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  • “The Strange Case of the Virgin Lidwina”—first recorded case of multiple sclerosis, 1421
  • Susan Wood (bio)

In the drawing she looks a little like photographs of both my grandmother and me, same long face, heavy eyelids, and maybe if I could trace my family back to 14th-century Holland, I’d find an ancestor, some still unknown gene passed on to me these six hundred years. Back then she was just another Dutch teenager, centuries before the term was invented, out skating with her friends. Delft blue sky, the hard sun cracking open the afternoon. She’d been showing off, as she liked to do, always the best skater, blades forming the edges of a perfect figure 8. Just an ordinary winter day in Schiedam, a girl floating free in the wind. And then she wasn’t. Facedown on the ice, she heard the voices of her friends as if from far away, calling, “Lidwy, Lidwy, get up!” And couldn’t. Soon, paralyzed, nearly blind, her face twitching in pain, she had little to do but think. When the doctor said her illness came from God and couldn’t be cured, she decided to make the most of it and declared she’d been called to suffer for the sins of others. Suffering would be her joy now. Who could resist such sympathy, even pity, especially when it’s all you have? Who doesn’t like to be the center of attention? Pretty soon the villagers flocked to press their noses against the windows of the sick room, worshipping. Thirty-seven years she lay there in that hushed room, while legends sprang up around her like roses on the wall outside her window. That her twisted body gave off the fragrance of those roses, that her dark room glowed with such holy light the peasants thought it must be on fire. In later years it was said she took no nourishment [End Page 140] but Christ’s blood and body. I wonder if she’d think it was all worth it now to know she’s the patron saint of figure skaters, all those healthy Tanyas and Taras and Sashas and Michelles set spinning in homage. I wonder if she’d think how much the world has changed or how little, these days when some see the image of the Virgin Mary on a pie pan, the face of Jesus in a corn tortilla, these days when a machine lights up my brain so the lesions seem to float there, white as the Milky Way, dark as a Black Hole. [End Page 141]

Susan Wood

Susan Wood, a native of Commerce, Texas, is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English at Rice University. She is author of three volumes of poems: Bazaar (1980), Campo Santo (LSU Press, 1991), winner of the Lamont Prize of the Academy of American Poets; and Asunder (Penguin, 2001), a National Poetry Series selection.

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