Black pox is a symptom of smallpox that is caused by bleeding under the skin which makes the skin look charred or black. It was more common in adults. This symptom usually indicates that a patient with smallpox is going to die.
A doctor who encountered black pox stated that "Doctors separate black pox into two forms—flat smallpox and hemorrhagic smallpox. In a case of flat smallpox, the skin remains smooth and doesn't pustulate, but it darkens until it looks charred, and it can slip or fall off the body in sheets, sometimes all of it, causing instant death, though that is very rare. In hemorrhagic smallpox, black, unclotted blood oozes or runs from the mouth and other body orifices. Black pox is close to one hundred percent fatal. If any sign of it appears in the body, the victim will almost certainly die. In the hemorrhagic cases, the virus destroys the linings of the throat, the stomach, the intestines, the rectum, and the vagina, and these membranes disintegrate. Fatal smallpox can destroy the body's entire skin — both the exterior skin and the interior skin that lines the passages of the body."
Famous quotes containing the words black and/or pox:
“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“A pox of this gout! or a gout of this pox! for the one or the
other plays the rogue with my great toe.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)