Page:Sushruta Samhita Vol 1.djvu/195

Chap.XII.] Authoritative verse on the subject:—A physician, after having carefully considered the seat of the disease and judiciously ascertained the patient's strength and the situations of the Marmas (the vital parts of the patients') body, should resort to cauterisation with an eye to the nature of the malady and the then prevailing season of the year. The part, after being properly cauterised, should be rubbed with an unguent composed of honey and clarified butter. A man of bilious temperament or with a quantity of bad blood lying stagnant and locked up in any part of his body, or of lax bowels, a person with any foreign substance (such as a thorn or a splinter still lodged in his body), a weak or an old man, an infant, or a man of timid disposition, or a person afflicted with a large number of ulcers, as well as a patient suffering from any of the diseases in which diaphoretic measures are forbidden, should be regarded as a subject unfit for cauterisation.

Now we shall describe the characteristic symptoms of the several kinds of burns other than those caused (for surgical purposes). Fire feeds both upon fatty and hard fuels, [such as oil and logs of wood etc.]. Hot or boiling oil has the property of permeating or entering into the minutest nerves and veins, and