I heard once that the cosmetic fashion of rougeing pale cheeks grew, at least in part, from the TB look.
ETA, although a quick trip to wiki debunks that
Hate to keep a zombie alive, but I recently heard a great one from comic Michael Showalter. He had some old-school terms for Restless Leg Syndrome. My favorites were “Sewing-Machine Foot” and “The Kicks”.
As he put it, “The Kicks” sounds so Dickensian. “Oh, Doctor Goodfellow, pray tell us that Eustace will be well!” “I’m afraid not, Martha. He’s got a bad case of The Kicks.”
When my granddaughter was but a couple of months old, her great grandmother (on the in-law’s side of the family) picked the child up by the diaper waist band in front, and dangled that sweet innocent baby as she made a bouncing motion… She said she was checking to see if it was “liver tied.”
I don’t know what that means but it scared the shit out of all of us.
A gay male co-worker of mine came back from a fabulous tropical vacation with giardiasis, otherwise known as Beaver Fever.
Yes, we still make fun of him for it.
No, it’s still used to refer to a real disease – I met someone with occasional gout a while ago, and it’s not fun.
But lord, it is hard to be sympathetic, when you’re thinking “Gout? Gout!? Where’s your powdered wig, gold-topped cane and liveried footmen?”
Semi-substantiated rumour has it that “The Danbury Shakes” a.k.a. “The Hatter’s Disease” was a term for mercury poisoning.
(Mercury was used to treat beaver pelts to make hats; Danbury, CT was a major hat-making center).
I had “midnight croup” when I was little. Or at least, that’s how my parents and the doctor referred to it. (Knowing my parents, they probably went out of their way to find the old-timeyest doc in town.) Anyway I was so little I didn’t understand properly at first, and though they were talking about “midnight crook” and thought that meant someone would come and steal me away, still hacking and coughing, into the night.
Some people in the '30s suffered from Jake leg, caused by the effects of a toxic Jamaican ginger extract substitute common during prohibition. Bad juice.
It’s about as much fun as if someone injected coarse-grade carborundum grit into the mating surfaces of a load-bearing joint, which is damn near what actually does happen. It generally means no port and pheasant for six to nine months, or else a quick course of indometacin and a long-term steady dose of allopurinol.
Sadly, I never have had my foot bound up like a wasp’s nest in nine feet of crepe bandage like you’re supposed to in the cartoons. 
Just last week, I was seized by a violent ague.
It’s also associated with prolonged labor where the baby’s head compresses the vaginal wall and the bladder against the pubic bone. Distressingly common in places where girls are either married and impregnated while quite young, or where the growth of adult females has been stunted due to chronic malnutrition.
Reading the ague and epizootic posts above, half the fun is the pronunciation.
My grandpa had influenza in WWI (lived), and said he’d had “the a-gyou.”
I first heard of epizootics in a book (about the Stanley Steamer automobile!) and assumed it was pronounced “eppy-zoo-tic.” And have found plenty of culural references using that pronunciation since.
Someone mentioned hysteria, but I once encountered a case of hysterical paralysis–which I assume is now broken down into a range of better-named conditions.
I and a second clerk were going to be at the same register on the day of the big sale (biggest sale day of the year). We took classes to learn how to deal with the extra work, etc. On the day, before they opened the doors, second clerk just “shut down.” Too scared to talk ar move or even stand up, she was taken out on a litter. She could maintain eye contact. Very creepy.
I had to work the register alone–and this was in the day of the crank-operated mechanical registers!
Just finished watching the BBC series Poldark, set in 18th-century Cornwall. In it, several people were diagnosed as having morbid sore throat, which I believe is Diptheria.
How 'bout ringworm (actually a fungal infection)
and lice? (not technically a disease, but still gross, then and now)
Apparently we have forgotten the Heartbreak of Psoriasis.
That reminds of another disease, lycanthropy.
When I was doing genealogical research on my family I got the Civil War military medical records of my great-great-great-grandfather. He missed some action during the war due to pleurisy and quinsy.
TB or not TB, that is consumption.
Scurvy and rickets just sound cool.
Dispepsia sounds like you prefer coke.
How about catarrh? Sounds like something a pirate would get.
Kuru not only sounds cool, but apparently one can get it by eating the brains of someone else who had it.
“A word known mainly to Americans, ‘fantods’ refers to a state of extreme nervousness or restlessness.”
Hmm, I wonder why it’s mostly Americans who know it.
I have heard diarrhea referred to by older generations as “the trots.”