Saint Lydwina

Lydwina was born in Schiedam, in Holland, on March 18, 1380, the only daughter of Peter, a night watchman, and Petronella, who also had eight sons. On Candlemas Day in 1394, at fifteen, she fell while ice skating and broke a rib. She never recovered from that fall. She spent the remaining thirty-eight years of her life almost always in bed, with pain, progressive paralysis, and eyesight trouble that worsened and improved in waves. That’s why her name appears in medical textbooks: Lydwina is historically the first person to whom the typical symptoms of multiple sclerosis have been attributed. The clinical picture is still debated — some attribute it mainly to anorexia — but the description left by the sources is detailed enough for doctors to discuss it six hundred years later. There is also a detail that has nothing to do with holiness. The woodcut showing her fall, in the biography written in 1456 by the Franciscan Johannes Brugman, is considered the oldest surviving picture of ice skaters. She died in Schiedam on April 14, 1433. Leo XIII confirmed her cult in 1890. She is one of the most venerated Dutch saints, and she is invoked by the chronically ill and by all who suffer for a long time. If your name is Lydwina, today is your name day.