Ignis Sacer
Ignis Sacer - Holy Fire or St Antony's Fire - is a deadly disease characterised by a burning sensation in the skin, particularly in the extremities. Outbreaks of the disease often affect a large number of people in a particular locality.
The cause of the disease is unknown during the Middle Ages, and treatment consists of prayer and miracles cures by saints' relics, especially those of St Anthony.
Transmission & Vectors
Holy Fire is not generally infectious, but the alkaloids causing the disease can be transmitted through breastfeeding from an affected mother to her child.
Causes
The cause is not known during the medieval period. Phsycian Denis Dodart noticed in the late 17th century that outbreaks were associated eating grain products contaminated ergot, or cockspurs - the fungus Claviceps purpurea (purple club-head fungus). The fungus can also infect ryes, wheat and barley. It does not infect oats.
The fungus contains poisonous alkaloids. These are the cause of ergotism. Different strains of Cavliceps pupurea in different grain species produce slightly different forms of alkaloids, creating the variety of symptoms reported in outbreaks.
Once milled, ergot forms a dark red powder, easy to spot in lighter grains such as wheat and barley, but harder to notice in dark rye flour. For this reason the disease is most closely associated with rye bread, most commonly eaten by the poor.
Symptoms
Exposure to large quantities of ergot over a limited period of time can cause burning itches over the skin, diarrhoea, headaches, nausea and vomiting, painful seizures and muscle spasms. It can also can cause mania or psychosis.
Longer term exposure can cause dry gangrene, particularly in extremities of fingers and toes, lesions, peeling, swelling of extremities.
Longer term exposure to lower quanties of ergot can affect the body's ability to keep cool, resulting in hyperthermia, causing loss of appetite, weight loss and lower reproduction.
Ultimately, Ignis Sacer can - and often does - cause death.
Treatment
Monks of the Order of St Anthony supplement prayer and miracles with appying a lard-based ointment called St Anthony's Water to affected areas. This ointment was imbued with herbs such as nightshade.
They also prescribed St Anthony's Wine, a powerful antidote made from grapes cultivated near the order's first abbey near Vienne, home of the relics of St Anthony. The closeness of the relics were thought to imbue the wine with miraculous healing properties.
Prognosis
Mild cases, with limited ingestion of infected grains and less severe symptons, may heal fully with time.
Prevention
Once the cause of the disease was known in the late 17th century it could be avoided simply by avoiding eating ergot-infected grains - a simple test is to float suspected grain infections in briny water; ergot bodies float while healthy grains sink.
Ergot spores do not germinate in deep soils, and infected fields can be cleaned by deep ploughing.
History
Ergotism has existed for centuries, though its causes were not known. Outbreaks were relatively common, especially among the poor, and have caused thousands of deaths through the centuries. The link between Holy Fire and ergot was not known until 1676, when it was identified by French physician Denis Dodart, who noticed the connection between outbreaks and infected bread.
Chinese sources describe an outbreak in 1100BC, and another outbreak occured in Assyria in 600BC.
The Annales Xantenses, written at the Abbey of Xanten, near Dusseldorf, record in the year 857, "a great plague of swollen blisters consumed the people by a loathsome rot, so that their limbs were loosened and fell off before death." Icelandic chronicler Snorri Sturluson recorded that King Magnus II of Norway died of the disease in 1069. There were outbreaks in Paris in 1129, reputedly cured by the miraculous intervention of St Genevieve (commenmorated in the annual Feast of the Burning Ones on 26 November), and the Limousin during the 12th century, cured by relics of St Martial.
The saint most closely associated with the disease was St Anthony the Great, thanks to the miraculous cure of young nobleman Guérin la Valloire, thanks to relics of the saint housed at the the church of the Benedictine priory of Saint Anthony at La-Motte-Saint-Didier Burgundy. In gratitude for his cure, he and his father Gaston la Valloire founded the Order of St Anthony in 1095. The order, which specialised in caring for the sick, particularly sufferers of Holy Fire, spread through Europe during the medieval period.
Cultural Reception
The disease may have caused Strasbourg's Dancing Plague of 1518. The Salem Witch Trials in Massachussetts have been blamed on accusers suffering hallucinations caused by ergotism, though this theory is not universally accepted.
Sources:
Angel Sanchez Crespo, Killer in the Rye: St Anthony's fire (National Geographic History Magazine, 2018)
Stephen N Wegulo, Michael P. Carlson, Ergot of Small Grain Cereals and Grasses and its Health Effects on Humans and Livestock (University of Nebraska, Lincoln)
Alessandra Foscati, Saint Anthony’s Fire from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Amsterdam University Press, 2020)
Ergotism - Wikipedia
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