The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser].

  • Wilfrid Bonser
Date:
1963
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    414 ORGANIC DISEASES AND THEIR TREATMENT miracle in honour of his most holy confessor St. Guthlac’, which caused many pilgrims to go to Croyland. Now it chanced that many who were present, both small and great, were labouring under a certain disease, like paralysis, which that year was wearing away the whole of England. It affected men, women, and children with a sudden and severe chill, more intense than that of an eastern winter, and an intolerable pain in the diseased members was an infallible sign of its approach. No remedy or application was of any avail, but for the most part it attacked the hands and arms, and withered or disabled them. Ceolnoth, archbishop of Canterbury, w r as one of those afflicted. In the midst of the council, he ‘cried out with a loud voice that he was cured and freed from his disease by the merits of. . . Guthlac. Others also . . . who had been labouring under the same disorder, exclaimed that they now, by the grace of God, and the merits of the most holy Guthlac, felt no pain whatever in any of their limbs. . . . Now when an innumerable throng of sick persons kept daily flocking ... to the tomb of St. Guthlac ... so that oftentimes in one day more than one hundred of these paralytics were cured, the abbot Siward was so much enriched and became so excessively powerful’ that ‘his old age became far more fruitful and twice as prosperous as the beginning’. 1 Bede records a miraculous cure for ‘paralysis’. It is of a man named Bethwegen, who was cured, after prayer, at the tomb of St. Cuthbert. The symptoms were these : 1 2 He was seized with a sudden distemper in his body, insomuch that he fell down, and having lain some time, he could scarcely rise again. When at last he got up, he felt one half of his body, from the head to the foot, struck with palsy ‘paralysis langore’—or in the Anglo-Saxon mid pa adl ... pe Grecas nemnad paralysis z -we cwedaS lyft-adl ], and with much difficulty got home by the help of a staff. This is very probably a case of apoplexy. Another case, again called ‘languor’, occurs in Eddius’s Life of Wilfrid. He relates how when the bishop had been put into prison ‘in the royal borough of Brono’—so far unidentified— —‘the wife of the reeve of this town was suddenly overtaken by 1 Ingulf: Croylandensis historia. In Rerum Anglicarum scriptorum veterum Tom. 1, 1684, pp. 16-17. 2 Bede, Eccles. Hist. iv. 31. Cf. also the story told in his Prose Life of St. Cuth bert, ch. 45, quoted on p. 189.