Plural of abscess; multiple pockets of pus that form in infected tissue areas.
From Latin 'abscessus' with English plural '-es', showing how medical terminology preserves Latin forms even when borrowed into English.
Before antibiotics, abscesses were death sentences—people needed to be lanced open and drained, and infections often spread to the bloodstream anyway; penicillin changed 'certain death' to 'minor surgery.'
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