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The nature of sickness
: the example of Rievaulx
(11/13)
During the last year of his life Aelred’s
health deteriorated - ‘a
dry cough racked his breast … caused by an intense dryness and stringency
from the pit of the stomach to the top of the throat.’(15) This
sapped him of energy. The abbot was also smitten with a fever that
raged through every part of his head; Walter’s diagnosis of his condition
is further testimony to his interest in and knowledge of medical
matters:
In my opinion, the suffering in his breast
and the difficulty of breathing were all due to an abnormal distemper in
the head,
producing fresh fever, and this in turn, when his body was
racked by the cough, set up irritation together with the coughing.
For he felt a weight on his chest, his tongue was rough, his gullet
ulcerated and contracted, his jaws burning with great thirst.(16)
Walter
includes an extremely vivid and poignant account of Aelred’s intense
suffering in his letter to Maurice. He describes the great agony Aelred suffered
from colic and the stone, presenting a pitiful image of the abbot hunched over
on an old mat by the hearth, cowering before the flames and ‘rubbing his
painful limbs’, hoping that the heat of the fire would bring him some relief.
His body, looking by the fire like a leaf of parchment, was so bent
that his head seemed altogether lost between his knees.(17)
Walter proceeds
to recount how on this particular occasion a mad monk - ‘a
bovine creature of criminal aspect, moving in the vilest disorder’- stormed
into the room in a rage, hurled abuse at Aelred and threw him, along with his
mat, into the fire. Aelred, however, remained calm. He pacified the monks who
had came to his aid, assuring them that he was perfectly fine and, moreover,
that this persecutor, his son, was simply ill and had actually cleansed him
through his brutality. Holding no rancour, the abbot then embraced and kissed
the offender.(18) <back> <next>
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