Tetter

Tetter is an historical term that appeared in English medical writing to denote a skin eruption or dermatitis. In modern medicine, "tetter" is not used as a precise diagnosis; its meaning varied across time and writers, and it was often used as a broad label for itchy, inflamed skin.

Historically, tetter referred to a range of cutaneous conditions characterized by itching, redness, flaking, cracking, or vesicular or crusted lesions. Descriptions frequently mentioned involvement of the scalp, hands, feet, or trunk and sometimes imagined contagion; however, many cases would today be diagnosed as different conditions such as eczema, dermatitis, or, when fungal infection was involved, tinea.

Because the term was applied inconsistently, it is difficult to map tetter to a single modern diagnosis. In some contexts, tetter overlapped with what clinicians would now classify as eczema or contact dermatitis; in others, it described more infectious-seeming eruptions described in earlier texts before the advent of microbiology.

In contemporary medical usage, tetter is mainly of historical interest. The term may appear in studies of medical history, old pharmacopoeias, or in regional dialects of English where it persists as a traditional name for certain skin conditions, but it is not a term used in current diagnostic practice.

See also: eczema, dermatitis, dermatology. Notes: This entry concerns a historical term; if a modern clinician suspects a rash, evaluation should follow current dermatologic guidelines to determine etiology and appropriate treatment.