Believed to have been Bishop of Sebaste (Armenia).
Martyred (4th century) under Emperor Licinius.
As he was being led away to prison, a mother brought to him her little
son, who was choking on a fish bone. Blaise healed him, and thus became
patron of those suffering from diseases of the throat -- which, as
Crystal reminds us, can severely impair speech.

Blaise was one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, a group of saints who
"enjoyed a collective cult in the Rhineland from the 14th century". They
seem to have been like a medical practice with specialists in different
types of disease.
(David Hugh Farmer, _Oxford Dictionary of Saints_ (1987))

Ar an triú lá de mí Feabhra, scríobh Ross Clark:

> Believed to have been Bishop of Sebaste (Armenia).
> Martyred (4th century) under Emperor Licinius.
> As he was being led away to prison, a mother brought to him her little son,
> who was choking on a fish bone. Blaise healed him, and thus became patron of
> those suffering from diseases of the throat -- which, as Crystal reminds us,
> can severely impair speech.

Fish bones have a better long-term prognosis than the usual cause of speech
impairment from throat disease these days, which is an upper airway cancer from
smoking.

With fish bones, most of the time there isn’t a persisting foreign body, the
discomfort is from a scratch to the airway as the bone went down.

> Blaise was one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, a group of saints who "enjoyed
> a collective cult in the Rhineland from the 14th century". They seem to have
> been like a medical practice with specialists in different types of disease.
> (David Hugh Farmer, _Oxford Dictionary of Saints_ (1987))

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vierzehn_Nothelfer comments:

»Darstellungen der Heiligen Oswald und Leonhard auf Fenstern von 1360 im Dom
zu Regensburg weisen auf die frühe Verehrung der Nothelfer in noch nicht
festgelegter Reihenfolge in der Region hin. Dass es sich bei ihnen vorwiegend
um Heilige aus dem griechisch-byzantinischen Raum handelt, erklärt sich aus
den frühen kulturellen Kontakten der Stadt mit Südosteuropa.«

It didn’t make intuitive sense that Regensburg would have had much to do with
Asia Minor, but on reading further at that point it was a hugely important
centre of long-distance trade.

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)