Organisms that are most frequently associated with brain abscess in patients with AIDS are poliovirus, Toxoplasma gondii, and Cryptococcus neoformans, though in infection with the latter organism, symptoms of meningitis generally predominate.
Dupuytren's success at draining a cerebral abscess is referred to in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary: "not Dupuytren, about to open up an abscess through a thick encephalic layer" (Part Two, Chapter 11).
He recommended opening and evacuating abscesses and washing them with warm water and chlorine, an early form of the more modern Carrel-Dakin method of wound treatment.
Also depicted are his life in a garret, while suffering from an illness due to an abscess in the throat; a visit from his mother who curses him; and the composition of the Symphonie fantastique.
A Paget's abscess, named by eminent British surgeon and pathologist Sir James Paget, is an abscess that recurs at the site of a former abscess which had resolved.