Glass delusion

He was just the most powerful person to suffer from what physicians of the time recognized as a genuine medical condition.

They called it the glass delusion, and at its peak, it spread across the elite of the continent with a persistence that bordered on epidemic.

The dominant medical framework, inherited from the Greek physician Galen and from Hippocrates before him, held that the body was governed by four humors.

Health meant keeping them balanced, and when they fell out of balance, illness followed.

The cold, dry properties of the humor produced a brittleness that the imagination then made literal.

In a medical culture where the boundary between the physical and the psychological was non-existent, this made a kind of internal sense.

The glass delusion wasn't treated as folklore or superstition by the physicians who encountered it, perhaps because of who it was affecting.

It attracted serious clinical attention from some of the most prominent medical minds of the period.