were seizing her heart”; and on a day soon after “she felt like a hard nail at her heart.”[15]

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]

And her emotional moods are analogously intense and rapidly shifting. In the spring of 1510 “she cried aloud because of the great pain: this attack lasted a day and a night”; in the night of August 10 “she tossed about with many exclamations”; and at the beginning of September “she cried out with a loud voice.” At other times, she laughs for joy. So at the end of April “she would laugh without speaking”; on August 11 “she fixed her eyes steadily on the ceiling; and for about an hour she abode all but immovable, and spoke not, but kept laughing in a very joyous fashion”; on August 17 great interior jubilation “expressed itself in merry laughter”; and on the evening of September 7 “her joy appeared exteriorly in laughter which lasted, with but small interruptions, for some two hours.”—And her entire apparent condition would shift from one such extreme to the other with extraordinary swiftness. In the autumn of 1509 “she many times remained as though dead; and at other times she would appear as healthy,—as though she had never had anything the matter with her.” Already in December 1509 she herself, after much vomiting and loss of blood, had sent for her Confessor and had declared that “she felt as though she must die in consequence of these many accidents.” Yet even on September 10, 1510, “when she was not being oppressed and tormented by her accidents (attacks), she seemed to be in good health; but when she was being suffocated by them, she seemed as one dead.”[17]

II. Conclusions Concerning Catherine’s Psycho-physical Condition During This Last Period.

1. Her illness not primarily physical. Her self-diagnosis.

Now we saw, at the beginning of this chapter, how readily her attendants concluded, from all these extreme, multiple, swift-changing and self-contradictory states, to their directly and separately supernatural origin.—And indeed the diagnosis and treatment of her case showed clearly that it was not primarily physical. So in the case, probably in November 1509, of the cupping-glasses, when “she got medically treated for a bodily infirmity, whilst her real trouble was fire of the spirit”; so with a medicine given to her by the resident Hospital physician, some time in April 1510, “from taking which she nearly died”; so with Giovanni Boerio’s three-weeks’ treatment of her, in May 1510, a treatment which led to no other results than momentary additional distress; and so with the declaration of the ten Physicians who, even on September 10, four days before her death, “could find no trace of disease in her pulse, secretions, or any other symptom,” and who consequently abstained from prescribing anything. And hence, more or less throughout her last nine years, “there was confusion in the management of her, not on her own part, but on that of those who served her.”[18]

For—and these two further points are of primary importance—the tending of her, as distinct from physic, was throughout held by herself to be of great importance; and yet this care was declared by her to be often useless or harmful, owing to the powers of discrimination possessed by her attendants being as much below their good-will, as her own knowledge as to the differences between her healthy and maladif states exceeded her power of herself acting upon this knowledge against these sickly conditions. “She would often appear to be asleep; and would awake from such a state, at one time, quite refreshed, and, at another time, so limp and broken down as to be unable to move. Those that served her knew not how to distinguish one state from the other; and on recovering from an attack of the latter sort, she would say to them: ‘Why did you let me continue in that state of quiet, from which I have all but died?’” So, on September 5, “she cried aloud on waking from a state of quiet, which had appeared to be (healthy) quietude, but had not been so.” And indeed, already on January 10 previous, she had shut herself off from her Confessor, “because it seemed to her that he bore with her too much in her sayings and doings.”

Yet, at least after this time, Marabotto does oppose her sometimes. Thus on two, somewhat later, occasions she respectively makes signs, and asks, that Extreme Unction be given her; but only some four months later did she actually receive it. In these cases, then, she either had not, even at bottom, a correct physical self-knowledge; or her requests had been prompted, at the time, by her secondary, maladif consciousness alone.—When first visited by Boerio, she takes pleasure in the thought of getting possibly cured by him; but “in the following night, when great pain came upon her, she reproved herself, saying, ‘You are suffering this, because you allowed yourself to rejoice without cause.’” But this declaration distinctly falls short of any necessary implication of a directly supernatural origin of her malady, as the Vita here will have it, and but refers, either to the continuance of earthly existence not deserving such joy, or to her persistent fundamental consciousness that the phenomena were partly the fruitful, profitable occasions, and partly the price paid, for the mind’s close intercourse with things divine.

Indeed her (otherwise unbroken) attitude is one, both of quiet conviction that physic cannot help her, and of gentle readiness to let the physicians try