Symptoms and signs

Use in the book

The symptom section opens with an assurance that suffering need not be forcibly produced for observation. Unlike the painter in the cruel Prometheus story, Burton can describe the people he already meets: their symptoms “delineate themselves.” Yet the confidence that symptoms are visible does not yield certainty about what each means. The ensuing division includes hidden as well as manifest signs, those common to kinds and those peculiar to individuals, and bodily as well as mental appearances. Their variation is variously attributed to humours, temperament, duration, inclinations, mixed disease and celestial influence. Burton gathers these explanations without making them a single demonstrated system.

His strongest qualification concerns universal signs. He first reports the authoritative claim that prolonged fear and sorrow are inseparable marks common to every sufferer. Immediately he compares writers who repeat the claim to hounds following a false scent. Later, with “to whom I subscribe,” he expressly adopts Hercules de Saxonia's objection: some fear without sorrow, some grieve without fear, and some do neither. The categorical statement is therefore a reported position under challenge, not Burton's final rule. His further account allows the listed appearances to be barely perceptible or absent, intermittent or continual, and present outside melancholy with different frequency and force.

The unit of description is not an imaginary patient carrying the whole catalogue. After comparing variation to faces, a river and a musical instrument, Burton admits that symptoms are obscure and mixed with those of other diseases. He then states that to put every listed sign in one person would be to paint a monster or Chimera: some belong to one person, some to another, and may occur at different times. This qualification governs how the surrounding lists are read. It also explains why an exhaustive list of appearances cannot by itself identify an affected organ: his hypochondriacal cases report accomplished physicians divided among womb, heart and stomach.

Even a supposedly chief diagnostic sign can be comparative rather than absolute. In head melancholy Burton says there should be no notable signs in the stomach or elsewhere, then immediately permits lesser stomach disorders and wind. More numerous and more evident head signs identify the brain as primarily affected in that account; the absence is of significant rival indications, not of every other symptom. Similarly, after describing pulse and urine, he questions their reliability in chronic disease. Their variability and the fineness of claimed distinctions obstruct inference rather than settle it.

Symptoms can also enter the causal circle. Sorrow is melancholy's “mother and daughter”: it helps produce the condition and appears as part of it. Jealousy is likewise reported as cause and symptom, before Burton argues that its range deserves treatment as a species apart. Classification here serves the arrangement of his inquiry as well as the description of illness. In religious melancholy he again presents symptom, cause and species as competing placements, and describes symptoms as taking the shape of previous inclinations. None of this licenses substituting symptom for cause in every passage.

Reading signs brings its own hazards. In the preliminaries, the promise that the book will drive melancholy away is followed by a warning that a reader currently suffering from it should not read the symptoms and prognostics, lest general statements be magnified into a personal case. Burton immediately adjusts that prohibition to advice to read the section cautiously. Both formulations matter: the book imagines beneficial self-correction but also harmful self-application, rather than treating all reading as a cure.

The young physicians in Plater's example “appropriate” other people's symptoms to themselves: the verb means apply, not properly classify. Burton follows it with his own warning that a currently melancholy reader may be temporarily made worse by the symptom tract. His text thus addresses a reader who can become implicated in the descriptions being read. The frontispiece's lover already establishes this reflexive possibility: books and lute are “symptomes of his vanity,” and the reader is invited to supply the portrait from himself.

Beyond medicine, symptom remains an interpretative and often accusatory term. Severe laws and punishments are made symptoms of jealousy; partisan love and hatred become symptoms in the attack on superstition; and a predicted social catastrophe is inferred from those signs. In the love narratives a changed pulse or countenance supposedly betrays the concealed beloved, but Burton records Vallés's denial that a distinctive lover's pulse exists. A sign's claimed visibility, its interpretation and the authority of the person interpreting it must therefore be tracked separately.

Related entries

Cause, Prognostics, and Anatomy distinguish production, prediction and ordered analysis. Characters explains distinguishing marks; Jealousy and Religious melancholy retain ownership of those larger subjects. See Disease and sickness and Acute and chronic for the medical framework.

Explained vocabulary: Additional Terms.

Places to read

1. An Explanation of the Frontispiece · paragraph 7Portrait objects as satirical symptoms and the reader’s implicated self.
2. Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 26Context: the book promises beneficial self-correction and relief from melancholy.
3. Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 27Readers warned against taking general symptoms as descriptions of themselves.
4. Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 28Context: the prohibition shifts to a recommendation of cautious reading.
5. Melancholy: Consider Its Different Meanings: As a Disposition, in a Figurative Sense, Etc. Subsection 5 · paragraph 22The synopsis separates causes, symptoms, prognosis and cure.
6. Member 3 Subsection 1. The Definition of Melancholy Its Name and Distinctions · paragraph 3The disease-or-symptom dispute left to other writers.
7. Subsection 4. The Species or Kinds of Melancholy · paragraph 48Supposedly infinite species recast as differences of symptoms.
8. Subsection 4. Sorrow as a Cause of Melancholy · paragraph 7Sorrow both producing and accompanying melancholy.
9. Section 3. Member 1. Subsection 1. Symptoms or Signs of Melancholy in the Body · paragraph 2The cruel painter’s literary exemplum.
10. Section 3. Member 1. Subsection 1. Symptoms or Signs of Melancholy in the Body · paragraph 3Symptoms said to draw their own portraits.
11. Section 3. Member 1. Subsection 1. Symptoms or Signs of Melancholy in the Body · paragraph 4Universal, particular, hidden and apparent signs.
12. Section 3. Member 1. Subsection 1. Symptoms or Signs of Melancholy in the Body · paragraph 5Diverse explanations of diverse signs, with a nonliteral Latin gloss.
13. Section 3. Member 1. Subsection 1. Symptoms or Signs of Melancholy in the Body · paragraph 6Different responses in different people.
14. Section 3. Member 1. Subsection 1. Symptoms or Signs of Melancholy in the Body · paragraph 16The initial pulse description.
15. Section 3. Member 1. Subsection 1. Symptoms or Signs of Melancholy in the Body · paragraph 17A challenge to pulse distinctions in chronic disease.
16. Section 3. Member 1. Subsection 1. Symptoms or Signs of Melancholy in the Body · paragraph 18Burton’s matching doubt about urine.
17. Subsection 2. Symptoms or Signs in the Mind · paragraph 22The claimed innumerability of mental symptoms.
18. Subsection 2. Symptoms or Signs in the Mind · paragraph 23The reported universal rule about fear and sorrow.
19. Subsection 2. Symptoms or Signs in the Mind · paragraph 24Burton’s immediate objection to that rule.
20. Subsection 2. Symptoms or Signs in the Mind · paragraph 45Applying others’ symptoms to oneself.
21. Subsection 2. Symptoms or Signs in the Mind · paragraph 46Burton warns vulnerable readers about the symptom tract.
22. Subsection 2. Symptoms or Signs in the Mind · paragraph 49Variability in visibility and intensity.
23. Subsection 2. Symptoms or Signs in the Mind · paragraph 50Symptoms outside melancholy, and contrasts of frequency and degree.
24. Subsection 2. Symptoms or Signs in the Mind · paragraph 53A likeness with differences rather than an identical presentation.
25. Subsection 4 Symptoms Arising From Education, Custom, Duration, Our Circumstances, Mingled With Other Diseases, Occurring in Fits, From Inclination, and So On · paragraph 27Irregularity, obscurity and the difficulty of a stable portrait.
26. Subsection 4 Symptoms Arising From Education, Custom, Duration, Our Circumstances, Mingled With Other Diseases, Occurring in Fits, From Inclination, and So On · paragraph 28Symptoms mixed with other diseases.
27. Subsection 4 Symptoms Arising From Education, Custom, Duration, Our Circumstances, Mingled With Other Diseases, Occurring in Fits, From Inclination, and So On · paragraph 29Explicit refusal to combine all signs in one person.
28. Member 2, Subsection 1 Symptoms of Head Melancholy · paragraph 6“No notable signs” permits lesser symptoms elsewhere.
29. Subsection 2 Symptoms of Windy Hypochondriacal Melancholy · paragraph 11Ambiguous signs leave the affected organ uncertain.
30. Subsection 2 Symptoms of Windy Hypochondriacal Melancholy · paragraph 12Burton explicitly rejects fear and sorrow as universal.
31. Subsection 2 How Love Tyrannizes Over Human Beings. Love, or Heroical Melancholy: Its Definition and the Part Affected · paragraph 49The first reported definition of love.
32. Subsection 2 How Love Tyrannizes Over Human Beings. Love, or Heroical Melancholy: Its Definition and the Part Affected · paragraph 50The definition whose commentator objects.
33. Subsection 2 How Love Tyrannizes Over Human Beings. Love, or Heroical Melancholy: Its Definition and the Part Affected · paragraph 51Symptom distinguished from genus.
34. Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind Good and Bad Signs and So Forth · paragraph 48Pulse and expression as claimed signs of love.
35. Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind Good and Bad Signs and So Forth · paragraph 49Antiochus and the recognition of the concealed beloved.
36. Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind Good and Bad Signs and So Forth · paragraph 50The disputed lover’s pulse.
37. Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind Good and Bad Signs and So Forth · paragraph 51A combined list of behavioural and bodily signs.
38. Jealousy: Its Different Meanings, Name, Definition, Extent and Various Kinds; Among Rulers, Parents and Friends; in Animals and Human Beings; Before Marriage, as Rivals, or Afterwards, as Discussed Here · paragraph 5Jealousy placed as cause or symptom by different writers.
39. Jealousy: Its Different Meanings, Name, Definition, Extent and Various Kinds; Among Rulers, Parents and Friends; in Animals and Human Beings; Before Marriage, as Rivals, or Afterwards, as Discussed Here · paragraph 6Burton elects to treat it as a separate species.
40. Causes of Jealousy. Who Are Most Susceptible. Idleness, Melancholy, Impotence, Prolonged Absence, Beauty, Sexual Licence, Being Unfaithful Themselves. Temptations Arising From Time, Place and People; Mistreatment as a Cause · paragraph 19A reciprocal relation between jealousy and melancholy.
41. Symptoms of Jealousy: Fear, Sorrow, Suspicion, Strange Actions, Gestures, Outrages, Confinement, Oaths, Trials, Laws, and So On · paragraph 42Punitive laws interpreted as symptoms of jealousy.
42. Its Object, God; What His Beauty Is; How It Attracts. The Parts and People Affected · paragraph 21Religious melancholy’s disputed classificatory status.
43. Its Object, God; What His Beauty Is; How It Attracts. The Parts and People Affected · paragraph 23Symptoms shaped by previous inclinations.
44. General Symptoms: Love of Their Own Sect; Hatred of All Other Religions; Obstinacy and Ill Temper; Readiness to Undergo Any Danger or Adversity for It; Martyrs; Blind Zeal and Blind Obedience; Fasts and Vows; Belief in Incredible and Impossible Things. Particular Symptoms Among Pagans, Muslims, Jews and Christians; and Among Christians, Heretics Old and New, Schismatics, Scholastic Theologians, Prophets, Enthusiasts and So On · paragraph 1Sectarian attachment and hostility described as symptoms.
45. Subsection 4. Prognosis of Religious Melancholy · paragraph 30Polemical prognosis inferred from those signs.

In this edition

The modern rendering generally keeps symptoms and signs, but translates the frontispiece's “symptomes of his vanity” as “Signs of his foolishness.” In the diagnostic discussion “generall” can be rendered “universal,” where the question is whether every patient has a feature. “Melancholica deliria multiformia” is first translated as “melancholic derangements take many forms”; Burton's following “diversity of melancholy signs” is retained as his looser gloss, not treated as a literal equivalence between deliria and signs.

The edition distinguishes report from correction: the painter's torture is a rhetorical exemplum; the medical quantities such as scarcely one in a thousand are cited formulations, not clinical statistics; and the notes identify Burton's conflation of Galen's patients in the love-pulse story. These apparatus claims do not cancel the story's lexical function, but prevent its confident recognition scene from masquerading as independently verified evidence.

Symptomes or signes

Manifestations or indications of a condition.

Original wording: “Its Symptomes or signes.”

Modern wording: “Its symptoms or signs.”

The paired terms name one stage of the book’s analysis, distinguished here from causes and prognostics.

Editorial access forms: symptome; symptomes; symptom; symptoms; signs; signes. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.

symptomes of his vanity

Objects read as signs of a lover’s foolishness.

Original wording: “As symptomes of his vanity.”

Modern wording: “Signs of his foolishness.”

The referents are the lute and books lying around the pictured lover. Symptoms can be attributes in a satirical portrait, not merely bodily sensations.

Editorial access forms: symptoms of vanity. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.

universall or particular

Common to the relevant class or peculiar to persons or kinds.

Original wording: “Symptomes therefore are either universall or particular”

Modern wording: “Symptoms, then, are either universal or peculiar to individuals or kinds of the disease”

This is a proposed distribution of signs. It does not validate every ensuing assertion of universality, which Burton repeatedly questions.

Editorial access forms: universal symptoms; particular symptoms. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.

The related wording “not generall Symptomes” becomes “not universal symptoms”: generall concerns whether every patient shows the feature, not its importance. Editorial lookup: generall [universal].

secret; manifest

Hidden versus evident, said of signs.

Original wording: “some signes are secret, some manifest”

Modern wording: “Some signs are hidden, some apparent”

Secret concerns recognisability rather than necessarily deliberate concealment. It qualifies the preceding rhetorical assertion that symptoms are plain and obvious.

Editorial access forms: secret signs; manifest signs. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.

melancholica deliria multiformia

Melancholic derangements occurring in many forms.

Original wording: “melancholica deliria multiformia”

Modern wording: “melancholic derangements take many forms”

The modern column translates the Latin before retaining Burton’s broader gloss, “diversity of melancholy signs.” Deliria itself names derangements, not the entire symptom category.

Editorial access forms: multiform melancholic derangements. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.

Cause and Symptome

A producing factor and a manifestation, predicated reciprocally of sorrow.

Original wording: “Sorrow is both Cause and Symptome of this disease”

Modern wording: “sorrow is both a cause and a symptom of this disease”

The mother-and-daughter image states a circular relation between sorrow and melancholy. It is not a claim that the two lexical categories are synonymous.

Editorial access forms: cause and symptom. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.

appropriate all symptomes

Apply all the described symptoms to oneself.

Original wording: “appropriate all symptomes they finde related of others, to their own persons”

Modern wording: “apply to their own persons every symptom they find described in others”

Appropriate is a verb of making something one’s own. It describes self-application by the readers in Plater’s example, not a physician’s correct selection of symptoms.

Editorial access forms: appropriate symptoms. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.

similitudo dissimilis

A likeness that preserves differences.

Original wording: “similitudo dissimilis”

Modern wording: “a dissimilar likeness”

The phrase reconciles a shared disease name with unlike individual presentations. The accompanying faces, river and musical-instrument comparisons emphasise variation without abolishing likeness.

Editorial access forms: dissimilar likeness. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.

no notable signs

No sufficiently important signs at the other sites, not a complete absence of symptoms.

Original wording: “no notable signs in the stomack, Hypocondries, or elswhere”

Modern wording: “the absence of notable signs in the stomach, hypochondria or elsewhere”

Burton immediately allows lesser stomach disorders and wind. Notable carries the threshold required for the inference about a primarily affected brain.

Editorial access forms: notable signs; significant signs. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.

not the genus, but a symptome

A manifestation shared with other states, rather than the defining broader class.

Original wording: “not the genus, but a symptome of love”

Modern wording: “not love’s general class but a symptom of it”

The commentator’s objection targets continual thought: hatred can produce that too. The logical defect is lack of discriminating scope, not denial that lovers think continually.

Editorial access forms: symptom versus genus. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.

pulsus amatorius

A supposedly distinctive lover’s pulse.

Original wording: “pulsus amatorius”

Modern wording: “lover’s pulse”

Burton records Vallés’s denial that such a pulse exists or permits love to be detected, alongside authorities who affirm it. The Latin label names the disputed sign, not an accepted diagnostic test.

Editorial access forms: amorous pulse; lover’s pulse. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.

symptomes of incredible jealousie

Public punitive practices interpreted as manifestations of extreme jealousy.

Original wording: “symptomes of incredible jealousie”

Modern wording: “symptoms of incredible jealousy”

The phrase refers to the preceding laws, punishments and ordeals. It extends the symptom vocabulary from an individual’s body to institutions and customs.

Editorial access forms: symptoms of jealousy. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.