Consumption and phthisis

Use in the book

The pulmonary comparison explains how a disposition becomes an established disease. One neglected flow of rheum produces a cough; continuing disturbance is said to produce consumption of the lungs. Burton applies the pattern to repeated provocations of melancholy. The analogy emphasizes repetition and entrenchment, but its continuation also makes outcomes depend on the strength of the humour and the body’s or rational soul’s capacity to resist. It is not a claim that every passing passion inevitably becomes chronic melancholy. The surrounding discussion explicitly contrasts different people’s susceptibility.

The anatomical account gives a broader, non-specific sense. After describing the faculty that increases bodily size in every dimension until its proper shape, Burton says the body has its appointed period “of augmentation, as of consumption.” The contrast is growth and decline, framed by verses on the limited span of life. Nothing in this passage supplies a pulmonary disease or an individual patient; translating consumption as “decline” preserves its place in the life-course account.

The scholarly examples return to illness. Consumptions join the diseases attributed to excessive sitting and study, alongside the description of scholars as lean, dry and poorly coloured. Later, the ox-and-camel fable rebukes mental labour that refuses bodily respite: fever, vertigo or consumption eventually seizes both body and soul, and study ceases. Wasting is an argument against imagining the mind can spend the body without suffering the consequence itself. Neither passage gives the evidence needed to narrow every consumption to tuberculosis.

In the envy passage, consumption joins a moth in the soul and eating one’s own heart. Burton, drawing on Cyprian, presents the envious person as making another’s happiness into his own misery. The marginal tabes pectoris, wasting of the breast, supports the self-consuming image. This is more than an interchangeable insult: the person’s own comparisons and thoughts become the instruments of inward punishment, and even food and drink cease to be enjoyable.

The cure-of-love passages distinguish allegation from imagination. One advises telling a lover that the beloved is subject to consumption; another says “suppose” seeing her pale, wasting, reduced to skin and bones or dead. The first constructs a frightening assertion, the second a hypothetical view meant to undo attraction. Neither establishes an actual illness in a named beloved. Finally, consumptions appear among the ailments that the vinegrower says Protesilaus’s shrine cures, within Burton’s expressly “fabulous remedies.” The Latin Phthises belongs to that reported list, not to clinical evidence confirming a universal remedy.

Related entries

Radical moisture retains the wider physiology of bodily expenditure and life; Macerate the vocabulary of making the body lean; Lights the lung-name. Plethora and repletion retains the already owned cachexia material beside which consumption appears. Compare Vertigo (Vertigo) for the overworked scholar’s other bodily disturbance.

Explained vocabulary: Additional Terms.

Places to read

1. Subsection 5. Melancholy as a Passing State, Loosely So Called; the Different Meanings of the Word · paragraph 14The transition from passing dispositions to settled conditions. [Context, not a headword attestation.]
2. Subsection 5. Melancholy as a Passing State, Loosely So Called; the Different Meanings of the Word · paragraph 15; note 1562Consumption of the lungs in the repeated-distillation analogy; pthisim appears in the accompanying note.
3. Subsection 5. Melancholy as a Passing State, Loosely So Called; the Different Meanings of the Word · paragraph 16Different people’s resistance to the same provocation. [Context, not a headword attestation.]
4. Subsection 5. The Soul and Its Faculties · paragraph 31Consumption opposed to bodily augmentation.
5. Subsection 5. The Soul and Its Faculties · paragraph 32The Latin verse on an appointed span of life. [Context, not a headword attestation.]
6. Subsection 5. The Soul and Its Faculties · paragraph 33Burton’s separate English verse gloss. [Context, not a headword attestation.]
7. Subsection 8. Rivalry, Hatred, Faction and the Desire for Revenge as Causes · paragraph 13; note 2932Envy as consumption and self-torment, with tabes pectoris in the accompanying note.
8. Subsection 15 Love of Learning or Excessive Study With a Digression on the Misery of Scholars and Why the Muses Are Melancholy · paragraph 26Consumptions among the bodily costs of excessive study.
9. Member 4 Exercise of Body and Mind Regulated · paragraph 22Body and soul compelled to be ill together in the fable.
10. Resist the Beginnings, Avoid Occasions, Change One’s Location; Fair and Foul Means, Contrary Passions and Ingenious Devices; Introduce Another Love and Disparage the Former · paragraph 51Consumption as an allegation about a beloved.
11. By Counsel and Persuasion, the Foulness of the Deed, the Faults of Men and Women, the Miseries of Marriage, the Consequences of Lust, and So Forth · paragraph 1A deliberately imagined wasting body.
12. Subsection 4 Love Potions and Magical and Poetic Cures · paragraph 54; note 10964The fabulous shrine report and marginal Phthises, the accompanying note.

In this edition

The modern column uses “wasting disease of the lungs,” “decline,” “wasting diseases” and “wasting away” according to the local construction. These choices preserve real differences in scope rather than replacing a uniformly precise original diagnosis. The printed pthisim must also remain distinct from an editorially normalized phthisis. Burton’s marginal Seneca quotation says assidua & violenta, persistent and violent, where his English body says “continual and inveterate”: force and long establishment are not precisely the same qualification. The editor identifies the underlying comparison as Letter 75.12, not the printed Letter 96, book 10.

a consumption of the lungs

A wasting disease specified as affecting the lungs.

Original wording: “a consumption of the lungs”

Modern wording: “a wasting disease of the lungs”

The full phrase, not consumption alone, supplies the anatomical location. Its role is analogical: repeated bodily disturbance illustrates how repeated passions may become established illness. Lookup: pulmonary consumption; consumption of the lungs.

consumption [decline]

Bodily diminution or decline, contrasted with growth.

Original wording: “his period of augmentation, as of consumption”

Modern wording: “its appointed period of growth, as it does of decline”

The opposing term augmentation establishes the life-course sense. The adjacent verses concern the finite span of life, not a specifically identified infection. Lookup: consumption [decline]; bodily decline.

Consumption; Consumptions [illness]

Wasting illness or illnesses, without a specified pulmonary site.

Original wording: “an Ague, Vertigo, Consumption, seiseth on them both”

Modern wording: “a fever, vertigo, or wasting illness seizes them both”

The wasting illness makes both body and mind unable to continue study. The earlier plural belongs to a catalogue of scholars’ disorders; neither instance independently identifies tuberculosis. Further checked occurrences: the passage; the passage; the passage. Lookup: consumption; consumptions; wasting illness; wasting diseases.

a consumption [envy image]

An inward wasting or eating away caused by envious rivalry.

Original wording: “a moth of the soule, a consumption”

Modern wording: “a moth in the soul, a wasting disease”

Consumption develops the moth image: another person’s happiness is turned into the envious person’s self-inflicted misery. The phrase draws bodily and moral suffering together without diagnosing a lung disease. Lookup: consumption [envy]; moth of the soul.

pthisim

Consumption or wasting illness, in the marginal Seneca quotation.

Original wording: “assidua & violenta pthisim”

Note translation: “a persistent and violent one produces consumption”

The printed form is retained. The implied subject is the continuing discharge; the phrase does not itself specify lungs. Burton adds that site in the English body and substitutes long establishment for the margin’s violence. Lookup: phthisis [dictionary access form]; pthisim; phthisim [normalized access form].

Phthises

Wasting illnesses.

Original wording: “Phthises, hydropes & oculorum morbos”

Note translation: “wasting illnesses, dropsies and diseases of the eyes”

Phthises aligns with the first item, wasting illnesses, not with the entire translated list. It occurs in the marginal account of the shrine’s alleged cures, whose fabulous status Burton marks in the body. Lookup: phthises; phthisis [dictionary access form].

tabes pectoris

Wasting of the breast, an image for envy’s inward damage.

Original wording: “quæ tabes pectoris zelare in altero”

Note translation: “what a wasting of the breast it is to envy another”

The Latin locates the image in the breast or inward seat of feeling. Burton’s English consumption condenses this part of the comparison; the rest of the passage develops thoughts as torturers. Lookup: tabes; tabes pectoris.