The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Religion
The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)
Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Catherine, of Genoa, Saint, 1447-1510
Disturbances of the power of swallowing and of nutrition are often
grave and sudden, and in curious contradiction to her abnormally acute
and shifting longing for and revulsion from certain specific kinds of
food. On August 22, 1510, “she was so thirsty that she felt as though
she could drink up the very ocean”; “yet she could not,” in fact,
“manage to swallow even one little drop of water.” On September 10
“her attendants continuously gave her drinking water; but she would
straightway return it from her mouth.” And on September 12, “whilst
her mouth was being bathed, she exclaimed, ‘I am suffocating,’--and
this because a drop of water had trickled down her throat--a drop which
she was unable to gulp down.” And on a day in August “she saw a melon
and had a great desire to eat it; but hardly did she have some of it
in her mouth, when she rejected it with intense disgust.” So too with
odours. A little later, “on one day the smell of wine would please
her, and she would bathe her hands and face in it with great relish;
and next day she would so much dislike it, that she could not bear to
see or smell it in her room.”--And so too with colours. On September
2 “a physician-friend came to visit her in his scarlet robes; and she
bore the sight a little, so as not to pain him.” But she then declared
that she could no longer bear it; and he went, and returned to her in
his ordinary black habit. And yet we have seen, from the Inventory of
her effects, that she loved to have vermilion colour upon her bed and
person.[16]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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