Harvard death n. a death which occurs despite all symptoms being treated successfully or all medical test results appearing normal. Editorial Note: This term is often explained to mean “the operation was successful but the patient died.” (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A physician in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, shares some of the vocabulary of his patients from Appalachia. There, a misery is anything painful, such as a misery in my jaw if they have a painful tooth or a misery in my back if they have lumbar pain...
During the late 19th and early 20th century, thousands of volunteers helped crowdsource the Oxford English Dictionary. This venerable reference work includes citations sent in by inventors, eccentrics, scientists and educators, an Arctic explorer —...