ABSTRACT
For sixteenth-century contemporaries, coping with illness involved coming to terms with one’s Maker, the Lord and Creator of the universe. In only six days, Genesis told them, the Almighty created the world and gave to all things within it a specific meaning and purpose. Until man’s Fall from Grace, all living beings in this carefree, heavenly paradise lived in harmonious togetherness. Humankind, made in God’s image and thus the crown of His creation, enjoyed universal knowledge and was free from all physical suffering. But Eve’s bite of the apple destroyed all this; not only was the right to stay in the Garden of Eden lost, but so too, through her disobedience, did the human body become an object of shame and subject to pain and disease, decay and mortality.1
