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The second instance comes from Neapolitan chronicles of 1470. Naples is under Spanish rule. In the splendor of a cultured and sophisticated city, Isabelle of Castille (dubbed the Catholic Queen) has just married Ferdinand of Aragon: her difficult road to reconquer the Spanish throne has started. In those days the court physician receives alarming news that two reserve cooks, during the night, manifested intense gastric pain, followed by retching black vomit.
There are thoughts of plague, and attempts to confine the event.
In fact, as the Spanish physician Hernando Cordoba y Francisco del Castillo will write in 1490 in his “De Medicina Mediterranea” (preserved in Naples’ and Madrid’s State Archives), it was probably a case of excessive consumption of cantaridin which, as is well known, eats the stomach lining away and causes hemorrhages. Or rather, as the historian of medicine Parisio maintains in his “Medicine from Galen to 1500 – a critical essay on past diagnoses” (Associated University Press, Naples, 1949) the rupturing of varicose veins in the esophagus, caused by portal hypertension, mainly seen in alcoholics.

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© 1998 Gianni Actis Barone