During the Middle Ages there was a belief that kings had healing abilities. With a touch of their hands they could heal the sick, especially if it was scrofula, also known as cervical lymphadenitis due to mycobacteria caused by tuberculosis, a disease from which Joseph Conrad’s mother died.
On August 3, the centenary of the death of Joseph Conrad, a Polish writer who showed the internal conflicts of his characters, taking them to extreme situations, was commemorated. Anyone who has read The heart of darkness either Victory will have vibrated on the string of images that swing between realism and metaphysics.
The fragility of the human being is exposed in each line of his dialogues, a discursive expression where morality is displaced to the realm of shadows. The darkness of his themes and the disturbing light of his prose—which so inspired Faulkner—make Conrad the foundation of North American literature of the last century. Without Conrad Faulkner would not be understood and Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald would not be understood either. And all this comes to mind from the essay recently published in Debate signed by Maya Jasanoff under the title The Dawn Guard, where he traces an interesting biography of Conrad in which there is no lack of critical awareness or illness. Neither does death.
Conrad’s father, named Apollo, paid for his political inclinations with exile. The arrival in Vologda in a horse cart through a muddy road, and with little Conrad sick, was an episode that would forever mark the feverish imagination of the future writer. In one of the letters that Apollo wrote to his cousins, he pointed out that Vologda was a “huge quagmire” and said, jokingly, that the name of the river was Scrofula because of the illness that everyone there suffered; a very literary medieval disease that amounts to a tuberculosis infection whose effect inflames the lymph nodes in the neck and that today we scientifically know as tuberculous lymphadenitis.
These scrofula have their origin in the diseased lungs, whose bacilli reach the bloodstream, causing inflammation. But the curious thing, and hence the classification of a literary disease, is that, since the Early Middle Ages, the belief developed in France and England that kings cured said disease with their hands. With a touch of his fingers the bulbs of the neck disappeared. In those times, the king was a reflection of Christ, that’s where his healing power came from. The divine gift, attributed to monarchs, is brought out by Shakespeare in his Macbeth, a dark and bloody work, where a doctor speaks of “a mob of unhappy people who await their cure by the touch of the king, such is the sanctity that Heaven has granted at his hand.”
The belief in the supernatural that dominates human beings from the moment everything is lost is embodied in the figure of a miraculous king. In the same way, belief in prayers and prayers to God become effective in religious thought, as happened with little Conrad, who survived the fever of the trip to exile thanks, according to his parents, to prayers. . But those same prayers couldn’t do anything with his mother; Years later he would die of tuberculosis. Centuries will have to pass until chance comes to the aid of science to discover that the substance secreted by the fungus “penicillium” fights infections more effectively than religion, although religion, remains close to every disease.
We must take charge, because there will always be the intimate consolation of divine intervention in our ills. In that aspect, since Conrad’s time we have changed little or nothing.
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