Jáundice. n.s. [jaunisse, jaune, yellow, Fr.] A distemper from obstructions of the glands of the liver, which prevents the gall being duly separated by them from the blood; and sometimes, especially in hard drinkers, they are so indurated as never after to be opened, and straighten the motion of the blood so much through that viscus as to make it divert with a force great enough into the gastrick arteries, which go off from the hepatick, to break through them, and drain into the stomach; so that vomiting of blood, in this distemper, is a fatal symptom. Quincy.
Why should a man, whose blood is warm within,
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?
Sleep when he wakes, and creep into the jaundice
By being peevish? Shakesp. Merchant of Venice.
What grief hath set the jaundice on your cheeks? Shak.
Those were thy thoughts, and thou couldst judge aright,
'Till int'rest made a jaundice in thy sight. Dryden.
The eyes of a man in the jaundice make yellow observations on every thing; and the soul, tinctured with any passion, diffuses a false colour over the real appearances of things. Watts's Improvement of the Mind.