FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   >>  
bific power of the emotions and passions is found in the frequent occurrence of _psychopathitis_ in times when all the elements of social life are in a state of fermentation. In and after revolutions sudden changes of fortune produce a thousand cases of mental disorder. The very same disease broke out among the Romanists themselves, at Port Royal, in 1729. In the previous century it had thrown whole nunneries near Bordeaux into wild confusion. In the sixteenth century it was known in Italy as the "Dancing Mania," or Tarantism. At the close of the fifteenth century _Tarantism_ had spread beyond the borders of Apulia. * * * The number of those affected by it increased beyond all belief. Inquisitive females joined the throng and caught the disease from the mental poison which they eagerly received _through the eye_. * * * Foreigners of every color and race were, in like manner, affected by it. Neither youth nor age afforded any protection; so that even old men of ninety threw aside their crutches, and joined the most extravagant dancers. * * * Subordinate nervous attacks were much more frequent during the seventeenth century, than at any former period. (Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp. 107-115, Engl. Trans.) During the Middle Ages it appeared in Germany. It was a convulsion, which in the most extraordinary manner infuriated the human frame; * * * and was propogated by the _sight_ of the sufferers. They continued dancing, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death. * * * They were haunted by visions, and some of them afterwards asserted that they had felt as if immersed in a _stream of blood_, which obliged them to leap so high. George Fox, Journal 1, p. 100: "The word of the Lord came to me again. * * * So I went up and down the streets crying, Woe to the bloody city, Lichfield! And there seemed to me to be a channel of blood running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a pool of blood." In Germany it was called St. John's or St. Vitus's dance. And long before its first appearance in that precise form, in 1374, it had, no doubt, been the real secret of the bacchanalian orgies among the Greeks, and of the frantic, dervish-like gestures and cuttings with knives and lancets which we read of among Asiatic races. In our own day and country (thank God) thes
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   >>  



Top keywords:

century

 
Tarantism
 

affected

 
Germany
 

joined

 

Middle

 
appeared
 

manner

 

streets

 

disease


mental

 
frequent
 

asserted

 

agonies

 

haunted

 

visions

 

George

 
lancets
 

knives

 

Asiatic


stream

 

obliged

 

immersed

 

oppression

 

dancing

 
continued
 
propogated
 

sufferers

 
delirium
 

country


exhaustion
 

complained

 

extreme

 

ground

 
length
 

groaned

 

market

 

running

 
channel
 

called


appearance

 
precise
 

secret

 

Lichfield

 

gestures

 
cuttings
 

dervish

 
bloody
 

crying

 

bacchanalian