Humility made physical
Accounts of Catherine of Genoa’s life describe her eating scabs from sick people as an act of self-effacement. The point was not the food itself. In Christian devotional practice, humility meant setting aside pride and self-importance; confronting something that provoked intense disgust could make that discipline bodily and immediate.
Catherine’s reported action also belongs to a wider pattern of service to the sick. Caring for people whose bodies were suffering could challenge the social distance between the respectable and the infirm. Taking a scab into her own mouth carried that challenge further: it made revulsion, rather than rank or comfort, the thing she sought to overcome.
A dramatic story of devotion
Such episodes were remembered because they turned an inward ideal into a startling physical gesture. They should be understood as reports preserved in accounts of a religious life, not as a clinical record or a practice expected of other people. Their force lies in what they were meant to signify: Catherine’s willingness to humble herself rather than recoil from those she served.
The image is difficult to forget precisely because it makes humility concrete—not a claim of being modest, but a deliberate crossing of the boundary that disgust would normally enforce.
