We've all got pneumonia in our lungs, which gain ascendancy when the body becomes weakened. It's been historically dubbed the "Old Man's Friend" because it would peacefully carry off someone who was suffering under some other terminal illness.
As someone who has had pneumonia, it's not an "Old Man's Friend".
There's nothing "peaceful" about pneumonia. It's a very frightening strangling feeling. The only thing "peaceful" about it is that you don't have the energy express the horror.
A now-former coworker of mine had walking pneumonia in 2019. He didn't know it was pneumonia until he eventually went to the hospital, but he had been suffering from severe unexplained back pain for days. It wasn't pleasant, and he went to the hospital because his back pain was so bad he was barely able to function.
This was related to me by my father, who had pneumonia as a teen and it nearly killed him. He was allergic to penicillin, and had to endure without it.
Looks like the phrase was written about in 1892. Probably it's older than that, though.
> The term is attributed to William Osler, who in the first edition of his book The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892) wrote:
> In children and in healthy adults the outlook is good. In the debilitated, in drunkards and in the aged the chances are against recovery. So fatal is it in the latter class [i.e. the elderly] that it has been termed the natural end of the old man.
Did he really say "we all got pneumonia in our lungs"? Pneumonia is inflammation in your lungs, that isn't normal. You die from it when it fills your lungs with pus and blood, pus and blood in your lungs isn't normal either.
