breakbone

Breakbone fever.

All felt that their safety was in his hands and that his careful watch and strict enforcement of the quarantine would result in our exemption from the scourge. He was obeyed implicitly, and for a time we escaped the fever, but the "breakbone" singled us out one by one, and several times alarming symptoms of the dreaded yellow fever appeared.

Besides this, yellow fever and scarlatina are two of the gravest maladies on the catalogues of the nosologists, and produce, everywhere, a serious mortality when they prevail. But nobody dies of dengue or breakbone; no, not one in one thousand, taken promiscuously, and under all circumstances of discomfort or mal-treatment. As to its relations with malaria and malarious diseases, it suffices to remark that it is not produced, nor has I been known to spread, in the worst malarious localities.

A chicken's wishbone.

breakbone A chicken's wishbone; also called the breaking bone or pulleybone.

Violent; rough and painful.

Near-synonym: backbreaking

Shampooing, as employed in Japan, is not exactly the vigorous breakbone manipulation of the Turks at the namman, and which makes one imagine that every joint in the body must have been dislocated.