fever-ridden

English

Etymology

fever +‎ -ridden

Adjective

fever-ridden (comparative more fever-ridden, superlative most fever-ridden)

1. (of a place or community) Experiencing an epidemic of one of the diseases known as fever (such as yellow fever).
   • 1900, Ira L. Reeves, Bamboo Tales, Kansas City: Hudson-Kimberly Publishing, Chapter , pp. 135-136,^[1]

     […] it was but shortly after he had returned from fever-ridden Santiago, when in the hospital at Montauk Point, that the much-coveted document, making him an officer in the United States Army, reached him.

   • 2007, Giles Foden, “The brio of Ali Banana” (review of Burma Boy by Biyi Bandele, The Guardian, 2 June, 2007,^[2]

     Rain and illness turn the camp into a fever-ridden mudbath.

2. (of a place) Harbouring the virus that causes one of the diseases known as fever.
   • 1890, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four, Chapter 12,^[3]

     Whose loot is this, if it is not ours? Where is the justice that I should give it up to those who have never earned it? Look how I have earned it! Twenty long years in that fever-ridden swamp, all day at work under the mangrove-tree, all night chained up in the filthy convict-huts, bitten by mosquitoes, racked with ague […]

   • 1957, Ian Fleming, The Diamond Smugglers, London: Jonathan Cape, Chapter Seven,^[4]

     […] the diamond mine was six and a half hours’ walk through fever-ridden jungle, fraught with hazards from wild animals […]

3. (of a person) Suffering from fever.
   • 1907, Richard Harding Davis, The Congo and Coasts of Africa, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, Chapter 3, p. 89,^[5]

     The State posts were “clearings,” less than one hundred yards square, cut out of the jungle. Sometimes only black men were in charge, but as a rule the chef de poste was a lonely, fever-ridden white, whose only interest in our arrival was his hope that we might spare him quinine.

   • 1936, “Abscess Abolished,” Time, 14 September, 1936,^[6]

     Since the days of Dreyfus, interest in Guiana and the plight of its jungle-bound, fever-ridden convicts has never diminished.

   • 1999, “Soothing Solutions to the Cold & Flu Season” (review of A Soothing Broth by Pat Willard), Washington Post, 17 March, 1999,^[7]

     Willard is plagued by the memory of one seemingly endless night as a newlywed when she helplessly watched her fever-ridden husband toss and turn in misery.