impostume

(ɪmˈpɒstjuːm) or

imposthume

(Pathology) an archaic word for abscess

[C15: from Old French empostume, from Late Latin apostēma, from Greek, literally: separation (of pus), from aphistanai to remove, from histanai to stand]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

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impostumed

References in periodicals archive ?

Thus the curdling of the king's blood introduced to us aurally may be said to represent the origin of the hidden "impostume" (IV.iv.27), which proves to be poisoning Claudius's Denmark.

Ear disease in Hamlet

Stanley Cavell has characterized Coriolanus's "speech, when angry, as being the spitting forth of the matter of an abscess." (27) He does so because Shakespeare's source, Plutarch, in his "Life of Caius Marcius Coriolanus," had written that this warrior "spitteth out anger from the most weake and passioned parte of the harte, much like the matter of an impostume." (28) Shakespeare, however, revises this voice from an abscessed to a diarrhetic one, partly in accordance, we shall see, with his long-standing interest in dramatizing, for shifting purposes, backward, excremental speech.