Status lymphaticus: Sudden death in children from “visitation of God” to cot death

Abstract

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in cases of sudden death, coroners' verdicts of death by "visitation of God" became increasingly popular. This reflected growing reluctance to blame the dead person in a verdict of felo de se. Increasingly, sudden deaths were attributed to human accident.' By the nineteenth century, as society became more secular and Christian ideas more sophisticated, belief in God's direct power waned, scientific medicine gained strength and "visitation of God" became less acceptable. A fatal "disease", status lymphaticus, was invented to fill the gap. This excited medical interest for some fifty years and is recorded as having killed thousands of people, mostly children. It was even regarded as "the most important problem in medicine". Later, though no "cure" had been found, it dropped from the textbooks so completely that today many younger doctors and medical historians have never heard of it.