Reginald of Durham's Disease Language

Sally Crumplin argued that Reginald of Durham medicalized the miracles in his Libellus Cuthberti as part of an attempt to "modernize" Cuthbert and his worship. I've spent the last couple of months digging into the Libellus (at least computationally), and so I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the ways illness and disease are described in Coombe's new edition of the Life and Miracles of Godric of Finchale. What I found there is striking and interesting.

Health and healing play a substantial role in Godric's Life. Godric effects a number of healing cures, both with the application of various belt contact relics, and also sometimes by sending people bread baked with his special, rather abstemious recipe. These aren't the only ways that Godric performed miracles-- someone is cured by beard hair-- but these techniques do recur multiple times over the course of his life.

The Life contains a number of descriptions of illness, both Godric's various illnesses (including the lengthy illness leading up to his death) and of the people he healed. These do describe the various illnesses, sometimes with some detail, but these only rarely use what I would call medicalized terminology (i.e., medical terminology that matches the technical terminology to be found in medical texts from the long twelfth century). Rather, Reginald appears to prefer a limited vocabulary of more or less commonplace disease categories: tumores, rubores, fevers, wounds, dolor, etc. Where many medical texts-- and texts that were influenced by medical texts-- often use morbus as their term for disease in general, Reginald overwhelmingly prefers languor. His terminology for the ill could probably use more scrutiny, but I noted infirmantibus, languentis, etc.; but not patientes, I don't think. Medical practitioners appear in the course of various miracles in the Life, but these appearances are quite brief, sometimes dispatched with a single phrase [exx?], that make clear that secular healing was attempted before Godric was appealed to.

There are a handful of cases, however, where we see hints of medical terminology: §101 refers to lienteria, and §170 refers to anatrope (though I'd have to investigate the origins of that term). There is medical specificity in a number of these ailments: "venemous" swellings (§124), tumors that are specified in various ways (lividus, §148; "grave", §158) a "semianimate" man cured by Godric's bread (§154), livor humorum (§§163-165). Other than lienteria and perhaps anatrope, however, these don't jump out to me as categories that necessarily reveal the influence of medical categories. (There's probably more to say about Reginald's anatomical terminology, but it's interesting to me that §112 refers to intestina cervicis, which has some commonalities with the intestina cerebri we find in the Libellus.)

What's even more interesting, however, is that we can see a sharp demarcation between the Life of Godric and his miracles. Once we get into the miracles, we see lots of medical terminology, right from the jump: the first miracle, in fact, is the cure of someone with epilepsy (epilempsia). What to make of this, however, I am less sure: was this the work of someone other than Reginald? Was this (somewhat rougher) text a working draft that was not polished? Regardless, this text contains a substantial number of ailments, described with specificity. The Latin (and the manuscript!) contains the details here, but Coombe's introduction (pp. lxxxv-vi) does tabulate the various cures found in the Miracula.