Saint Isidore of Seville (570-636) was a bishop and a Doctor of the Church. He wrote just about everything from medicine to a book about the classifications of heaven’s angels. He attempted to catalogue what was then known to man in 20 books called De Los Orígenes (Of Origins) and he wrote the first encyclopedic dictionary. He divided his Of Origins into 20 books each on one category:
1. Grammar 2. Rhetoric
and Dialectic 3. Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy 4. Medicine 5. Laws
and time 6. the books and laws of the church 7. God, angels and men 8. the
church and sects 9. languages, races, kingdoms and the armies 10. words in
alphabetical order 11. man and monsters 12. animals 13. the universe and its
parts, or cosmology 14. the earth and its divisions or geography 15. cities,
fields and roads 16. minerals and metals 17. farmers and gardening 18. war and
games 19. ships, buildings and clothing 20. Food and its tools.
For our purposes St.
Isidore figures here for two very good reasons. He was the first to coin the
word in Spanish cama (bed) from the Latin camba for a narrow bed used for
sleeping or, as the Romans so much enjoyed, for eating.
Because it was St.
Isidoro (Spanish for Isidore) who was really the first human to attempt to
compile all human knowledge, Spanish scholars have declared him to be the
patron saint of the internet. I would offer no objection seeing that this man
knew about everything and beds, too. Thanks to him I can justify placing here
these delightful pictures of Art Bergmann in bed with his wife Sherri
Decembrini.
Sherri's Video with Art in Bed