saw, that danced for a month. In Strasburg many of
them ate nothing for days and nights until their mania subsided.
Paracelsus, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, was the first to
make a study of this disease. He outlined the severest treatment for
it, and boasted that he cured many of the victims. Hecker conjectures
that probably the wild revels of St. John's day, 1374, gave rise to
this mental plague, which thenceforth visited so many thousands with
incurable aberrations of mind and disgusting distortions of the body.
Almost simultaneous with the dance of "St. With," there appeared in
Italy and Arabia a mania very similar in character which was called
"tarantism," which was supposed to originate in the bite of the
tarantula. The only effective remedy was music in some form. In the
Tigre country, Abyssinia, this disease appeared under the name of
"Tigretier." The disease, fortunately, rapidly declined, and very
little of it seems to have been known in the sixteenth century, but in
the early part of the eighteenth century a peculiar sect called the
"Convulsionnaires" arose in France; and throughout England among the
Methodist sect, insane convulsions of this nature were witnessed; and
even to the present day in some of the primitive religious meetings of
our people, something not unlike this mania of the Middle Ages is
perpetuated.

Paracelsus divided the sufferers of St. Vitus's dance into three
classes .--

(1) Those in which the affliction arose from imagination (chorea
imaginativa).

(2) Those which had their origin in sexual desires depending on the
will.

(3) Those arising from corporeal causes (chorea naturalis). This last
case, according to a strange notion of his own he explained by
maintaining that in certain vessels which are susceptible of an
internal pruriency, and thence produced laughter, the blood is set into
commotion in consequence of an alteration in the vital spirits, whereby
are occasioned involuntary fits of intoxicating joy, and a propensity
to dance. The great physician Sydenham gave the first accurate
description of what is to-day called chorea, and hence the disease has
been named "Sydenham's chorea." So true to life was his portrayal of
the disease that it has never been surpassed by modern observers.

The disease variously named palmus, the jumpers, the twitchers, lata,
miryachit, or, as it is sometimes called, the emeryaki of Siberia, and
the tic-convulsif of La Tourette, ha