Middle Ages

The Middle Ages serve as a historical point of comparison in the novel, where periodic outbreaks of ergotism are recalled as a devastating public-health crisis. This brief reference gives the past a material consequence—illness, gangrene, and lost limbs—while resonating with the novel’s later depictions of medical and administrative power over individual bodies.

Historical Reference

The account identifies ergot as a fungal disease affecting poor-quality wheat and says that Europe was periodically decimated by ergotism during the Middle Ages. The illness was known as St. Anthony’s fire; gangrene could follow, causing the legs to blacken and fall off. The passage compresses a broad historical disaster into a stark sequence of cause and bodily consequence.

Disease and the Body

The reference to ergotism occurs amid a description of people as impaired, including mention of a person handicapped by the absence of legs. The historical detail makes bodily loss concrete without developing the afflicted person’s life or circumstances. Its emphasis is on the severity of the disease and the physical consequences associated with it.

Place in the Novel

Elsewhere, the novel presents officials framing sexual difference as illness and justifying examination or treatment as public-health measures. Against that institutional language, the medieval example recalls a disease with grave physical effects, while exposing how readily the language of sickness can be used to classify people. The comparison is suggestive rather than a stated equivalence: the passage supplies historical medical detail, not an explicit argument linking ergotism to those later policies.