The Sense of Suffering by Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen

In other words, they can be analysed as examples of how lived religion was experienced through a body, and how bodily experience formed and shaped lived religion and religious experience of an individual and even of a community. These two narratives of infirmity, portrayed in a religious context, share several similarities as the bodily experience of ill health and medical experience intermingle with lived religion. Unlike Giovanni Bronsius, at the time he reported his experience, he was fully healed. He received help from a physician and had to take medicine for a number of days. He spat out the fig, but he still ended up in bed with stomach pains and constant vomiting. He ate a fig, but soon sensed bitterness in his mouth and started to worry that something was amiss. Footnote 1 Two years later, some 50 kilometres south, a Roman cleric by the name of Marcello Ferro also encountered an unfortunate dish. Months later, he had become even more infirm, being unable to get up from his bed and feeling terrible pain and discomfort everywhere in his body.

He went to see several physicians, who administered medicines but could not heal his condition. Sometime afterwards, he started to feel very ill. In the autumn of 1597, a Tuscan friar named Giovanni Bronsius ate a plate of maccheroni that was offered to him in the osteria of a bath.

The Sense of Suffering by Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen