February 14 is Valentine’s Day, and we all know what that means: a time to remember the mostly fictitious early Christian martyr(s) who became known as the patron of sufferers of epilepsy!
This painting of St Valentine by Leonhard Beck (d. 1542) shows the saint raising his hand in blessing over a stiffened body which lies at his feet. It is in accordance with the way Medieval and Early Modern Europeans often referred to the disease of epilepsy as “the falling sickness”. Probably you have heard about how many of the Medieval interpretations concerning epileptic seizures involved demonic possessions. The sufferers of course had no recourse to modern medical knowledge, and many sought divine assistance for their maladies.
St Valentine was said to have lived in the third century CE, but the earliest sources for him only appear in the 400s, and seem to have confused two different stories about men called Valentine who were killed for being Christian and were buried along the Via Flaminia outside Rome. It wasn’t until the 1400s that he started to become associated with epilepsy in Germanic- and English- speaking lands, perhaps because the German name “Valentine” sounds like the phrase “fall net hin”/do not fall down.
A 2009 study of artistic renderings of St Valentine healing or attending to people experiencing a grand mal seizure argues that although Medieval people didn’t understand the causes of epilepsy, they accurately diagnosed its symptoms in paintings and drawings.
Sources: _Epilepsy & Behavior_ vol 14, issue 1, Jan 2009, pp 219-225, Gerhard Kluger, Verena Kudernatsch. “The Saints of Epilepsy,” Edward L. Murphy, pp 303-311, Medical History 1959
