Miliary fever

Miliary fever was a loose medical term used in the past to indicate a general cause of infectious disease that cause an acute fever and skin rashes similar to the cereal grain called proso millet.^[1][2] The term has been used for various local epidemics in previous centuries, and considered synonymous with other diagnoses, including "sweating sickness",^[3] "prickly heat",^[4] or "Picardy sweat" (after the region in Northern France).^[5] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's death report showed this non-specific, by today's standards, term.^[1]

After subsequent advances in medicine, this term fell into disuse, supplanted by other more specific names of diseases, for example the modern miliary tuberculosis.