Complications The most common complications of boils are scarring and infection or abscess of the skin, spinal cord, brain, kidneys, or other organs.

David Landes likes to tell the story of Nathan Meyer Rothschild, the richest man in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century, dead in his fifties of an infected abscess.

I know that the abscess that grew around my wound after the operation, the 16 ounces of puss, is the contaminated Gulf of Mexico, and there were oil drenched pelicans inside me and dead floating fish.