Zymotic disease
Zymotic diseases (from the Greek word ζυμοῦν zumoûn "to ferment") is a 19th-century medical term for acute infectious diseases,[1] especially "chief fevers and contagious diseases (e.g. typhus and typhoid fevers, smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, erysipelas, cholera, whooping-cough, diphtheria, &c.)".[2]
The organism believed to cause these diseases was called the Zyme or microzyme.
Historical use of the Term
As originally employed by Dr W. Farr, of the British Registrar-General's department, the term included the diseases which were "epidemic, endemic and contagious," and were regarded as owing their origin to the presence of a morbific principle in the system, acting in a manner analogous to, although not identical with, the process of fermentation.[2]
In the late 19th century, Antoine Béchamp proposed that tiny organisms he termed microzymas, and not cells, were the fundamental building block of life. His ideas were rejected.[3] Bechamp claimed these microzymas are present in all things—animal, vegetable, and mineral—whether living or dead. Microzymas coalesce to form blood clots and bacteria. Depending upon the condition of the host, microzymas assume various forms. In a diseased body, the microzymas become pathological bacteria and viruses. In a healthy body, microzymas form healthy cells. When a plant or animal dies, the microzymas live on.
The term first saw British official use in 1839.[4] It was used extensively in the English Bills of Mortality as a cause of death beginning in 1842. Robert Newstead (1859-1947) used the term in a 1908 publication in the Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology, to describe the contribution of house flies (Musca domestica) towards the spread of infectious diseases. However, by the early-1900s, bacteriology "displaced the old fermentation theory",[2] and so the term became obsolete.
