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Festering   /fˈɛstərɪŋ/   Listen
Festering

noun
1.
(medicine) the formation of morbific matter in an abscess or a vesicle and the discharge of pus.  Synonyms: maturation, suppuration.
2.
A fluid product of inflammation.  Synonyms: ichor, purulence, pus, sanies, suppuration.






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"Festering" Quotes from Famous Books



... over, its healing power was felt, this time at the North. There was a honeycomb for Samson in the carcass of the monster. The two great Presbyterian sects at the North had found a common comfort in their relief from the perpetual festering irritation of the slavery question; they had softened toward each other in the glow of a religious patriotism; they had forgotten old antagonisms in common labors; and new issues had obscured the tenuous doctrinal disputes that had agitated the continent in 1837. Both parties grew tired and ashamed ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... standards of honor and converts every wound into a festering sore; hate misunderstands; hate misinterprets; hate maligns its supposed adversary, while every contractor, battleship builder, and manufacturer of munitions ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... to-day. Everything was eloquent of those days they had spent together on the upper reaches of the Ottawa. The flowing river, the open sky, the wood, the fresh air, and, most of all, the slipping canoe spoke to him of Dick. The fierce resentment, the bitter sense of loss, that had been as a festering in his heart these years, seemed somehow to-day to have lost their stinging pain. With every lift of the paddle, with every deep breath of the fragrant spring air, with every slip of the canoe, the buoyant gladness ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... when a beetling cliff, by seething seas Aye buffeted, is carved and underscooped, For all its stubborn strength, by tireless waves, Till, scourged by winds and lashed by tempest-flails, The sea into deep caves hath gnawed its base; So greater 'neath his foot grew evermore The festering wound, dealt when the envenomed fangs Tare him of that fell water-snake, which men Say dealeth ghastly wounds incurable, When the hot sun hath parched it as it crawls Over the sands; and so that mightiest man Lay faint ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus

... agreeable task to have to deal out justice to one's own child—a child so lovable, in spite of her faults. How much easier to pass the matter over slightly, merely administering a gentle reprimand! But no, I cannot; 'twould be like healing slightly the festering sore that threatens the citadel of life. I must be faithful to my God-given trust, however trying to my feelings. Ah, there she is!" as a little figure appeared at the top of the staircase and hurried across the intervening ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley

... obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling. At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels but partially decayed, which ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... plague runs festering through the town, And never a bell is tolling: And corpses jostled 'neath the moon, Nod to the dead-cart's rolling. The young child calleth for the cup— The strong man brings it weeping; The mother from her babe looks up, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... Their success in preventing deaths from suppurating wounds amazed the world. Their method was to discard the use of antiseptics and to depend upon absolutely clean instruments, dressings and hands. The most terrible wounds healed under this method without festering. This is, of course, the method in vogue to-day all over the civilized world. The Japanese did not discover aseptic surgery, but they were the first to put it to actual test in a large way. The old method was to depend upon drugs to kill the germs which might find their way into wounds and ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague

... was causing a festering sore in the community of Polktown could not be gainsaid. Sim Howell and two other boys in their early teens had somehow obtained liquor, and had been picked up in a frightful condition on the public street ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long

... the Revolution than before. This we say to the foreign reader. To her own country, Sand is a boon precious and prized, both as a warning and a leader, for which none there can be ungrateful. She has dared to probe its festering wounds; and if they be not past all surgery, she is one who, most of ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... miserable marksmen, not one arrow in half-a-dozen hitting the target. They said that all they required was to wound their game, and then that they ran it down till it died; that they could kill an elephant by wounding him in the foot. The shaft breaks short off, when, the wound festering, the poor brute becomes so lame that they can easily overtake him and eventually worry ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... even afterward in Washington—I mean the hospitals after Bull Run. Young bravery—the Zouaves—the multicolored guard regiments—and a romance in every death!" She laid one stained hand over the other, fingers still wide. "But here in this blackened horror they call the 'seat of war'—this festering bullpen, choked with dreary regiments, all alike, all in filthy blue—here individuals vanish, men vanish. The schoolgirl dream of man dies here forever. Only unwashed, naked duty remains; and its inspiration, man—bloody, dirty, vermin-covered, ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers

... great sorrow of his life, the thorn in the flesh which was always festering, the wound which would not be cured, the grief for which there was no remedy, was his love for Clarissa Underwood. He had asked her thrice to be his wife,—with very little interval, indeed, between the separate prayers,—and had been so answered that he entertained ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... spot," said the minister as he stood waiting for their car. "I never realized that Raymond had such a festering sore. It does not seem possible that this is a ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon

... dissatisfaction that had been all along festering in the hearts of the people, began to come to the surface. An inside view would have revealed a perpetual murmur of discontent. The Territorial Legislature was now in session, and doing its work, and copies of the laws they had enacted were coming into circulation. No legislature in America had ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler

... punishment. The Law makes for good,—and if we pull back for evil, destroys us in its outward course. Vice breeds corruption in body and in soul; and history furnishes us with more than sufficient examples of that festering disease. It is plainly demanded of us that we should assist God's universe in its way towards perfection; if we refuse, and set a drag on the majestic Wheel, we are ourselves crushed in its progress. Here is where our Church errs in the present generation. It is setting itself as a drag on the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... Dollars, blood money, into the coffers of these human dealers—as the rental for profit of the bodies of our American girl and her alien sister who has been mercilessly trapped, lured from her home and sold into the great festering cesspool, without the slightest knowledge of our customs and ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann

... of time, depending on the skill of the operator and on the endurance and patience of the subject. It is painful, but no such manifestations of pain are made as in teeth grinding. The portion tattooed is sensitive for about 24 hours, but no other evil consequences, such as festering, etc., follow as far as my ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... venture into the world. The washing process was simple enough. From the dish-pan which stood upon the hearth half full of dirty water and some of the breakfast dishes, she took a greasy dish-cloth, wrung it out carefully, and with it proceeded to wash, not untenderly, the festering heads, faces and fingers of her children, resorting from time to time to the dish-pan for a fresh supply of water. This done, she carefully dried the parts thus diligently washed with the handkerchief which she usually wore about her head. ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor

... iron, rotten timber jagged with out-torn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones, and ordure, indescribable; and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering foully here and there over all these,—remnants broadcast, of every manner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered bill, festering and flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of stinking ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... use the word "slut" once in every act. They can even bear up whenever a law forbids disrobing on the stage. They know that most pruriency in the theatre derives from the old frustrations sealed up and festering in the mind of the onlooker who detects it. They suspect, from what little reading they have managed in the psychology of outlets, that the more mock-raping there is done on the stage of the local opera house, the less ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... persecution I described as having taken place in former days? All this I had from a source more reliable than the whole Papist hierarchy. The Tuamites can deny nothing of what I have written. The tumbledown town is there, the filthy cabins and degraded squaws of the Galway Road are still festering in their own putridity, and probably the police are still preserving Strachan from the fate of the poor fellow so brutally murdered near Tuam a few weeks ago. The priests called a town meeting to protest against insult to the Church. Great ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... explain it away under the terms of science and philosophy, we need not wonder that they have so little faith in higher things. We need go no further for an explanation of the thoughtless unbelief which is eating its way like a festering sore to the heart of our modern world. If the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life sum up the totality of our being here, why should that crowd on the artist's canvas be represented as moved by an anguish that touches ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd

... characterize these papers, the peculiar power he possessed of enlisting and retaining the attention for what are commonly supposed to be dry and difficult subjects, and the capacity he had for controversy, sharp and incisive, but so candid and generous that it left no festering wound." ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek

... creative function. And since, further, one of the most pressing problems for solution in the older countries is that of poverty, the horrible slums and dens into which are crowded and in which are festering families of eight and ten children, whose parents are earning an uncertain 10s., 12s., 15s., and 20s. a week; since an immediate palliative is wanted, if popular risings impelled by starvation are to be avoided; since the lives of men and women ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... painting. One takes a muddy, sullen river flanked by rotting wharves and grimy factories and huddled, festering slums, and under the mantle of evening and the veil of illusion one creates a "Nocturne in Silver." The eye of the artist finds equal beauty in the Thames by sordid Southwark and the Adriatic lapping Venice in her soft caress. The common phrase ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... heart, and has felt them in any measure as his own, there are a hundred to whom these make no appeal and give no pang. Within ear-shot of our churches and chapels there are squalid aggregations of stunted and festering manhood, of whom it is only too true that they are 'drawn unto death' and 'ready to be slain,' and yet it would be an exaggeration to say that the bulk of our congregations cast even a languid eye of compassion upon those, to say nothing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... agreed in labouring for the good of their parishioners. Dr. Cambray and Mr. M'Cormuck made it their business continually to follow after Mrs. M'Crule, healing the wounds which she inflicted, and pouring into the festering heart the balm of Christian charity: they were beloved and revered by their parishioners; Mrs. M'Crule was soon detected, and universally avoided. Enraged, she attacked, by turns, both the clergyman and the priest; and when ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... day he thought of Poerio, Settembrini, and the rest, wearing their double chains, subsisting on their foul soup, degraded by forced companionship with criminals, cut off from the light of heaven, and festering in their dungeons. The facts that escaped from him in private conversation seemed to him—so he tells Lacaita—to spread like wildfire from man to man, exciting the liveliest interest, and extending ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... ever seen—like a hideous toad with wrinkled, baggy skin, with legs and arms so thin as to be no more than skin stretched tight over very meagre shinbones; and the face of this wretched being was a mass of festering wounds, on which no one could look without pity and horror. The man, too, was remarkable; an exceedingly smart young buck with an air of irresponsibility about him that suggested madness—a suspicion ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... Harvest from devouring blight, The Smut's dark poison, and the Mildew white; Deep-rooted Mould, and Ergot's horn uncouth, And break the Canker's desolating tooth. 515 First in one point the festering wound confin'd Mines unperceived beneath the shrivel'd rin'd; Then climbs the branches with increasing strength, Spreads as they spread, and lengthens with their length; —Thus the slight wound ingraved on glass ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... and cannot be removed in the ordinary way by washing, because the abnormal, hardened secretion of the gland itself becomes stained. These insects are so lowly organized that it is almost impossible to satisfactorily deal with them. {113} and they sometimes cause the continual festering of the ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... their fathers, husbands, or brethren. To none of these miserable creatures remained a living protector—hardly even a dead body which could be recognized; and thus the ghastly procession of more than three thousand women, many with gaping wounds in the face, many with their arms cut off and festering, of all ranks and ages, some numbering more than ninety years, bareheaded, with grey hair streaming upon their shoulders; others with nursing infants in their arms, all escorted by a company of heavy-armed troopers, left forever their native city. All made ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... One particularly festering day after dinner I had the excitement of quite a pretty little quarrel for dessert. Miss Whiffle had stuffed me with suet, in meat and pudding, to a point of stupefaction that stopped short only of ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes



Words linked to "Festering" :   medical specialty, body fluid, fester, bodily fluid, liquid body substance, bodily process, activity, suppuration, sanies, humour, humor, body process, gleet, medicine, bodily function



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