Cautery

Use in the book

The cause of head melancholy is attributed by Hercules de Saxonia to a cautery, boil or other outlet drying up. Amatus Lusitanus supplies a case in which a man with a hole in his arm allegedly became mad after healing and recovered when the wound was open again. The story treats closure and reopening as causally significant within a historical theory of retained harmful matter. Elsewhere, readiness to undergo searing and amputation illustrates the ordinary desire for health and life, contrasted with the extreme suffering Burton assigns to melancholy. The physical word therefore serves both a supposed therapeutic mechanism and a rhetorical measure of endurance.

The surgical catalogue describes cauteries as searing with hot irons and groups them with other frightening procedures, explaining the turn to blistering or corrosive applications. Its later treatment is far from unanimous. Salvianus offers reports of recovery after skull injury; Gordon reserves cauteries until other remedies fail and recounts relapse after a wound closes. Messaria rejects them entirely because he thinks the humour too thick to evaporate. The subsequent “All approve” is Burton’s sweeping statement despite that immediately preceding dissent, not a consensus that a reader should reconstruct. The closing qualification again limits the procedure to cases where other treatment does no good. These are historical therapeutic claims, not present-day recommendations.

The moral metaphor has more than one voice. In the attack on church patrons who withhold dues, “cauterized consciences” ignore threats and rebukes while their owners applaud their money. In the religious account of impenitence, the same phrase accompanies being “past all feeling”. But in consolation it is the distressed sufferers who call their consciences cauterized and say they cannot repent. Burton immediately grants the case’s gravity while denying that it requires despair; he insists that lack of present feeling does not prove final rejection. Treating this last occurrence as his confirmed verdict on the sufferers would reverse the exchange.

Related entries

Chirurgery

Issue

Conscience

Places to read

1. Subsection 15 Love of Learning or Excessive Study With a Digression on The… · paragraphs 20–24Patrons’ alleged insensibility to rebuke and the money motif.
2. Subsection 3. Causes of Head Melancholy · paragraphs 24–27Dried outlets and the attributed arm-wound case.
3. Section 4 Member 1 Prognosis of Melancholy · paragraphs 1–2Searing endured for health in the comparison of bodily and mental suffering.
4. Member 3 Surgical Remedies · paragraphs 8–10Searing, frightening procedures and maintained outlets.
5. Subsection 4 Remedies That Divert the Humours · paragraphs 10–16Therapeutic reports, last-resort qualifications, Messaria’s refusal and the contradictory generalization.
6. Member 2 Subsection 1 Religious Melancholy From Deficiency: Those… · paragraphs 1–3The conscience metaphor as polemical judgment.
7. Treatment of Despair Through Medicine, Good Counsel, Consolation, and So On · paragraphs 1–7The metaphor as the sufferer’s objection, followed by reassurance.

In this edition

“a cautery” is clarified as “a cautery wound”; wound supplies the object that can dry up. “seared” becomes “cauterized” within the paired actions of cauterizing and cutting off limbs. “cauterized consciences” becomes “consciences are seared” in the changed construction, the two passages; this shared wording does not erase the change of speaker. The main text and margin also differ: the body repeats leg before specifying the left leg, while the marginal Latin gives crown of the head or left leg. The body says shaved and bored where the margin says shaved and given a cautery. The supplied edition preserves these differences rather than silently repairing them.

cauterized conscience · cauterized consciences · local use 1

Printed “cauterized consciences” (English; phrase).

A conscience figuratively seared into insensibility.

Here: The patrons being denounced ignore rebuke and prefer money to the threatened loss of heaven.

Context: Burton’s polemical accusation against simoniacal patrons and those withholding tithes, not a medical diagnosis.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: they have cauterized consciences

Modern rendering: their consciences are seared

Word and construction: The attributive participle becomes the predicate are seared; their replaces the possessive force of have.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

cauterized conscience · cauterized consciences · local use 2

Printed “cauterized consciences” (English; phrase).

A conscience figuratively seared into insensibility.

Here: Religious insensibility is described as being past feeling despite a profession of Christianity.

Context: Burton’s religious polemic labels a group’s impenitence; the phrase is not a bodily operation.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: they have cauterized consciences

Modern rendering: Their consciences are seared

Word and construction: The noun phrase becomes a full predication, with Their bearing the original possessive relation.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

cauterized conscience · cauterized consciences · local use 3

Printed “cauterized consciences” (English; phrase).

A conscience imagined as seared into insensibility.

Here: A distressed person claims inability to repent as an objection to assurance.

Context: The accusation is voiced as the sufferer’s own complaint; Burton answers that the situation is not beyond hope and warns against concluding oneself rejected.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: they have cauterized consciences

Modern rendering: their consciences are seared

Word and construction: The same English metaphor occurs, but attribution to the worried speaker differs from the polemical use.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

cautery

Printed “cautery” (English; lemma).

A wound produced by searing, here used as a draining outlet.

Here: Drying or closure of the outlet is presented as a cause of head melancholy.

Context: Hercules de Saxonia supplies the causal claim; Amatus supplies the arm-wound anecdote that follows.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: a cautery, or boyl dried up, or any issue

Modern rendering: a cautery wound, boil or any draining sore dries up

Word and construction: The modern rendering supplies wound to clarify the noun and applies dries up across the listed outlets.

Qualification: The modern quoted unit omits the preceding when; the lexical list and its drying condition are aligned, not the whole clause.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

cautery · Cauteries

Printed “Cauteries” (English; lemma).

A treatment that sears tissue.

Here: The frightening manual procedure is contrasted with blistering and corrosive applications.

Context: Burton lists historical procedures and explains why alternatives were devised.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: Cauteries or searing with hot irons

Modern rendering: Cauteries, or searing with hot irons

Word and construction: The procedure name retains its own explanatory alternative; hot irons describes the means.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

cautery · cauteries

Printed “cauteries” (English; lemma).

A treatment that sears tissue and can create an outlet.

Here: Gordon reserves the procedure for failure of other remedies, with a reported wound-and-relapse case offered as support.

Context: The recommendation and first-person observation belong to the cited Gordon; the next paragraph gives Messaria’s refusal.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: these cauteries tryed last, when no other Physick will serve

Modern rendering: these cauteries tried last, when no other treatment will work

Word and construction: Cauteries is retained; last and when retain the limiting condition.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

sear

Printed “seared” (English; lemma).

To burn or cauterize bodily tissue.

Here: Enduring cauterization exemplifies what people will suffer for future health.

Context: Burton’s comparison opposes ordinary desire to preserve life to the desperate sufferer’s felt aversion; it is rhetorical, not a clinical universal.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: suffer our joynts to be seared, to be cut off

Modern rendering: allow our limbs to be cauterized or cut off

Word and construction: Seared contributes cauterized; the separate cutting-off action is preserved as an alternative.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.