Dr. Johnson and Scrofula

I spent the day yesterday comparing the latin text of Pliny's Natural History and an English text to see what is being translated as 'scrofula'. In every case, scrofula came from a form of 'struma' however, doing another word search, I found there were 67 instances of 'struma' in the text but only 19 were translated as scrofula. Now that could also be because the English word search doesn't give you the adjective when you are searching for the noun, but I am too lazy to look for every one of the 67 occurrences of the word. You will have to forgive me.

There is an interesting entry in the Cambridge History of Human Diseases on scrofula but there is no electronic version, that I can access remotely, so any discussion of that text will have to wait until I can get to a university library and have a look.

For the time being then, I will leave the discussion of scrofula with a comment on the fact that Samuel Johnson, he who wrote the dictionary, had scrofula as a child. At the age of two, he was taken to see Queen Anne who was the last English monarch to attempt the healing touch. It was abandoned shortly after as being too Catholic a practice. Queen Anne did give him a gold coin which he wore around his neck until he died in his old age.

It is assumed that he got scrofula from drinking infected cows' milk since that is how people commonly got it. It is something that people who think that 'raw milk' is superior to pasteurized milk want to consider. The gold coin that Queen Anne gave to Dr. Johnson has been preserved and is on display at the British Museum and you can see it online here.

There Is Always a Reason

I was curious as to why Mr. Harris chose scrofula as Vatinius' disfiguring ailment. Short of writing him a letter, and assuming he would reply, know why he chose that, or has notes that would help him figure out why, I must do my own detective work and make the best guess available.

I used the Perseus site to peruse texts that refer to Vatinius but most of the ones that interested me were not readily available in Latin on that site. Cicero made a very long speech in the Senate called In Vatinium against Vatinius where he makes reference to Vatinius being denied augership. He also refers to the disfigurement in his letters to Atticus and in one to Brutus. What word did he use in In Vatinium? "Ista quae sunt inflata" or those disgusting things which are swollen. The English translation at Perseus rendered 'ista' which is a pronoun into the word 'wen'.

Catullus came to my aid, good ole Catullus. He wrote a poem, now called 52 but at the time was called In Novium, in which there is a line calling Nonius 'a giant boil sitting on the curule chair'(my translation) and accusing Vatinius of perjury. Who is Nonius and what exactly is a struma anyway? So I looked in my pocket dictionary The New College Latin and English Dictionary. It also includes Late Latin and Neo Latin so it has been useful for some Medieval texts. In this dictionary, struma means 'tumor, swollen gland'; however just after this entry is strumosus which means scrofulous.

Not content with this, I got out the granddaddy of Latin dictionaries, the Oxford Latin Dictionary, because it has only classical Latin and some etymology plus where words occur in Latin texts. I love a good dictionary. I should have gone to this one first as nearly all the entries where struma occurs also contain the name Vatinius. There is nothing like being famous for all time for a giant boil on your neck.

The OLD defines struma as 'a swelling of the lymphatic glands'. Strumosis is 'afflicted with glandular swellings'. This requires now a look at the Oxford English Dictionary and, indeed, scrofulous comes from a Medieval Latin word 'scrofula' which means an enlarged lymph gland. Maybe struma is scrofula but there is more reason that one for enlarged lymph nodes. Scrofula is derived from scrofa, which the OED states is latin for 'breeding sow which were deemed subject to this disease'. Struma was equated with goiter, bronchocele or scrofula at the earliest in 1400 in Lefranc's Cicurgie. So whatever dictionary, if he was conducting his research in the original latin texts, he used may have been like my pocket dictionary - spoiled with Medieval Latin terms - or whatever translation he used of those texts had been spoiled with Medieval Latin terms.

The OLD lists In Vatinium 39 "si...strumae ab ore improbo demigrarunt et aliis iam se locis conlocarunt"(if those tumors migrate from your shameless face and now lodge themselves in other places), Letters to Atticus 2.9.2 "licet....Vatini strumam sacerdoti vestiant" (it is permitted that priests adorn the glandular swellings of Vatinius) and Celsus V.29.2"struma est tumor, in quo subter concreta quaedam ex pure et sanguine quasi glandulae oriuntur...nascuntur maxime in cervice, sed etiam in alis et inguinibus" ( A struma is a tumor, in which arises under certain curdling from pus and blood just like of a small gland.... it is borne mostly in the neck but also in other private parts.) Most English translations of these texts call struma 'scrofula'. Pliny's Natural History is full of references to scrofula including how to cure it with weasel's blood. So Harris is not wrong to say that Vatinius had scrofula but I wonder if later translators had been duly diligent in naming the disease or just followed what previous translators had done.