Page:Zawis and Kunigunde (1895).djvu/234

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CHAPTER XIX.

WRATH IN HUNGARY. LORD BOPPO AROUSED.

Intelligence of these proceedings speedily reached the court of Hungary, where Solomon, on his return from escorting the Princess Judith to Fürstenberg, still discharged his duties as chief physician. In short, his labors were neither few nor light. Not only the court attendants, but a multitude from every quarter sought his aid. Diseases concealed, or ignorantly aggravated, complaints of long continuance now grown chronic, the results of dirt, of overcrowding, of bad food;—tetanus, St. Anthony’s fire, epilepsy, paralysis, dropsy, abscess, rupture, and a thousand complications of scrofula; deafness, consumption, fistula, and even club feet, rickets, madness, with various degrees of each. In all Hungary not a hospital existed. People in their misery festered, and died in loathsomeness with few to bury them. But not a priest or layman could openly profess to understand the philosophy of the human body, or did understand it even empirically. The custom had been recently introduced from the west of applying to some holy man or his relics for special relief. St. Hubert became the curer of madness; St. Anthony, of ague fever; St. Gerbola, of hemorrhage; St Eloi, of abscess; St. Fiacrius, of fistula;

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