Few medical words strike as much terror in the clinician and the public as gangrene with all its associations of rotting, corruption, and putrefaction. The word is of Greek origin and comes to English by way of Latin and French. It has always had an indivisible meaning, in its literal sense: mortification of a part of the living body. Gangrene seems to have first appeared in the British Isles in the 16th century as a noun. It was used most often by surgeons whose domain was the cure of external conditions. By the 17th century, it had passed into common speech although it was usually used in a narrow pathological sense. Shakespeare begins to give it metaphorical wings in Coriolanus: “The service of the foote Being once gangren'd, is not then respected For what it was before”.As pathology became a profession in the 19th century, gangrene, from being a rough and ready clinical description, was made into a taxonomic umbrella under which myriad species flourished: acute, constitutional, mummified, idiopathic, pulpy, senile, and many more. Doctors, however, never cornered the market on the term. At least twice the word spread a chill through the English-speaking world. In the Victorian era, hospital gangrene ripped through the surgical wards of Victorian infirmaries, turning wounds to greyish-green mush and patients into fevered, dying wrecks. The hospital was the microcosm of the Victorian city and to describe the latter, gangrene was launched into figurative life. “Our pauper system”, wrote Harriet Martineau, is “the great political gangrene of England”. Sanitary reform, better diet, antisepsis, and asepsis finally saw off hospital gangrene.The second occasion when gangrene sent widespread shivers through the reading public's spine was in World War I. Military surgeons had long been familiar with gangrene. However, in the rain-sodden, manure-soaked ground of Flanders, they witnessed something new. In 1915, surgeon D'Arcy Power in his Wounds of War described how gangrene set in: “The wound generally becomes more or less emphysematous and discharges a thin brownish, offensive fluid, which contains bubbles of gas … The infective process continues after death and the swelling may rapidly become so great as to make the corpse unrecognisable”. Surgeons soon learnt how fruitless was antisepsis alone and how valuable was deep radical excision of dead tissue to prevent the horrors of gas gangrene. Here were George Romero's living dead. Few medical words strike as much terror in the clinician and the public as gangrene with all its associations of rotting, corruption, and putrefaction. The word is of Greek origin and comes to English by way of Latin and French. It has always had an indivisible meaning, in its literal sense: mortification of a part of the living body. Gangrene seems to have first appeared in the British Isles in the 16th century as a noun. It was used most often by surgeons whose domain was the cure of external conditions. By the 17th century, it had passed into common speech although it was usually used in a narrow pathological sense. Shakespeare begins to give it metaphorical wings in Coriolanus: “The service of the foote Being once gangren'd, is not then respected For what it was before”. As pathology became a profession in the 19th century, gangrene, from being a rough and ready clinical description, was made into a taxonomic umbrella under which myriad species flourished: acute, constitutional, mummified, idiopathic, pulpy, senile, and many more. Doctors, however, never cornered the market on the term. At least twice the word spread a chill through the English-speaking world. In the Victorian era, hospital gangrene ripped through the surgical wards of Victorian infirmaries, turning wounds to greyish-green mush and patients into fevered, dying wrecks. The hospital was the microcosm of the Victorian city and to describe the latter, gangrene was launched into figurative life. “Our pauper system”, wrote Harriet Martineau, is “the great political gangrene of England”. Sanitary reform, better diet, antisepsis, and asepsis finally saw off hospital gangrene. The second occasion when gangrene sent widespread shivers through the reading public's spine was in World War I. Military surgeons had long been familiar with gangrene. However, in the rain-sodden, manure-soaked ground of Flanders, they witnessed something new. In 1915, surgeon D'Arcy Power in his Wounds of War described how gangrene set in: “The wound generally becomes more or less emphysematous and discharges a thin brownish, offensive fluid, which contains bubbles of gas … The infective process continues after death and the swelling may rapidly become so great as to make the corpse unrecognisable”. Surgeons soon learnt how fruitless was antisepsis alone and how valuable was deep radical excision of dead tissue to prevent the horrors of gas gangrene. Here were George Romero's living dead.