jail fever

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈdʒeɪl fiːvə/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈdʒeɪl ˌfivər/

jail fever (uncountable)

1. (dated) typhus spread in jails.^[1]
   • 1782, John Haysham, An Account of the Jail Fever - Or Typhus Carcerum: as it Appeared at Carlisle in the Year 1781, page 1:

     A'LTHO this Fever neither arose in a Jail, nor a Hospital, yet it so exactly re-sembles the Jail Fever, both in the symptoms, causes, and method of cure, that I have not scrupled to treat of it under that name.

   • 1803, James Carmichael Smyth, A Description of the Jail Distemper, as it appeared amongst the Spanish prisoners, at Winchester, page 105:

     I have now the satisfaction to see this opinion confirmed, in so far at least as relates to the dysentery, a putrid disease, equally contagious with the jail fever, and in military hospitals, at least, still more fatal.

2. (dated) any infectious disease spread in cramped and unhygienic conditions.^[2]
   • 2017, Margaret DeLacy, Contagionism after 1750: John Pringle and James Lind, →DOI, page 55:

     John Pringle’s army service in the 1740s convinced him that an assortment of illnesses attributed to an unhealthy environment—“jail fever,” “camp fever,” “ship fever” and “putrid fever” —were in fact the same disease, generated by crowding but transmitted by contagion.

• typhus on Wikipedia.Wikipedia