pachydermy

English

Etymology

From pachy- +‎ derm +‎ -y.

Noun

pachydermy (uncountable)

1. (medicine) A condition in which the skin thickens and becomes hardened or verrucous.
   • 1883, Felix von Niemeyer, A Text-book of Practical Medicine:

     If, as the inflammation recurs, the pachydermy spread beyond the point originally attacked, all the different grades of the disease are often exhibited simultaneously in the same extremity.

   • 1917, Botanical Society of Edinburgh, Transactions - Botanical Society of Edinburgh - Volume 26, page 302:

     Here in Edinburgh, whether on account of the pachydermy of its people or because the secretion is less virulent than it is elsewhere, cases of dermatitis caused by the plant are few.

   • 1976, Excerpta medica. Section 31: Arthritis and rheumatism:

     From the clinical point of view, there was striking, symmetrically expressed pachydermy of extremities, forehead, crown of the head and sometimes even the face with the symptom of cutis certicis gyrata.

2. Insensitivity.
   • 1972, Wayland Kennet, Preservation, page 35:

     The haughty foreign secretary, to whom for the next fifty years all stories of aristocratic pachydermy were attached, was still to come.

   • 1982, V. R. Krishna Iyer, Law, Justice, and the Disabled, page 10:

     Their blood, sweat, toil and tears go unheeded, their personhood neglected, and their developmental contribution atrophied, in the ballyhoo of politics and the pachydermy of the bureaucracy.

   • 1994, Civil & Military Law Journal - Volume 29, page 24:

     Now, may we hope a shift of paradigm and a shake-up of operational pachydermy will take place ?