In the writings of the Arabians and of their imitators, the so-called Arabists, measles and smallpox are always taken together. The usual distinction made between them is that morbilli, or measles, come from the bile, whereas variolae, or smallpox, come from the blood, that the former are small, and that they are less apt to attack the eyes. The reference in Gaddesden is of the usual kind, but it is complicated by the introduction of a third term, punctilli, which Gruner, however, takes to be merely a synonym for morbilli. As Gaddesden’s passage is of some importance for the history of the familiar name of the disease in England, I shall translate it at length, so far as it can be made into sense:—
“Variolae are so called, as if variously choosing the skin itself, because in the skin they occupy divers parts, by apostematising and infecting; they are caused by corruption of blood, and therein they differ from morbilli and punctilli.
Morbilli are small apostemata in the skin generated of bile; and they are a diminutive of apostematous diseases because they occupy less space by reason of the sharpness of choleric matter. They are in fact variolae of choleric matter, and the smallest of pustules. But punctilli are infections commonly sanguineous, as if they had arisen from a fleabite, only they remain continually. And punctilli are of two kinds, large and small. Of the small I have already spoken [under the name of morbilli?]. But the large are broad, red and opaque infections in the legs of poor and wasting persons, (pauperum et consumptuorum), who sit as if continually at the fire without boots; and they are called in English mesles[879].”
The rest of Gaddesden’s chapter on smallpox and measles contains nothing that is not to be found in Avicenna or in any medieval compend on medicine. But the passage quoted is of interest as using the old word “mesles” to mean one of the two forms of morbilli or punctilli. We are here enabled to see a little way into the confusion of mind which attended the medievalists in their verbalist dealing with disease. The syntax of Gaddesden’s sentence implies that the broad, red and opaque infections on the legs of poor and wasted persons were called in English mesles. In other writers, both before and after his date, the name of mesles or mesels or meseals was given, not to a form of disease, but to a class of sufferers from disease. It is the name applied to the inmates of leper-houses by Matthew Paris (circa 1250)—miselli and misellae, being diminutives of miser[880]. It is the word used for the same class in the Norman-French entries in the Rolls of Parliament in the reign of Edward I. fixing the taxation of leper-houses: if the head of the house was himself a meseal, the hospital was to pay nothing, but if the head were a whole man, the hospital had to pay[881]. The same use of mesles, as meaning the leprous, in the generic sense, occurs several times in the 14th century poem, ‘The Vision of Piers the Ploughman[882].’ Thus, Christ in His ministrations,
“Sought out the sick and sinful both,
And salved sick and sinful, both blind and crooked;
And comune women converted, and to good turned.
Both meseles and mute, and in the menysoun bloody,
Oft he heled such. He ne held it for no mystery,
Save tho he leched Lazar that had ylain into grave.”
Or again:
“Ac old men and hore that helpless ben of strength,
And women with child that worche ne mowe,
Blind and bedred and broken their members,
That taketh their mischief mekely, as meseles and other.”
It is this old English word “mesles,” meaning the leprous in the generic sense, that Gaddesden brings into his Latin text in connexion with morbilli (or punctilli). It is useless to look for precision in such a writer; but if his introduction of “mesles” in the particular context mean anything at all, it means that the English word represented a variety of morbilli,—the large, broad and opaque variety. That it should have occurred to him to bring these blotches or spots on the legs of poor people even remotely into relation with the morbilli of the Arabians, probably means that Gaddesden had a merely verbal acquaintance with the latter, or that he knew them only in books. It is certainly improbable that anyone, even in the Middle Ages, who had ever seen a case of measles should bracket that transitory and insubstantial mottling of the skin, with the large, broad and “obscure” spots (or nodules, or what else) on the legs of poor and wasted persons, which were called, in the vernacular, mesles. But Gaddesden, though a verbalist and a plagiary, was a great name in medicine, a name usually joined (as in Chaucer) with more solid reputations than his own. If he identified “mesles” with a variety of morbilli (which variety no one but himself seems to have heard of), it was an easy transition for the name in English usage to become what it now is, measles meaning morbilli, in the correct and only real sense of the latter[883].
History of the name “Pocks” in English.
Gaddesden’s case of variola which he cured without pitting by means of red cloth stands alone in English records until the 16th century; probably he was as little able to diagnose variola as morbilli, and it is more than probable that he would not have scrupled to call some infantile malady by the book-name variola, on the principle of “omne ignotum pro terribili,” when there was anything to be gained by so doing. There is no independent evidence that smallpox or measles existed in England in the 14th and 15th centuries. There are extant various medieval prescription-books, in which remedies are given for all the usual diseases. If the name of variola, or any English form of it, occur therein, we should draw the same inference as from the prescriptions for maladies of children such as “the kernels,” and “the kink” (or whooping-cough)[884]. In the Anglo-Saxon “leechdoms,” which have been collected in three volumes, the word poc occurs once in the singular in the phrase “a poc of the eye” (probably a hordeum or sty of the eyelid), and once in the plural (poccan) without reference to any part of the body and with no indication that a general eruption was meant. Willan, indeed, has found in a manuscript of uncertain date a Latin incantation against disease, in which the words lues, pestis, pestilentia, and variola occur; at the end of it is written in Anglo-Saxon an invocation of certain saints to “shield me from the lathan poccas and from all evil[885].” This looks as if poccas had been the Anglo-Saxon translation of variola. But it remains to be seen in what sense the word “pokkes” was used in the earliest English writings.