More stories from days gone past.... The Convento de San Anton and St. Anthony's Fire

This is another story from previous days when time and/or internet access weren't as readily accessible. Dad/Len/Grampa passed through Castrojeriz on April 20th.

“A couple of weeks ago now, I was approaching the town of Castrojeriz. This was during the not so nice weather period. A few km before Castrojeriz, I came across a large stone structure that my guidebook called a “ruins”. The sign said it was the Convento de San Anton. It was not quite correct to call it a ruins because part of it was still in use, but it was very large, almost of castle proportions but without any defensive structures.

The Convento de San Anton was a hospital. In our times the word hospital is used only in a medical context but the original use of the word is as a place of hospitality, a welcoming place of shelter, warmth, care and yes sometimes healing. There are many places on the Camino with the word Hospital in their name.

The Convento de San Anton was a place of refuge and care for pilgrims especially from northern Europe who were coming to Santiago for relief from a very common and very painful disease called St. Anthony’s Fire. St. Anthony’s Fire was a disease in which the peripheral areas of the body became very painful, eventually turned black and in very severe cases fingers, toes or even hands and feet could fall off (I am not making this up, this really does happen). The disease was more common in the northern and wetter parts of Europe and less common in the southern drier parts. It was also more common where bread had a high component of rye grain. In the middle ages no one knew what caused this terrible affliction.

Well today we know exactly what St. Anthony’s Fire is (or was). St. Anthony’s Fire is Ergotism. Ergot is a fungus that infects grains and particularly rye grains. The fungus is called Claviceps purpurea (Brandon, please check that I am correct here, it is a while since I reviewed this). The active principle of Claviceps purpurea is to cause contraction of smooth muscle including blood vessels. If a person or an animal eats bread made from infected rye flour or the grain itself, the peripheral blood vessels contract depriving the affected areas of blood, causing pain and eventually if enough contaminated food is eaten it may cause dry gangrene of the extremities and eventually they may self amputate (drop off). The pharmacological principle in ergot has even been used as a drug to cause smooth muscle contraction to induce eg uterine contraction. I don’t know if it is still in use or not.

In any event this common disease in the middle ages that was called St. Anthony’s Fire is Ergotism and is caused by eating bread made from contaminated rye flour or in the case of animals by being fed contaminated grain.

So the Convento de San Anton was a place that was set up to heal pilgrims affected by St. Anthony’s Fire. The treatment was probably a combination of kind care, good food, clean water, rest and lots of prayer. And it probably worked but not for reasons which were understood then. Of course the care was important. But more important was that the affected pilgrims stopped eating contaminated bread. In the south rye was less common and most breads were made of wheat flour which is more resistant to ergot.

Today Ergotism is uncommon in people because grains are inspected for fungal contamination and affected grain is taken out of the human food chain. It is still seen occasionally in animals because grain considered unfit for human consumption can still be fed to livestock. I seem to remember a case in Russia???? not too long ago where some unscrupulous person did introduce infected grain into flour for human consumption and did cause a modern outbreak of St. Anthony’s Fire.

In the middle ages it was likely that even had people known the cause of this disease, they may not have had much choice. It may have been a case of eating the contaminated bread or starving to death. Also their storage facilities for grains were probably not ideal. Today for example we dry our grain carefully.

Len”

Editor’s note – apparently St. Anthony’s Fire refers to different things in different geographies. Certainly ergotism is the big one but in some areas it also refers to Erysipelas (more common in the UK and US) and Herpes zoster (especially in Italy and Malta) I considered adding an image of ergotism from a veterinary pathologist’s perspective but settled on images of the Convento de San Anton.