“Does she?” I thought I saw a look of concern cross Brother Wigbert’s face and wanted to ask more, but Bertolf poked his head in and said that we were needed in the infirmary.
* * *
It was a tradition at St. Disibod that as winter approached, the infirmarian made large quantities of elderberry wine and rosehips tincture. The year 1117 was no different. As the northerly winds turned colder, patients with chills and coughs began to arrive. I wondered what the real reason for their visit was, for the wine was justifiably renowned throughout the countryside.
As far as actual treatment, Brother Wigbert’s approach was the same in most cases. He would give each patient a cup of warm wine, then bathe their foreheads in rosewater to cleanse the skin of the bad vapors the body was expelling. For more stubborn cases, he made fennel drafts, which seemed to ease the discomforts better, but we only had a small quantity of the herb as most of the yield went to the kitchen.
At Bermersheim, Uda had always kept a stock of horehound lozenges to soothe our throats, and I had made certain provisions that autumn. I had befriended the servant who brought meals to the infirmary and asked him to pick some horehound for me in the forest where it grew abundantly. When he did, I hung it up to dry in the tool shed behind the workshop. It was almost ready, and I was excited to make a batch of lozenges to surprise Brother Wigbert.
But before that happened, I saw my first severe case of the seasonal ailment when a girl of about fourteen was brought to the infirmary, feverish and shaking with a violent cough. Brother Wigbert applied his standard cures, but the next morning her fever was higher and pulse more rapid. He boiled the remaining fennel and she drank the draft avidly, but to no avail—she remained flushed and restless, with glassy, bloodshot eyes.
It was then that he decided to examine her urine. When I brought the requisite fluid in a special bell-shaped glass, he walked to the window and studied it at length, swirling and tilting the glass, and smelling the contents. “The scant amount indicates that bad humors are drying her body,” he explained as I hovered behind. “The color is too intensely yellow; normal urine is paler, similar to straw in hue.”
“And you can tell from that what is wrong with Rumunda?” I asked, amazed. I had never thought of my own water as anything other than waste and a nuisance in the middle of a cold night.
The monk nodded solemnly. “Urine is the repository of all manner of information about one’s health. Its analysis is the very basis of the art of medicine. This specimen, for example, shows no signs of blood or pus, and its odor is normal. But look.” He brought the flask closer to my face. “It is almost as if someone dissolved a dye in it.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means that she suffers from an excess of yellow bile, which is making her blood warm, causing the fever,” he opined. “I will bleed her to rid her of this overabundance.”
He produced a sizable bowl with stains of previous procedures on it, and I recalled the words of Herrad, the wise woman who had treated me for my headaches at Bermersheim. My father had asked her about bloodletting, and she shook her head. “I have never seen people who languish from an illness improve after it,” she had said. “Many get even weaker.” Now I held the bowl under Rumunda’s elbow as Brother Wigbert expertly cut the vein, and a line of thick dark blood welled up, trickled down her forearm, and started dripping into the receptacle.
“You have gone a little pale.” Wigbert said as he wiped the knife. “Never seen this much blood before, eh?”
If only that were true. In fact, the sight reminded me of Sister Jutta flogging herself on the night I had fallen ill, and my anxiety returned. But I shook my head so as not to appear weak. “It’s nothing. I will be fine.”
“The first time can make one queasy, but you will get used to it,” he said.
Meanwhile, the patient sat with her eyes closed, and her chest heaved with labored breaths. When Brother Wigbert deemed that enough blood had been let, he bound her arm up tightly. Even before he finished, she was asleep. “It is normal too,” he said. “Bleeding causes drowsiness, but that is when the body sorts out the imbalance.”
Herrad’s words came back to me again, and I frowned in puzzlement. Yet was Brother Wigbert not an educated man who had studied at Salerno and done this many times? Uncertain who to believe, I decided that the proof would be in the outcome.
In the wake of the bloodletting, Rumunda’s fever had stopped rising, but she was weaker, so much so that even her cough turned into little more than a flutter in her neck. Brother Wigbert insisted that the cure needed time to settle in order to restore the balance of the humors as the amount of yellow bile subsided. He also forbade Rumunda from drinking more than strictly necessary so as not to jeopardize the balancing process. On the third day, he ordered an application of leeches, but when she woke up afterwards, her eyes shone with fever again. I gave her a cup of water when Wigbert was away, and her eyes became less cloudy and more focused.
But she never recovered. She was bled one more time, but it was as if her viriditas had left her body with it, and she languished a few more days until she died on the morning of All Saints Day. She was poor and we laid her to rest in the abbey cemetery. Buried along with her was my confidence in bloodletting and leech cures.
8
November 1117
On the feast of St. Martin’s,
