The Life of Saint Martin · Chapter XIX
The letter that cured Arborius’s daughter, the eyes of Paulinus of Nola and the fall down the stairs
Arborius, a former Roman prefect and a man of very deep and sincere faith, had a daughter at home wasting away with terrible attacks of quartan fever. It so happened that in those days he received a letter written by Martin; at the exact moment when the fever began to rise again in the girl, her father laid the letter on her chest and, that very second, the fever went down and never came back. Arborius was so struck by what he had seen that he decided there and then to consecrate his daughter to God, in a life of chastity for ever. He then set out to go and find Martin, took the young woman with him — living proof that he had cured her even at a distance — and absolutely insisted that it should be Martin himself, and no one else, who gave her the veil of consecrated virgins.
Paulinus, for his part — a man who would later become an extraordinary example of Christian life for everyone — began to suffer horrible pains in one eye, to the point where a thick film formed over the pupil and was blinding him. Martin gently passed a small medical brush over his eye, took away all the pain in an instant and gave him back his sight, as perfect as before.
As for Martin himself, he one day had the misfortune to fall from an upper floor and tumble down a broken staircase full of crooked steps, ending up all cut and bruised from head to foot. He was lying in his cell almost at death’s door, in unbearable pain, when during the night an angel appeared to him, washing his wounds and spreading a soothing balm over his whole battered body. The next morning, Martin got up so well and so restored that it seemed as though he had never had any fall at all.
But if I set about telling every case here one by one, we should never be done; let us stop at these few examples chosen from among so many others. They are quite enough to show the truth about the most admirable things that happened, without wearying the reader with too many stories.
Here we cross paths with two historical personalities very well known from other sources of the period:
1. Magnus Arborius and the “quartan fever”: Arborius was a high imperial official (vir praefectorius, prefect in Rome around 379–380) and nephew of the famous poet Ausonius, of Bordeaux. The “quartan fever” that had attacked his daughter was a serious form of malaria (Plasmodium malariae), characterised by violent peaks of fever and chills that returned every three days (every “fourth day” in the Roman way of counting, which included the first and the last day).
2. Saint Paulinus of Nola (354–431): The “Paulinus” cured of a serious eye complaint (probably a corneal ulcer or a traumatic cataract, touched with a peniculus, a small sponge or brush used by ancient doctors) is none other than Pontius Meropius Paulinus, an immensely rich senator born in Bordeaux, governor of Campania and the best friend of our author, Sulpicius Severus! Paulinus himself left an account of this cure in his writings; shortly afterwards he sold his immense fortune to give to the poor and went to live at Nola, in southern Italy, becoming one of the greatest Christian poets of Antiquity.