Thy cristall ene (eyes) minglit with blude I mak,[199]
Thy voice sa cleir unpleasand, hoir, and hace,
Thy lustie lyre (fair skin) ouirspread with spottis blak,
And lumpis haw (livid[200]) appeirand in thy face;
Quhair thow cummis, ilk (each) man sall fle the place;
Thus sall thow go begging fra hous to hous,
With cop and clapper like ane Lazarous.
In this remarkable passage, those more striking symptoms, the
swellings, lumps, or livid tubercles on the face, the morbid alteration
of the voice and skin, and that turgid and injected appearance of the
eye, which Dr. Good has given as one of his characteristic symptoms of
the _genus_ elephantiasis, are all tersely, yet accurately described.
Indeed, if Sauvages, Swediaur, Cullen, or any of our great nosologists
of the last or present century, had been poets, I greatly doubt
whether, with all their medical knowledge to boot, they could, in four
fettered lines of rhyme, have described the Greek elephantiasis more
faithfully and briefly than we have it described in the four first lines
that I have just quoted from the Dunfermline schoolmaster of the
fifteenth century. Henryson’s account of a leper may not be so
poetically beautiful, but it is pathologically much more true than that
which the American poet, Willis, has recently given of the disease in
his well-known poem of _Helon_. We shall afterwards find that “the cop
and clapper,” alluded to in Henryson’s two last lines, were badges
commonly carried by the inmates of the leper hospitals of Scotland.
In passages subsequent to that which I have quoted, Henryson reiterates
some of the more prominent symptoms. Thus, the hapless Cresseid
afterwards describes what is elsewhere termed “her uglye lipper face,
the whilk before was quhite (white) as lilie flour,” as “deformed in the
figour;” and again also she describes and laments the characteristic
morbid change in the voice:
“My cleir voice and my courtlie carrolling
Is rawk (rank) as roke, full hideous, hoir, and hace.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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