Plural of dropsy; multiple instances or cases of abnormal fluid accumulation in the body.
Standard English plural of 'dropsy,' formed by changing the '-y' to '-ies,' following the pattern of nouns like 'baby' becoming 'babies.'
When doctors wrote about 'dropsies' in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were treating a symptom they didn't understand—the word persists because it captures an observable phenomenon even though modern medicine knows dropsy results from many different underlying diseases.
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