Culpeper update -- nothing of help yet. I had a mini-brainwave, and looked at those herbs which would now be used to help with diabetes (I know you said it isn't that, but that's the closest I could get) -- namely French beans, bilberries (aka whortleberries), goat's rue, herb robert, knapwort, and sumach. There's no specific mention of a condition akin to diabetes in any of them, though they refer to things like provoking urine or cleansing the kidneys, or cooling the heat of the liver, and the knapwort entry remarks it's "good for diseases of the head and nerves" (perhaps "falling-sickness, giddiness, and swimmings" which are noted in the entry for bryony). So it looks like Culpeper didn't have a name for it in 1649, or didn't know of anything to help, perhaps.
By coincidence I was reading an article about epilepsy (Culpeper's falling-sickness) this morning, and it reminded me that it doesn't always manifest in great seizures with convulsions and limb spasms, but can also be an absence seizure, where there is just a momentary loss of consciousness. I know this isn't what she has, but it's the name which caught my eye, petit mal, ie little illness. That's apparently an C18th name -- pissing evil looks to be C17th by the way, not earlier as I'd hoped -- but I wondered whether some kind of name like that might be more useful than choler with its other associations.
You could always use a generic word like ailment or distemper -- I know that's a dog thing now, but it wasn't originally, though it does carry the connotation of paint, too, which wouldn't help!
If we can't find a likely name, you could invent one for her based on her symptoms, ie rage-faint. Though one thing that occurred to me is that surely her father would have given it a name if he talked to her about it, and tried to show it was a sign of eg holiness or whatever, so wouldn't she use that name? Which presumably would have been in his mother tongue, not English.
By coincidence I was reading an article about epilepsy (Culpeper's falling-sickness) this morning, and it reminded me that it doesn't always manifest in great seizures with convulsions and limb spasms, but can also be an absence seizure, where there is just a momentary loss of consciousness. I know this isn't what she has, but it's the name which caught my eye, petit mal, ie little illness. That's apparently an C18th name -- pissing evil looks to be C17th by the way, not earlier as I'd hoped -- but I wondered whether some kind of name like that might be more useful than choler with its other associations.
You could always use a generic word like ailment or distemper -- I know that's a dog thing now, but it wasn't originally, though it does carry the connotation of paint, too, which wouldn't help!
If we can't find a likely name, you could invent one for her based on her symptoms, ie rage-faint. Though one thing that occurred to me is that surely her father would have given it a name if he talked to her about it, and tried to show it was a sign of eg holiness or whatever, so wouldn't she use that name? Which presumably would have been in his mother tongue, not English.
