was passing through the western passages into the British Isles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would be quarantined and left to die.” (Jim Crace, The Paris Review). Pest was once synonymous with the plague and more generally referred to any dread contagious disease.
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- Pesticide
A chemical used to control, repel, or destroy pests of any sort. There are scores of different types of pesticides which may act specifically, for example, as acaricides (against mites), fungicides, herbicides, insecticides, molluscacides (against snails and other mollusks), pediculicides (against lice), rodenticides (against rats and other rodents), scabicides (against scabies), etc.
- Pestilence
“Ther cam a privee theef men clepeth Deeth, / That in this contree al the peple sleeth, / And with his spere he smoot his herte atwo, / And wente his wey withouten wordes mo. / He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence.” “La Peste” (The Plague), a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning 20th- century […]
- Pestis
The plague. An infectious disease due to a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. Y. pestis mainly infects rats and other rodents. Rodents are the prime reservoir for the bacteria. Fleas function as the prime vectors carrying the bacteria from one species to another. The fleas bite the rodents infected with Y. pestis and then they bite […]
- PET scan
The popular name (and abbreviation) of Positron Emission Tomography.
- Petechiae
Charles P. Davis, MD, PhD The body has enough work to do defending itself from the outside world, repairing injuries, and fighting off infections. So it seems unfair that there are also enemies within that body that are ready to attack. Such is the case with immune thrombocytopenic purpura (idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura or ITP), where […]