Brain fever

Brain fever describes a medical condition where a part of the brain becomes inflamed and causes symptoms that present as fever. The terminology is dated, and is encountered most often in Victorian literature, where it typically describes a potentially life-threatening illness brought about by a severe emotional upset. Conditions that may be described as brain fever include:

In The Wound Dresser / a series of letters written from the hospitals in Washington ..., by Walt Whitman the part called Letters of 1864 (about 3/4 of the way through the book), VI, a letter dated March 15, 1861(!) describes a patient Whitman lost to brain fever.

In Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Crooked Man", the term is used to refer to a woman suffering from a state of shock when her husband has been murdered. The term is also used in "The Naval Treaty", in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes; here it refers to Percy Phelps, an old schoolmate of Dr Watson’s, who was distraught after losing important diplomatic papers. He was so upset that he had a fit and went almost mad, before he “lay for over nine weeks, unconscious, and raving mad with brain fever.” Similarly, brain fever is also mentioned in the Holmes stories "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches", "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box", and "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual".