morbific

This imagery of illness in the body politic reiterates the "morbific matter" of Democratic Vistas--and Whitman's somewhat mordant diagnosis of America's cultural ailments, partly in reaction to Thomas Carlyle's dyspeptic criticism of American democracy.

Workman remarked in one of his many reports to the Executive Council that, "the source of morbific agency [was] not merely adequate to destroy the health of the asylum, but even of the neighbourhood" (Workman in Moran, 2000, p.

(139.) "And let us avoid not only committed sin but also the thought of sin, like the morbific smell of a rotting body, a nasty odour, with nostrils pinched together." Paulinus, Carmen 28.241-43, and Eng.

Certainly the sphere of action is more limited, the communication of the poison more dependent on circumstances, and the morbific influences more within the control of sanitary laws and regulations than in the usual zymotic, or so-called contagious maladies.

Now, this same source is the locus classicus of the Ayurvedic theory of the three dosas, the three humours or morbific entities that are responsible for pathogenesis in the human organism (Caraka Samhita 1.12.13).