The author of the deutero-Pauline letter 1 Timothy makes robust use of medical language in his depiction of theological opponents. One such instance is the curious phrase “cauterized in their own conscience” in 1 Timothy 4:2. What, we might wonder, does it mean for a conscience to be cauterized? In this presentation, I argue that the ancient evidence regarding the historical practice of cautery suggests a very different answer than the one customarily given by scholars regarding this passage in 1 Timothy 4. My argument compares this passage with evidence from ancient medical literature, archaeological data, and philosophical commonplaces. As an alternative to the most common modern interpretation, which supposes that “cauterized” here denotes insensitivity, I argue that this imagery suggests a visceral pathological condition that is subjected to an attempted, but ultimately, from the author’s perspective, unsuccessful remedy. This presentation assesses previous scholarly assessments of 1 Tim 4:2 and argues that the medical approach provides the most cohesive reading of the passage. By examining the medical conditions most readily associated with a need for cautery, I suggest that the conscience is here being cast as a diseased organ of the soul, a weepy and necrotic body part whose excessive flow has necessitated the dramatic intervention of hot cauteries. With appeal to the ancient evidence regarding the practice of cautery in the Greco-Roman world, I argue that the language of cauterization is meant to evoke a visceral image of decay and a correspondingly dramatic surgical intervention. By locating this particular instance of 1 Timothy’s pathologizing of deviance in the context of ancient medical discourses, this paper pursues new angles of research in order to provide an alternative account of this curious instance of early Christian medicalized polemic. A result of this approach is a more cohesive reading of the textual unit 1 Tim 4:1-5, which I argue can be understood as a case of excess and extremes, wherein the radical rejection of marriage and the advocacy for strict dietary prohibitions is mirrored by the dramatic therapeutic intervention suggested by cautery. Using 1 Timothy as a test case, I demonstrate that the earliest Christian authors were already beginning to appropriate medicalized images and arguments in their religious discourses, a popular practice among later patristic authors. Through an examination of one particular instance of such appropriation, I raise broader questions regarding the extent and kinds of medical knowledge required for early Christians to either produce or interpret medically inflected argumentation such as this. Just how prevalent were contemporary humoral theories, for instance, and can we identify an awareness of them in our texts? How attuned to the specifics of medical practice were the earliest authors of the New Testament documents? In this paper, I utilize diverse disciplinary insights from the history of medicine, the study of metaphor, and disability studies in order to rethink the significance of this memorable image.