Note 191 — Chapter V · CATHERINE’S LAST FOUR YEARS, 1506 TO 1510—SKETCH OF HER CHARACTER, DOCTRINE, AND SPIRIT

The five passages of the Vita concerning Physicians (pp. 71c, 72a; 145c, 146b; 146c-147c; 158c, 159a) all bear very clear marks of successive additions, glosses, and re-castings,—always in the direction indicated above.

The entire Boerio-episode (pp. 146c-147c), is wanting in all the MSS. It is, however, most plainly authentic. I believe both the episode and a further passage concerning Boerio to have been furnished by Boerio’s son, a Secular Priest, who died a septuagenarian in 1561; his monument still exists in the Church of the Santa Annunciata, at Sturla, near Genoa. See the Biografia Medica Ligure, by Dottore G. B. Pescetto, Genova, 1846, Vol. I, p. 104.—There are some suspicious symptoms connected with that first consultation of Physicians: Boerio’s interviews read as though they had not been quite recently preceded by such an activity—and it is possible that we have here an account produced by a retrogressive doubling of the undoubtedly authentic consultation of the 10th of September, to be described presently. Still, there is nothing intrinsically improbable in the account itself. I have, then, allowed both consultations to stand.