facies Hippocratica

English

Etymology

Latin; so called because the effect was described by Hippocrates.

Noun

facies Hippocratica

1. (medicine) The pallid or shrunken face of someone about to die.
   • 1790, Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France:

     Your child comes into the world with the symptoms of death; the facies Hippocratica forms the character of its physiognomy, and the prognostic of its fate.

   • 1891, Mary Noailles Murfree, In the "Stranger People's" Country, Nebraska, published 2005, page 191:

     Carew shifted his position, and once more looked anxiously at the haggard face on the pillow. It bore certain tokens which in his ignorance he fancied were characteristic of the facies hippocratica [...].

   • 1997, Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, Folio Society, published 2016, page 59:

     Hippocratics prided themselves on their clinical acuity, being quick to pick up telltale symptoms, as with the facies hippocratica, the facial look of the dying: ‘a protrusive nose, hollow eyes, sunken temples, cold ears that are drawn in with the lobes turned outward, the forehead's skin rough and tense like parchment, and the whole face greenish or black or blue-grey or leaden’.

Synonyms

• Hippocratic face

Further reading

• Hippocratic facies on Wikipedia.Wikipedia