'Eaten of worms' / by W. Curran.

  • Curran, William, 1927-
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: 'Eaten of worms' / by W. Curran. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    18/47 (page 17)
    There is, however, a consensus of argument in the several accounts which one does not usually find in such company, so also is there considerable accord about the gouty and febrile symptoms from which he suffered, but some further details are required to complete the case, and for these a few words must here suffice. As the attendants or the contemporaries of the King would naturally be our best guides to these, I turned for information about them to a very rare and curious tract that was written by one of his chaplains, and which has not, so far as I know, been quoted by any of his biographers. This was written by one Cerverra de la Torre, (a) who describes minutely the fever from which Philip suffered, and from him we learn that it was first a tertian, and subsequently a double tertian. Its course was complicated with, or rather aggravated by, the superven- tion of several superficial, (pysemic?) abscesses as well as by the supervention of a very severe, if it was not indeed an uncontrollable, diarrhoea. So frequent or copious were these intestinal discharges, or so enfeebled was the King, that they could not be removed from his side, and there were no invalid couches or absorbent mattresses in those days. As a consequence, he who had been nurtured in the lap of luxury from his cradle, and over whose wide realms it was proudly boasted the sun had never set, lay wallowing like a pig for days together in his own mire, and if worms or other foul abominations of that kind appeared in these, or in the other foetid discharges that came out of the ab- scesses above referred to, where is the wonder ? Where, indeed ! and meanwhile the arthritic pains he had suffered from so long persisted. The fever became a hectic, while his thirst was insatiable, dropsical swellings invaded his legs and abdomen, and, reduced to skin and bone, he fell into a stupor from which he was only released by death. A very similar explanation will dispose of the case of Calvin. All the accounts that I have seen of his death re- present him as being through life delicate and feeble; sub- ject to frequent attacks of headache, gout, and fever, as eating little and sleeping less, and as devoting all his spare time to religious study, meditation, and preaching, He was, like Pascal, a confirmed sufferer from what the French call migraine, and he probably died, like Bossuet, with a cal- culus in his bladder. Beza, his life-long friend and col- league, ascribes it to chronic phthisis, and adds that he suffered severely towards the close of his life from arthritic (a) De Felicl Excessu Philippi: Austriacl HiBpanorum Regis, &c., p 8. B