apostem

A sixteenth-century resident of Mexico City writes to his wife in Seville about his desperate state of health: "... since coming here I have not had one day of health, and all of the month of July and August I was in bed, and without any hope, so that the doctors wanted to open me up, because they said that my disease was an apostem on my liver ..."

Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico 2008

Here he describes a bewildering variety of maladies from which people suffered: gangrene of the limbs or digits; carbuncles; lamparones (painful swellings of the neck); empeines (a pustular skin rash); encordios (swellings of the groin area); sarna, or scabies; and an infinite diversity of growths, bumps, and protuberances which tend to appear anywhere on the head, eyes, nostrils, ears, or on the breasts. 93 At one point during his travels through New Spain, Fray Alonoso Ponce was much indisposed by an apostem of his right nipple, which:

Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico 2008