25. A Disease That Terrified People in the Middle Ages
One of the more colorfully named Middle Ages diseases was Saint Anthony’s Fire, also known as “Holy Fire”. The affliction was named after the monks of the Order of Saint Anthony, who were particularly successful at treating those struck by the disease. Modern medicine, not given to colorful names, knows it as ergotism. It was a horrible illness that produced great suffering. Caused by fungus that grows on moldy grains, especially rye, Saint Anthony’s Fire produced swelling, redness, and gangrene in those whom it afflicted.
A ninth-century text described it as: “a great plague of swollen blisters consumed the people by a loathsome rot, so that their limbs were loosened and fell off before death“. Sufferers often hallucinated, and sometimes imagined that they were in a fight with Satan. As the disease progressed, convulsions occurred, extremities began to rot, and ears, fingers, toes, and even arms and legs, began to fall off. In 944, about 40,000 died from an outbreak in France. As a contemporary put it: “The afflicted thronged to the churches and invoked the saints. The cries of those in pain and the shedding of burned-up limbs alike excited pity; the stench of rotten flesh was unbearable“.