Dictionary

gangrenize en · VERB

Etymology

From gangrene + -ize.

Meanings

1. To cause or to develop gangrene.
   • Whoever knows what changes occur in an element of the body separated from the rest , and kept macerating at temperatures of F . 60° – 100° , can predict what changes the same element would undergo if gangrenized in connection with the body. 1864, John Simon, Transactions of the Vermont Medical Society, page 30:
   • And that resulted, as we know, in frightful stomatitis which gangrenized the gums, which disturbed, lay bare the teeth and often made them fall out, which sometimes extended to their base, to necrosis of parts of the maxillas, and which in all cases imposed on the unfortunate patients a long and horrible suffering. 1979, Jean de Vigo, Le mal français, 1514, page 71:
   • Yet several times after he seemed to be near success, "upon a sodaine ... his sores did putrifye and breake foorth again ... so that I feared his Vlcers would gangrenize." After over a year both surgeon and patient wearied and gave up. 1992, F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance, page 285:
2. (figuratively) To corrupt or cause to degenerate.
   • Many early-1970s leftist evocations of sexual violence instead developed claims made by left-wing critics of France's violent campaign to crush the Algerian revolution, who had warned that the security forces' systematic use of torture and extreme violence, notably rape, would “gangrenize” the French. 2017, Todd Shepard, Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979, page 234:
   • A painting by Severini (of Scaramouche with a guitar and two masked pals) hangs near a cubist rendering of the Woolworth Building in New York, and a post-pre-Raphaelite landscape by a period-fancying Gloucestershire Hebrew, to point the gangrenizing of the time. 1981, Thomas Kush, Wyndham Lewis's pictorial integer, page 106:
   • Perhaps the worst imbecility of the Junkers was their policy towards gangrenized Russia . 1932, Herbert Vivian, The Life of the Emperor Charles of Austria, page 149:

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