ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I discussed claims for the novelty of green sickness in English vernacular medical writing, and the process by which the digestive disorder of green jaundice was repackaged and, drawing on imagery of ‘green’ as suggesting freshness, youth and sexuality, relaunched as the disease of virgins, and subsequently as chlorosis. In this chapter, I will return to Latin medical writing and to Johannes Lange, who made no such claims to novelty in his description of the disease of virgins in his Medicinalium epistolarum miscellanea 1.21 (1554). Although, as we have seen, he himself did not talk about being ‘the first’, historians of chlorosis have identified Lange’s letter as ‘doubtless the earliest account of chlorosis’ (Ruhräh 1934:393), ‘the first distinct description of chlorosis’ (Bird 1982:134), the ‘first medical description of this syndrome’ (Crosby 1987:2799) or, more cautiously, ‘the account which all later commentators would agree upon as describing chlorosis’ (Hudson 1977:448-9). On the contrary, however, and in obvious contrast to Bullein’s claims for the ‘new’ green sickness in 1558, Lange stressed that his ‘disease of virgins’ was far from being new. He referred to popular knowledge-among ‘the women of Brabant’—of the condition which he described, but also gave it a 2,000-year past by naming classical precedents for this combination of symptoms. Modern discussions of the mysterious disappearance of chlorosis have also looked to classical precedents, but have identified different classical texts as the sources for the symptoms. Do any of these classical precedents exist and, more broadly, how did Lange use Greek medical texts to structure his ‘disease of virgins’?
