c. 1690.—Rumphius, speaking of the [Jack]-fruit (q.v.): "Non nisi vacuo stomacho edendus est, alias enim ... plerumque oritur Passio Cholerica, Portugallis Mordexi dicta."—Herb. Amb., i. 106.
1702.—"Cette grande indigestion qu'on appelle aux Indes Mordechin, et que quelques uns de nos Français ont appellée Mort-de-Chien."—Lettres Edif., xi. 156.
Bluteau (s.v.) says Mordexim is properly a failure of digestion which is very perilous in those parts, unless the native remedy be used. This is to apply a thin rod, like a spit, and heated, under the heel, till the patient screams with pain, and then to slap the same part with the sole of a shoe, &c.
1705.—"Ce mal s'appelle mort-de-chien."—Luillier, 113.
The following is an example of literal translation, as far as we know, unique:
1716.—"The extraordinary distempers of this country (I. of Bourbon) are the Cholick, and what they call the Dog's Disease, which is cured by burning the heel of the patient with a hot iron."—Acct. of the I. of Bourbon, in La Roque's Voyage to Arabia the Happy, &c., E.T. London, 1726, p. 155.
1727.—"... the Mordexin (which seizes one suddenly with such oppression and palpitation that he thinks he is going to die on the spot)."—Valentijn, v. (Malabar) 5.
c. 1760.—"There is likewise known, on the Malabar coast chiefly, a most violent disorder they call the Mordechin; which seizes the patient with such fury of purging, vomiting, and tormina of the intestines, that it will often carry him off in 30 hours."—Grose, i. 250.
1768.—"This (cholera morbus) in the East Indies, where it is very frequent and fatal, is called Mort-de-chien."—Lind, Essay on Diseases incidental to Hot Climates, 248.
1778.—In the Vocabulary of the Portuguese Grammatica Indostana, we find Mordechim, as a Portuguese word, rendered in Hind. by the word badazmi, i.e. bad-haẓmī, 'dyspepsia' (p. 99). The most common modern Hind. term for cholera is Arab. haiẓah. The latter word is given by Garcia de Orta in the form hachaiza, and in the quotation from Couto as sachaiza (?). Jahāngīr speaks of one of his nobles as dying in the Deccan, of haiẓah, in A.D. 1615 (see note to Elliot, vi. 346). It is, however, perhaps not to be assumed that haiẓah always means cholera. Thus Macpherson mentions that a violent epidemic, which raged in the Camp of Aurangzīb at Bījapur in 1689, is called so. But in the history of Khāfi Khān (Elliot, vii. 337) the general phrases ta'ūn and wabā are used in reference to this disease, whilst the description is that of bubonic plague.