PUTREFACTION • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Putrefaction

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noun

Putrefaction n.

The act or the process of putrefying; the offensive decay of albuminous or other matter. Note: Putrefaction is a complex phenomenon involving a multiplicity of chemical reactions, always accompanied by, and without doubt caused by, bacteria and vibriones; hence, putrefaction is a form of fermentation, and is sometimes called putrefaction fermentative. Putrefaction is not possible under conditions that preclude the development of living organisms. Many of the products of putrefaction are powerful poisons, and are called cadaveric poisons, or ptomaïnes.

The condition of being putrefied; also, that which putrefied. "Putrefaction's breath."

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Etymology of 'Putrefaction'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Putrefaction" Quotes from Famous Books

... soever may be the examples of existence without thought, it is certainly a state not much to be desired. He that lives in torpid insensibility, wants nothing of a carcass but putrefaction. It is the part of every inhabitant of the earth to partake the pains and pleasures of his fellow-beings; and, as in a road through a country desert and uniform, the traveller languishes for want of amusement, so the passage of life ...

— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... process of drying, and then remain almost unalterable even on exposure to the air and moisture. There is a vault at Toulouse in which a vast number of bodies that have been buried were found, after many years, dry and without a trace of the effects of putrefaction; and in the vaults of St. Michael's Church, Dublin, the bodies are similarly preserved. In both cases putrefaction is prevented by the constant absorption of the moisture from the atmosphere, and through its medium from the body by the calcareous soil in which the vaults are ...

— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... up, or, in other words, the deposit of Globigerina skeletons, did not go on very fast. It is demonstrable that an animal of the cretaceous sea might die, that its skeleton might lie uncovered upon the sea-bottom long enough to lose all its outward coverings and appendages by putrefaction; and that, after this had happened, another animal might attach itself to the dead and naked skeleton, might grow to maturity, and might itself die before the calcareous mud ...

— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... a hundred other zoological triumphs. As early as 1842, he proved to himself the vegetable nature of the common pink Coralline, which fringes every rock-pool, by keeping it for eight weeks in unchanged salt-water, without any putrefaction ensuing. The ground, of course, on which the proof rested in this case was, that if the coralline were, as had often been thought, a zoophyte, the water would become corrupt, and poisonous to the life of the small animals in the same jar; and ...

— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley

... door he was enveloped by a smell of putrefaction and hospital air. On the stairs he met a Russian army doctor smoking a cigar. The doctor was followed by a ...

— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

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