Definition of Pesthouse

Pesthouse: A hospital where people suffering from infectious disease were once confined and sometimes treated. "I discovered the ruin of the pesthouse, a building where anyone with an illness who was passing through the western passages into the British Isles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would be quarantined and left to die." (Jim Crace, The Paris Review). Pest was once synonymous with the plague and more generally referred to any dread contagious disease.