The process of converting into or becoming a cheese-like substance, especially the pathological death and breakdown of tissue in diseases like tuberculosis.
From Latin 'caseus' (cheese) plus the suffix '-ation' (denoting action or process). The term emerged in medical literature as physicians needed language to describe the distinctive appearance of tubercular tissue damage.
Caseation is one of those weird medical terms that's actually quite poetic—it shows how 17th and 18th-century doctors, without microscopes that worked well, used their eyes and kitchen knowledge to describe disease, literally saying 'that diseased tissue looks like cheese.'
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