‘I know the difference between ictal and icteric,’ said my husband proudly, reminding me of Tweedledum in Through the Looking-Glass. He explained, accurately enough, that ictal was to do with strokes and icteric with jaundice. But he hadn’t heard about the bird.
Pliny in his Natural History says that there is a bird called ikteros (icterus) from its colour of yellowish green, like jaundice. If someone with jaundice looks at it, the patient will recover and the bird die.
Pliny thinks it the bird called in Latin galgulus, and this has been identified as the wodewale, woodwall, witwall or golden oriole.
On the unjaundiced side of things, ictal derives from the Latin ictus, a stroke, and here there is something that the dictionaries omit, for no good reason. Ictus (ictus apoplecticus being an apoplexy, and ictus solis sunstroke) didn’t begin as a medical term.
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