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Henry F. Chambers, Editorial Commentary: Cellulitis, by Any Other Name, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Volume 56, Issue 12, 15 June 2013, Pages 1763–1764, https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/cit126
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(See the Major Article by Pallin et al on pages 1754–62.)
“I know it when I see it … ,” as Justice Potter Stewart famously said of hard-core pornography. Would that this were the case with cellulitis. In principle, cellulitis is simply defined as an acute infection with inflammation of the skin involving the dermis and subcutaneous tissues. In practice, because of the overlapping signs and symptoms of skin infections, the terminology has become burdened with terms such as erysipelas, purulent cellulitis, nonpurulent cellulitis, nonsuppurative cellulitis, cellulitis with drainage, cellulitis with ulcer, cellulitis with abscess, abscess with surrounding cellulitis, and necrotizing cellulitis (to name a few), in an effort to parse differences in microbiology, severity, and prognosis that may impact therapy and management. At the semantic other extreme is International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision coding, which lumps cellulitis and abscess together, even though these 2 entities would appear to be easily differentiated clinically and microbiologically. Clearly, an abscess is a collection of pus often in association with pain, swelling, and inflammation. Whatever cellulitis is, it is not an abscess, as there is no collection of pus, which, if there were, the lesion would be an abscess and not cellulitis.
