Francis - a full life with illnesses

Francis of Assisi  (1181-1226)

- a full life with illnesses

 a  feeble body with bodily wounds, scars, laceration and soul pain, anguish and hearbreak.

PART 1.  Francis’s life was encumbered by dark shadow. His psychological trauma began with his military service in Assisi’s war against its more powerful neighbor, Perugia in 1202. He saw men he knew since childhood torn limb from limb in a devastating battle, and was taken prisoner for a year, thrown in a dark, damp hole in the ground. 

This left Francis a broken man, traumatized. He was a physical and emotional wreck, too ill and depressed to go out of the house. There he contracted malaria which racked him with violent pains and would return periodically for the rest of his life.

PART 2. Upon Francis’s arrival home, he fell ill with, most likely, tuberculosis and spent another year in bed. Francis was filled with anguish and sorrow for several years before he could finally find tranquility. Such prolonged spiritual anguish would hint, at least in the medieval era, at the acedia (Spiritual or mental sloth, apathy, negligence).
One complication of his malaria occasionally seen around Francis' time was a purple hemorrhage of blood into the skin.

PART 3. In his journey to the middle-east (1220) he developed an eye condition. A degenerative and extremely painful eye disease, trachoma, which was eventually to make him virtually blind.

PART 4. Francis’ Stigmata (Christ’s wounds) in 1224 is the first recorded stigmatic in Christian, two years before his death. 

The marks were round on the palm of each hand but elongated on the other side, and small pieces of flesh jutting out from the rest took on the appearance of the nail-ends, bent and driven back. 

In the same way the marks of nails were impressed on his feet and projected beyond the rest of the flesh. 

Moreover, his right side had a large wound as if it had been pierced with a spear, and it often bled so that his tunic and trousers were soaked with his sacred blood.