Dyscrasia

DISCRASIA (from the Greek dys- prefix indicating qualitative disturbance and krasis-mixing), a term widely used in former medicine, beginning with Hippocrates who introduced it to denote constitutional diseases, in which a corrupted, compared to normal, composition of the body's humors was assumed. In this context, a whole range of crases was distinguished. Thus, one of the last representatives of humoral pathology, Rokitansky, speaks of tuberculous, fibrinous, cancerous, typhoid, exanthematous, septic, and other 'crases'. With the displacement of the humoral direction in pathology by the cellular, the concept of 'crases', in the sense of endogenously arising peculiarities of the organism, was contrasted with the concept of changes in the blood and humors of exogenous origin, created by various infections and intoxications; in this sense, the aforementioned term could also be used by Virchow, the founder of cellular pathology. At the present time, this term has lost its meaning, but the concept of diathesis (see), which was confused in ancient medicine with the concept of D., has been preserved and has even become very common with the development of the modern doctrine of constitution (see). However, the concept of diathesis now contains a different, broader compared to the previous, meaning.