Historia y Humanidades

Neurological illness in the process of canonising Saint Dominic de Guzmán

Á.L. Guerrero-Peral [REV NEUROL 2007;44:181-183] PMID: 17285524 DOI: https://doi.org/10.33588/rn.4403.2006250

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Volumen 44 | Number 03 | Nº of views of the article 5.954 | Nº of PDF downloads 645 | Article publication date 01/02/2007

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ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION Dominic de Guzmán, the founder of the Order of Preachers (or Dominicans), was one of the most influential and outstanding figures in medieval Hispania. His canonisation process was endorsed by a good number of miraculous healings that took place thanks to his intervention. The descriptions of the people he cured contain several clinical pictures that are compatible with neurological diseases. DEVELOPMENT. We review the records of the canonisation process that have survived in various biographies of the saint written in the Middle Ages. We also study other descriptions of pathologies that appear in the hagiographical texts by the first Dominican monks. Six of the miracles included in the records of the canonisation process describe clinical signs and symptoms that can be interpreted as being of a neurological nature. The most striking are those concerning a young male with acute lumbar-radicular pain with motor involvement, a female with a clinical picture compatible with a cervical central cord disorder and another young male probably suffering from acute myositis. The biographies of the first preacher monks describe deficiency symptoms in the dominant hemisphere and a case of Parkinson’s syndrome, among others.

CONCLUSIONS Medieval literature, in the early hagiography of the Dominican order, provides us with exquisite, interesting descriptions of neurological clinical cases which are outlined in this paper. KeywordsCentral cord syndrome Hagiographies Lumbar-radicular pain Monoplegia Myositis Parkinson’s syndrome Syndromic diagnosis in neurology Topographic diagnosis in neurology CategoriesNeurodegeneración Trastornos del movimiento

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Historia y Humanidades

Neurological illness in the process of canonising Saint Dominic de Guzmán