The Black DeathandThe Dancing Mania. 

FROM THE GERMAN OFJ. F. C. HECKER. 

TRANSLATED BYB. G. BABINGTON. 

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:_LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_. 1888. 

INTRODUCTION

Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker was one of three generations ofdistinguished professors of medicine. His father, August FriedrichHecker, a most industrious writer, first practised as a physician inFrankenhausen, and in 1790 was appointed Professor of Medicine at theUniversity of Erfurt. In 1805 he was called to the like professorship atthe University of Berlin. He died at Berlin in 1811. 

Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker was born at Erfurt in January, 1795. Hewent, of course--being then ten years old--with his father to Berlin in1805, studied at Berlin in the Gymnasium and University, but interruptedhis studies at the age of eighteen to fight as a volunteer in the war fora renunciation of Napoleon and all his works. After Waterloo he wentback to his studies, took his doctor's degree in 1817 with a treatise onthe "Antiquities of Hydrocephalus, " and became privat-docent in theMedical Faculty of the Berlin University. His inclination was strongfrom the first towards the historical side of inquiries into Medicine. This caused him to undertake a "History of Medicine, " of which the firstvolume appeared in 1822. It obtained rank for him at Berlin asExtraordinary Professor of the History of Medicine. This office waschanged into an Ordinary professorship of the same study in 1834, andHecker held that office until his death in 1850. 

The office was created for a man who had a special genius for this formof study. It was delightful to himself, and he made it delightful toothers. He is regarded as the founder of historical pathology. Hestudied disease in relation to the history of man, made his study yieldto men outside his own profession an important chapter in the history ofcivilisation, and even took into account physical phenomena upon thesurface of the globe as often affecting the movement and character ofepidemics. 

The account of "The Black Death" here translated by Dr. Babington wasHecker's first important work of this kind. It was published in 1832, and was followed in the same year by his account of "The Dancing Mania. "The books here given are the two that first gave Hecker a widereputation. Many other such treatises followed, among them, in 1865, atreatise on the "Great Epidemics of the Middle Ages. " Besides his"History of Medicine, " which, in its second volume, reached into thefourteenth century, and all his smaller treatises, Hecker wrote a largenumber of articles in Encyclopaedias and Medical Journals. ProfessorJ. F. K. Hecker was, in a more interesting way, as busy as Professor A. F. Hecker, his father, had been. He transmitted the family energies to anonly son, Karl von Hecker, born in 1827, who distinguished himselfgreatly as a Professor of Midwifery, and died in 1882. 

Benjamin Guy Babington, the translator of these books of Hecker's, belonged also to a family in which the study of Medicine has passed fromfather to son, and both have been writers. B. G. Babington was the son ofDr. William Babington, who was physician to Guy's Hospital for some yearsbefore 1811, when the extent of his private practice caused him toretire. He died in 1833. His son, Benjamin Guy Babington, was educatedat the Charterhouse, saw service as a midshipman, served for seven yearsin India, returned to England, graduated as physician at Cambridge in1831. He distinguished himself by inquiries into the cholera epidemic in1832, and translated these pieces of Hecker's in 1833, for publication bythe Sydenham Society. He afterwards translated Hecker's other treatiseson epidemics of the Middle Ages. Dr. B. G. Babington was Physician toGuy's Hospital from 1840 to 1855, and was a member of the Medical Councilof the General Board of Health. He died on the 8th of April, 1866. 

H. M. 

THE BLACK DEATH

CHAPTER I--GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

That Omnipotence which has called the world with all its living creaturesinto one animated being, especially reveals Himself in the desolation ofgreat pestilences. The powers of creation come into violent collision;the sultry dryness of the atmosphere; the subterraneous thunders; themist of overflowing waters, are the harbingers of destruction. Nature isnot satisfied with the ordinary alternations of life and death, and thedestroying angel waves over man and beast his flaming sword. 

These revolutions are performed in vast cycles, which the spirit of man, limited, as it is, to a narrow circle of perception, is unable toexplore. They are, however, greater terrestrial events than any of thosewhich proceed from the discord, the distress, or the passions of nations. By annihilations they awaken new life; and when the tumult above andbelow the earth is past, nature is renovated, and the mind awakens fromtorpor and depression to the consciousness of an intellectual existence. 

Were it in any degree within the power of human research to draw up, in avivid and connected form, an historical sketch of such mighty events, after the manner of the historians of wars and battles, and themigrations of nations, we might then arrive at clear views with respectto the mental development of the human race, and the ways of Providencewould be more plainly discernible. It would then be demonstrable, thatthe mind of nations is deeply affected by the destructive conflict of thepowers of nature, and that great disasters lead to striking changes ingeneral civilisation. For all that exists in man, whether good or evil, is rendered conspicuous by the presence of great danger. His inmostfeelings are roused--the thought of self-preservation masters hisspirit--self-denial is put to severe proof, and wherever darkness andbarbarism prevail, there the affrighted mortal flies to the idols of hissuperstition, and all laws, human and divine, are criminally violated. 

In conformity with a general law of nature, such a state of excitementbrings about a change, beneficial or detrimental, according tocircumstances, so that nations either attain a higher degree of moralworth, or sink deeper in ignorance and vice. All this, however, takesplace upon a much grander scale than through the ordinary vicissitudes ofwar and peace, or the rise and fall of empires, because the powers ofnature themselves produce plagues, and subjugate the human will, which, in the contentions of nations, alone predominates. 

CHAPTER II--THE DISEASE

The most memorable example of what has been advanced is afforded by agreat pestilence of the fourteenth century, which desolated Asia, Europe, and Africa, and of which the people yet preserve the remembrance ingloomy traditions. It was an oriental plague, marked by inflammatoryboils and tumours of the glands, such as break out in no other febriledisease. On account of these inflammatory boils, and from the blackspots, indicatory of a putrid decomposition, which appeared upon theskin, it was called in Germany and in the northern kingdoms of Europe theBlack Death, and in Italy, _la mortalega grande_, the Great Mortality. 

Few testimonies are presented to us respecting its symptoms and itscourse, yet these are sufficient to throw light upon the form of themalady, and they are worthy of credence, from their coincidence with thesigns of the same disease in modern times. 

The imperial writer, Kantakusenos, whose own son, Andronikus, died ofthis plague in Constantinople, notices great imposthumes of the thighsand arms of those affected, which, when opened, afforded relief by thedischarge of an offensive matter. Buboes, which are the infallible signsof the oriental plague, are thus plainly indicated, for he makes separatemention of smaller boils on the arms and in the face, as also in otherparts of the body, and clearly distinguishes these from the blisters, which are no less produced by plague in all its forms. In many cases, black spots broke out all over the body, either single, or united andconfluent. 

These symptoms were not all found in every case. In many, one alone wassufficient to cause death, while some patients recovered, contrary toexpectation, though afflicted with all. Symptoms of cephalic affectionwere frequent; many patients became stupefied and fell into a deep sleep, losing also their speech from palsy of the tongue; others remainedsleepless and without rest. The fauces and tongue were black, and as ifsuffused with blood; no beverage could assuage their burning thirst, sothat their sufferings continued without alleviation until terminated bydeath, which many in their despair accelerated with their own hands. Contagion was evident, for attendants caught the disease of theirrelations and friends, and many houses in the capital were bereft even oftheir last inhabitant. Thus far the ordinary circumstances only of theoriental plague occurred. Still deeper sufferings, however, wereconnected with this pestilence, such as have not been felt at othertimes; the organs of respiration were seized with a putrid inflammation;a violent pain in the chest attacked the patient; blood was expectorated, and the breath diffused a pestiferous odour. 

In the West, the following were the predominating symptoms on theeruption of this disease. An ardent fever, accompanied by an evacuationof blood, proved fatal in the first three days. It appears that buboesand inflammatory boils did not at first come out at all, but that thedisease, in the form of carbuncular (_anthrax-artigen_) affection of thelungs, effected the destruction of life before the other symptoms weredeveloped. 

Thus did the plague rage in Avignon for six or eight weeks, and thepestilential breath of the sick, who expectorated blood, caused aterrible contagion far and near; for even the vicinity of those who hadfallen ill of plague was certain death; so that parents abandoned theirinfected children, and all the ties of kindred were dissolved. Afterthis period, buboes in the axilla and in the groin, and inflammatoryboils all over the body, made their appearance; but it was not untilseven months afterwards that some patients recovered with matured buboes, as in the ordinary milder form of plague. 

Such is the report of the courageous Guy de Chauliac, who vindicated thehonour of medicine, by bidding defiance to danger; boldly and constantlyassisting the affected, and disdaining the excuse of his colleagues, whoheld the Arabian notion, that medical aid was unavailing, and that thecontagion justified flight. He saw the plague twice in Avignon, first inthe year 1348, from January to August, and then twelve years later, inthe autumn, when it returned from Germany, and for nine months spreadgeneral distress and terror. The first time it raged chiefly among thepoor, but in the year 1360, more among the higher classes. It now alsodestroyed a great many children, whom it had formerly spared, and but fewwomen. 

The like was seen in Egypt. Here also inflammation of the lungs waspredominant, and destroyed quickly and infallibly, with burning heat andexpectoration of blood. Here too the breath of the sick spread a deadlycontagion, and human aid was as vain as it was destructive to those whoapproached the infected. 

Boccacio, who was an eye-witness of its incredible fatality in Florence, the seat of the revival of science, gives a more lively description ofthe attack of the disease than his non-medical contemporaries. 

It commenced here, not as in the East, with bleeding at the nose, a suresign of inevitable death; but there took place at the beginning, both inmen and women, tumours in the groin and in the axilla, varying incircumference up to the size of an apple or an egg, and called by thepeople, pest-boils (gavoccioli). Then there appeared similar tumoursindiscriminately over all parts of the body, and black or blue spots cameout on the arms or thighs, or on other parts, either single and large, orsmall and thickly studded. These spots proved equally fatal with thepest-boils, which had been from the first regarded as a sure sign ofdeath. No power of medicine brought relief--almost all died within thefirst three days, some sooner, some later, after the appearance of thesesigns, and for the most part entirely without fever or other symptoms. The plague spread itself with the greater fury, as it communicated fromthe sick to the healthy, like fire among dry and oily fuel, and evencontact with the clothes and other articles which had been used by theinfected, seemed to induce the disease. As it advanced, not only men, but animals fell sick and shortly expired, if they had touched thingsbelonging to the diseased or dead. Thus Boccacio himself saw two hogs onthe rags of a person who had died of plague, after staggering about for ashort time, fall down dead as if they had taken poison. In other placesmultitudes of dogs, cats, fowls, and other animals, fell victims to thecontagion; and it is to be presumed that other epizootes among animalslikewise took place, although the ignorant writers of the fourteenthcentury are silent on this point. 

In Germany there was a repetition in every respect of the same phenomena. The infallible signs of the oriental bubo-plague with its inevitablecontagion were found there as everywhere else; but the mortality was notnearly so great as in the other parts of Europe. The accounts do not allmake mention of the spitting of blood, the diagnostic symptom of thisfatal pestilence; we are not, however, thence to conclude that there wasany considerable mitigation or modification of the disease, for we mustnot only take into account the defectiveness of the chronicles, but thatisolated testimonies are often contradicted by many others. Thus thechronicles of Strasburg, which only take notice of boils and glandularswellings in the axillae and groins, are opposed by another account, according to which the mortal spitting of blood was met with in Germany;but this again is rendered suspicious, as the narrator postpones thedeath of those who were thus affected, to the sixth, and (even the)eighth day, whereas, no other author sanctions so long a course of thedisease; and even in Strasburg, where a mitigation of the plague may, with most probability, be assumed since the year 1349, only 16, 000 peoplewere carried off, the generality expired by the third or fourth day. InAustria, and especially in Vienna, the plague was fully as malignant asanywhere, so that the patients who had red spots and black boils, as wellas those afflicted with tumid glands, died about the third day; andlastly, very frequent sudden deaths occurred on the coasts of the NorthSea and in Westphalia, without any further development of the malady. 

To France, this plague came in a northern direction from Avignon, and wasthere more destructive than in Germany, so that in many places not morethan two in twenty of the inhabitants survived. Many were struck, as ifby lightning, and died on the spot, and this more frequently among theyoung and strong than the old; patients with enlarged glands in theaxillae and groins scarcely survive two or three days; and no sooner didthese fatal signs appear, than they bid adieu to the world, and soughtconsolation only in the absolution which Pope Clement VI. Promised themin the hour of death. 

In England the malady appeared, as at Avignon, with spitting of blood, and with the same fatality, so that the sick who were afflicted eitherwith this symptom or with vomiting of blood, died in some casesimmediately, in others within twelve hours, or at the latest two days. The inflammatory boils and buboes in the groins and axillae wererecognised at once as prognosticating a fatal issue, and those were pastall hope of recovery in whom they arose in numbers all over the body. Itwas not till towards the close of the plague that they ventured to open, by incision, these hard and dry boils, when matter flowed from them insmall quantity, and thus, by compelling nature to a critical suppuration, many patients were saved. Every spot which the sick had touched, theirbreath, their clothes, spread the contagion; and, as in all other places, the attendants and friends who were either blind to their danger, orheroically despised it, fell a sacrifice to their sympathy. Even theeyes of the patient were considered a sources of contagion, which had thepower of acting at a distance, whether on account of their unwontedlustre, or the distortion which they always suffer in plague, or whetherin conformity with an ancient notion, according to which the sight wasconsidered as the bearer of a demoniacal enchantment. Flight frominfected cities seldom availed the fearful, for the germ of the diseaseadhered to them, and they fell sick, remote from assistance, in thesolitude of their country houses. 

Thus did the plague spread over England with unexampled rapidity, afterit had first broken out in the county of Dorset, whence it advancedthrough the counties of Devon and Somerset, to Bristol, and thencereached Gloucester, Oxford and London. Probably few places escaped, perhaps not any; for the annuals of contemporaries report that throughoutthe land only a tenth part of the inhabitants remained alive. 

From England the contagion was carried by a ship to Bergen, the capitalof Norway, where the plague then broke out in its most frightful form, with vomiting of blood; and throughout the whole country, spared not morethan a third of the inhabitants. The sailors found no refuge in theirships; and vessels were often seen driving about on the ocean anddrifting on shore, whose crews had perished to the last man. 

In Poland the affected were attacked with spitting blood, and died in afew days in such vast numbers, that, as it has been affirmed, scarcely afourth of the inhabitants were left. 

Finally, in Russia the plague appeared two years later than in SouthernEurope; yet here again, with the same symptoms as elsewhere. Russiancontemporaries have recorded that it began with rigor, heat, and dartingpain in the shoulders and back; that it was accompanied by spitting ofblood, and terminated fatally in two, or at most three days. It is nottill the year 1360 that we find buboes mentioned as occurring in theneck, in the axillae, and in the groins, which are stated to have brokenout when the spitting of blood had continued some time. According to theexperience of Western Europe, however, it cannot be assumed that thesesymptoms did not appear at an earlier period. 

Thus much, from authentic sources, on the nature of the Black Death. Thedescriptions which have been communicated contain, with a few unimportantexceptions, all the symptoms of the oriental plague which have beenobserved in more modern times. No doubt can obtain on this point. Thefacts are placed clearly before our eyes. We must, however, bear in mindthat this violent disease does not always appear in the same form, andthat while the essence of the poison which it produces, and which isseparated so abundantly from the body of the patient, remains unchanged, it is proteiform in its varieties, from the almost imperceptible vesicle, unaccompanied by fever, which exists for some time before it extends itspoison inwardly, and then excites fever and buboes, to the fatal form inwhich carbuncular inflammations fall upon the most important viscera. 

Such was the form which the plague assumed in the fourteenth century, forthe accompanying chest affection which appeared in all the countrieswhereof we have received any account, cannot, on a comparison withsimilar and familiar symptoms, be considered as any other than theinflammation of the lungs of modern medicine, a disease which at presentonly appears sporadically, and, owing to a putrid decomposition of thefluids, is probably combined with hemorrhages from the vessels of thelungs. Now, as every carbuncle, whether it be cutaneous or internal, generates in abundance the matter of contagion which has given rise toit, so, therefore, must the breath of the affected have been poisonous inthis plague, and on this account its power of contagion wonderfullyincreased; wherefore the opinion appears incontrovertible, that owing tothe accumulated numbers of the diseased, not only individual chambers andhouses, but whole cities were infected, which, moreover, in the MiddleAges, were, with few exceptions, narrowly built, kept in a filthy state, and surrounded with stagnant ditches. Flight was, in consequence, of noavail to the timid; for even though they had sedulously avoided allcommunication with the diseased and the suspected, yet their clothes weresaturated with the pestiferous atmosphere, and every inspiration impartedto them the seeds of the destructive malady, which, in the greater numberof cases, germinated with but too much fertility. Add to which, theusual propagation of the plague through clothes, beds, and a thousandother things to which the pestilential poison adheres--a propagationwhich, from want of caution, must have been infinitely multiplied; andsince articles of this kind, removed from the access of air, not onlyretain the matter of contagion for an indefinite period, but alsoincrease its activity and engender it like a living being, frightful ill-consequences followed for many years after the first fury of thepestilence was past. 

The affection of the stomach, often mentioned in vague terms, andoccasionally as a vomiting of blood, was doubtless only a subordinatesymptom, even if it be admitted that actual hematemesis did occur. Forthe difficulty of distinguishing a flow of blood from the stomach, from apulmonic expectoration of that fluid, is, to non-medical men, even incommon cases, not inconsiderable. How much greater then must it havebeen in so terrible a disease, where assistants could not venture toapproach the sick without exposing themselves to certain death? Only twomedical descriptions of the malady have reached us, the one by the braveGuy de Chauliac, the other by Raymond Chalin de Vinario, a veryexperienced scholar, who was well versed in the learning of the time. Theformer takes notice only of fatal coughing of blood; the latter, besidesthis, notices epistaxis, hematuria, and fluxes of blood from the bowels, as symptoms of such decided and speedy mortality, that those patients inwhom they were observed usually died on the same or the following day. 

That a vomiting of blood may not, here and there, have taken place, perhaps have been even prevalent in many places, is, from a considerationof the nature of the disease, by no means to be denied; for every putriddecomposition of the fluids begets a tendency to hemorrhages of allkinds. Here, however, it is a question of historical certainty, which, after these doubts, is by no means established. Had not so speedy adeath followed the expectoration of blood, we should certainly havereceived more detailed intelligence respecting other hemorrhages; but themalady had no time to extend its effects further over the extremities ofthe vessels. After its first fury, however, was spent, the pestilencepassed into the usual febrile form of the oriental plague. Internalcarbuncular inflammations no longer took place, and hemorrhages becamephenomena, no more essential in this than they are in any other febriledisorders. Chalin, who observed not only the great mortality of 1348, and the plague of 1360, but also that of 1373 and 1382, speaks moreoverof affections of the throat, and describes the back spots of plaguepatients more satisfactorily than any of his contemporaries. The formerappeared but in few cases, and consisted in carbuncular inflammation ofthe gullet, with a difficulty of swallowing, even to suffocation, towhich, in some instances, was added inflammation of the ceruminous glandsof the ears, with tumours, producing great deformity. Such patients, aswell as others, were affected with expectoration of blood; but they didnot usually die before the sixth, and, sometimes, even as late as thefourteenth day. The same occurrence, it is well known, is not uncommonin other pestilences; as also blisters on the surface of the body, indifferent places, in the vicinity of which, tumid glands and inflammatoryboils, surrounded by discoloured and black streaks, arose, and thusindicated the reception of the poison. These streaked spots were called, by an apt comparison, the girdle, and this appearance was justlyconsidered extremely dangerous. 

CHAPTER III--CAUSES--SPREAD

An inquiry into the causes of the Black Death will not be withoutimportant results in the study of the plagues which have visited theworld, although it cannot advance beyond generalisation without enteringupon a field hitherto uncultivated, and, to this hour entirely unknown. Mighty revolutions in the organism of the earth, of which we havecredible information, had preceded it. From China to the Atlantic, thefoundations of the earth were shaken--throughout Asia and Europe theatmosphere was in commotion, and endangered, by its baneful influence, both vegetable and animal life. 

The series of these great events began in the year 1333, fifteen yearsbefore the plague broke out in Europe: they first appeared in China. Herea parching drought, accompanied by famine, commenced in the tract ofcountry watered by the rivers Kiang and Hoai. This was followed by suchviolent torrents of rain, in and about Kingsai, at that time the capitalof the empire, that, according to tradition, more than 400, 000 peopleperished in the floods. Finally the mountain Tsincheou fell in, and vastclefts were formed in the earth. In the succeeding year (1334), passingover fabulous traditions, the neighbourhood of Canton was visited byinundations; whilst in Tche, after an unexampled drought, a plague arose, which is said to have carried off about 5, 000, 000 of people. A fewmonths afterwards an earthquake followed, at and near Kingsai; andsubsequent to the falling in of the mountains of Ki-ming-chan, a lake wasformed of more than a hundred leagues in circumference, where, again, thousands found their grave. In Houkouang and Honan, a drought prevailedfor five months; and innumerable swarms of locusts destroyed thevegetation; while famine and pestilence, as usual, followed in theirtrain. Connected accounts of the condition of Europe before this greatcatastrophe are not to be expected from the writers of the fourteenthcentury. It is remarkable, however, that simultaneously with a droughtand renewed floods in China, in 1336, many uncommon atmosphericphenomena, and in the winter, frequent thunderstorms, were observed inthe north of France; and so early as the eventful year of 1333 aneruption of Etna took place. According to the Chinese annuals, about4, 000, 000 of people perished by famine in the neighbourhood of Kiang in1337; and deluges, swarms of locusts, and an earthquake which lasted sixdays, caused incredible devastation. In the same year, the first swarmsof locusts appeared in Franconia, which were succeeded in the followingyear by myriads of these insects. In 1338 Kingsai was visited by anearthquake of ten days' duration; at the same time France suffered from afailure in the harvest; and thenceforth, till the year 1342, there was inChina a constant succession of inundations, earthquakes, and famines. Inthe same year great floods occurred in the vicinity of the Rhine and inFrance, which could not be attributed to rain alone; for, everywhere, even on tops of mountains, springs were seen to burst forth, and drytracts were laid under water in an inexplicable manner. In the followingyear, the mountain Hong-tchang, in China, fell in, and caused adestructive deluge; and in Pien-tcheon and Leang-tcheou, after threemonths' rain, there followed unheard-of inundations, which destroyedseven cities. In Egypt and Syria, violent earthquakes took place; and inChina they became, from this time, more and more frequent; for theyrecurred, in 1344, in Ven-tcheou, where the sea overflowed inconsequence; in 1345, in Ki-tcheou, and in both the following years inCanton, with subterraneous thunder. Meanwhile, floods and faminedevastated various districts, until 1347, when the fury of the elementssubsided in China. 

The signs of terrestrial commotions commenced in Europe in the year 1348, after the intervening districts of country in Asia had probably beenvisited in the same manner. 

On the island of Cyprus, the plague from the East had already broken out;when an earthquake shook the foundations of the island, and wasaccompanied by so frightful a hurricane, that the inhabitants who hadslain their Mahometan slaves, in order that they might not themselves besubjugated by them, fled in dismay, in all directions. The seaoverflowed--the ships were dashed to pieces on the rocks, and fewoutlived the terrific event, whereby this fertile and blooming island wasconverted into a desert. Before the earthquake, a pestiferous windspread so poisonous an odour, that many, being overpowered by it, felldown suddenly and expired in dreadful agonies. 

This phenomenon is one of the rarest that has ever been observed, fornothing is more constant than the composition of the air; and in norespect has nature been more careful in the preservation of organic life. Never have naturalists discovered in the atmosphere foreign elements, which, evident to the senses, and borne by the winds, spread from land toland, carrying disease over whole portions of the earth, as is recountedto have taken place in the year 1348. It is, therefore, the more to beregretted, that in this extraordinary period, which, owing to the lowcondition of science, was very deficient in accurate observers, so littlethat can be depended on respecting those uncommon occurrences in the air, should have been recorded. Yet, German accounts say expressly, that athick, stinking mist advanced from the East, and spread itself overItaly; and there could be no deception in so palpable a phenomenon. Thecredibility of unadorned traditions, however little they may satisfyphysical research, can scarcely be called in question when we considerthe connection of events; for just at this time earthquakes were moregeneral than they had been within the range of history. In thousands ofplaces chasms were formed, from whence arose noxious vapours; and as atthat time natural occurrences were transformed into miracles, it wasreported, that a fiery meteor, which descended on the earth far in theEast, had destroyed everything within a circumference of more than ahundred leagues, infecting the air far and wide. The consequences ofinnumerable floods contributed to the same effect; vast river districtshad been converted into swamps; foul vapours arose everywhere, increasedby the odour of putrified locusts, which had never perhaps darkened thesun in thicker swarms, and of countless corpses, which even in the well-regulated countries of Europe, they knew not how to remove quickly enoughout of the sight of the living. It is probable, therefore, that theatmosphere contained foreign, and sensibly perceptible, admixtures to agreat extent, which, at least in the lower regions, could not bedecomposed, or rendered ineffective by separation. 

Now, if we go back to the symptoms of the disease, the ardentinflammation of the lungs points out, that the organs of respirationyielded to the attack of an atmospheric poison--a poison which, if weadmit the independent origin of the Black Plague at any one place of theglobe, which, under such extraordinary circumstances, it would bedifficult to doubt, attacked the course of the circulation in as hostilea manner as that which produces inflammation of the spleen, and otheranimal contagions that cause swelling and inflammation of the lymphaticglands. 

Pursuing the course of these grand revolutions further, we find notice ofan unexampled earthquake, which, on the 25th January, 1348, shook Greece, Italy, and the neighbouring countries. Naples, Rome, Pisa, Bologna, Padua, Venice, and many other cities, suffered considerably; wholevillages were swallowed up. Castles, houses, and churches wereoverthrown, and hundreds of people were buried beneath their ruins. InCarinthia, thirty villages, together with all the churches, weredemolished; more than a thousand corpses were drawn out of the rubbish;the city of Villach was so completely destroyed that very few of itsinhabitants were saved; and when the earth ceased to tremble it was foundthat mountains had been moved from their positions, and that many hamletswere left in ruins. It is recorded that during this earthquake the winein the casks became turbid, a statement which may be considered asfurnishing proof that changes causing a decomposition of the atmospherehad taken place; but if we had no other information from which theexcitement of conflicting powers of nature during these commotions mightbe inferred, yet scientific observations in modern times have shown thatthe relation of the atmosphere to the earth is changed by volcanicinfluences. Why then, may we not, from this fact, draw retrospectiveinferences respecting those extraordinary phenomena?

Independently of this, however, we know that during this earthquake, theduration of which is stated by some to have been a week, and by others afortnight, people experienced an unusual stupor and headache, and thatmany fainted away. 

These destructive earthquakes extended as far as the neighbourhood ofBasle, and recurred until the year 1360 throughout Germany, France, Silesia, Poland, England, and Denmark, and much further north. 

Great and extraordinary meteors appeared in many places, and wereregarded with superstitious horror. A pillar of fire, which on the 20thof December, 1348, remained for an hour at sunrise over the pope's palacein Avignon; a fireball, which in August of the same year was seen atsunset over Paris, and was distinguished from similar phenomena by itslonger duration, not to mention other instances mixed up with wonderfulprophecies and omens, are recorded in the chronicles of that age. 

The order of the seasons seemed to be inverted; rains, flood, andfailures in crops were so general that few places were exempt from them;and though an historian of this century assure us that there was anabundance in the granaries and storehouses, all his contemporaries, withone voice, contradict him. The consequences of failure in the crops weresoon felt, especially in Italy and the surrounding countries, where, inthis year, a rain, which continued for four months, had destroyed theseed. In the larger cities they were compelled, in the spring of 1347, to have recourse to a distribution of bread among the poor, particularlyat Florence, where they erected large bakehouses, from which, in April, ninety-four thousand loaves of bread, each of twelve ounces in weight, were daily dispensed. It is plain, however, that humanity could onlypartially mitigate the general distress, not altogether obviate it. 

Diseases, the invariable consequence of famine, broke out in the countryas well as in cities; children died of hunger in their mother'sarms--want, misery, and despair were general throughout Christendom. 

Such are the events which took place before the eruption of the BlackPlague in Europe. Contemporaries have explained them after their ownmanner, and have thus, like their posterity, under similar circumstances, given a proof that mortals possess neither senses nor intellectual powerssufficiently acute to comprehend the phenomena produced by the earth'sorganism, much less scientifically to understand their effects. Superstition, selfishness in a thousand forms, the presumption of theschools, laid hold of unconnected facts. They vainly thought tocomprehend the whole in the individual, and perceived not the universalspirit which, in intimate union with the mighty powers of nature, animates the movements of all existence, and permits not any phenomenonto originate from isolated causes. To attempt, five centuries after thatage of desolation, to point out the causes of a cosmical commotion, whichhas never recurred to an equal extent, to indicate scientifically theinfluences, which called forth so terrific a poison in the bodies of menand animals, exceeds the limits of human understanding. If we are evennow unable, with all the varied resources of an extended knowledge ofnature, to define that condition of the atmosphere by which pestilencesare generated, still less can we pretend to reason retrospectively fromthe nineteenth to the fourteenth century; but if we take a general viewof the occurrences, that century will give us copious information, and, as applicable to all succeeding times, of high importance. 

In the progress of connected natural phenomena from east to west, thatgreat law of nature is plainly revealed which has so often and evidentlymanifested itself in the earth's organism, as well as in the state ofnations dependent upon it. In the inmost depths of the globe thatimpulse was given in the year 1333, which in uninterrupted succession forsix and twenty years shook the surface of the earth, even to the westernshores of Europe. From the very beginning the air partook of theterrestrial concussion, atmospherical waters overflowed the land, or itsplants and animals perished under the scorching heat. The insect tribewas wonderfully called into life, as if animated beings were destined tocomplete the destruction which astral and telluric powers had begun. Thusdid this dreadful work of nature advance from year to year; it was aprogressive infection of the zones, which exerted a powerful influenceboth above and beneath the surface of the earth; and after having beenperceptible in slighter indications, at the commencement of theterrestrial commotions in China, convulsed the whole earth. 

The nature of the first plague in China is unknown. We have no certainintelligence of the disease until it entered the western countries ofAsia. Here it showed itself as the Oriental plague, with inflammation ofthe lungs; in which form it probably also may have begun in China, thatis to say, as a malady which spreads, more than any other, by contagion--acontagion that, in ordinary pestilences, requires immediate contact, andonly under favourable circumstances of rare occurrence is communicated bythe mere approach to the sick. The share which this cause had in thespreading of the plague over the whole earth was certainly very great;and the opinion that the Black Death might have been excluded fromWestern Europe by good regulations, similar to those which are now inuse, would have all the support of modern experience, provided it couldbe proved that this plague had been actually imported from the East, orthat the Oriental plague in general, whenever it appears in Europe, hasits origin in Asia or Egypt. Such a proof, however, can by no means beproduced so as to enforce conviction; for it would involve the impossibleassumption, either that there is no essential difference between thedegree of civilisation of the European nations, in the most ancient andin modern times, or that detrimental circumstances, which have yieldedonly to the civilisation of human society and the regular cultivation ofcountries, could not formerly keep up the glandular plague. 

The plague was, however, known in Europe before nations were united bythe bonds of commerce and social intercourse; hence there is ground forsupposing that it sprang up spontaneously, in consequence of the rudemanner of living and the uncultivated state of the earth, influenceswhich peculiarly favour the origin of severe diseases. Now we need notgo back to the earlier centuries, for the fourteenth itself, before ithad half expired, was visited by five or six pestilences. 

If, therefore, we consider the peculiar property of the plague, that incountries which it has once visited it remains for a long time in amilder form, and that the epidemic influences of 1342, when it hadappeared for the last time, were particularly favourable to itsunperceived continuance, till 1348, we come to the notion that in thiseventful year also the germs of plague existed in Southern Europe, whichmight be vivified by atmospherical deteriorations; and that thus, atleast in part, the Black Plague may have originated in Europe itself. Thecorruption of the atmosphere came from the East; but the disease itselfcame not upon the wings of the wind, but was only excited and increasedby the atmosphere where it had previously existed. 

This source of the Black Plague was not, however, the only one; for farmore powerful than the excitement of the latent elements of the plague byatmospheric influences was the effect of the contagion communicated fromone people to another on the great roads and in the harbours of theMediterranean. From China the route of the caravans lay to the north ofthe Caspian Sea, through Central Asia, to Tauris. Here ships were readyto take the produce of the East to Constantinople, the capital ofcommerce, and the medium of connection between Asia, Europe, and Africa. Other caravans went from India to Asia Minor, and touched at the citiessouth of the Caspian Sea, and, lastly, from Bagdad through Arabia toEgypt; also the maritime communication on the Red Sea, from India toArabia and Egypt, was not inconsiderable. In all these directionscontagion made its way; and, doubtless, Constantinople and the harboursof Asia Minor are to be regarded as the foci of infection, whence itradiated to the most distant seaports and islands. 

To Constantinople the plague had been brought from the northern coast ofthe Black Sea, after it had depopulated the countries between thoseroutes of commerce, and appeared as early as 1347 in Cyprus, Sicily, Marseilles, and some of the seaports of Italy. The remaining islands ofthe Mediterranean, particularly Sardinia, Corsica, and Majorca, werevisited in succession. Foci of contagion existed also in full activityalong the whole southern coast of Europe; when, in January, 1348, theplague appeared in Avignon, and in other cities in the south of Franceand north of Italy, as well as in Spain. 

The precise days of its eruption in the individual towns are no longer tobe ascertained; but it was not simultaneous; for in Florence the diseaseappeared in the beginning of April, in Cesena the 1st June, and placeafter place was attacked throughout the whole year; so that the plague, after it had passed through the whole of France and Germany--where, however, it did not make its ravages until the following year--did notbreak out till August in England, where it advanced so gradually, that aperiod of three months elapsed before it reached London. The northernkingdoms were attacked by it in 1349; Sweden, indeed, not until Novemberof that year, almost two years after its eruption in Avignon. Polandreceived the plague in 1349, probably from Germany, if not from thenorthern countries; but in Russia it did not make its appearance until1351, more than three years after it had broken out in Constantinople. Instead of advancing in a north-westerly direction from Tauris and fromthe Caspian Sea, it had thus made the great circuit of the Black Sea, byway of Constantinople, Southern and Central Europe, England, the northernkingdoms, and Poland, before it reached the Russian territories, aphenomenon which has not again occurred with respect to more recentpestilences originating in Asia. 

Whether any difference existed between the indigenous plague, excited bythe influence of the atmosphere, and that which was imported bycontagion, can no longer be ascertained from facts; for thecontemporaries, who in general were not competent to make accurateresearches of this kind, have left no data on the subject. A milder anda more malignant form certainly existed, and the former was not alwaysderived from the latter, as is to be supposed from this circumstance--thatthe spitting of blood, the infallible diagnostic of the latter, on thefirst breaking out of the plague, is not similarly mentioned in all thereports; and it is therefore probable that the milder form belonged tothe native plague--the more malignant, to that introduced by contagion. Contagion was, however, in itself, only one of many causes which gaverise to the Black Plague. 

This disease was a consequence of violent commotions in the earth'sorganism--if any disease of cosmical origin can be so considered. Onespring set a thousand others in motion for the annihilation of livingbeings, transient or permanent, of mediate or immediate effect. The mostpowerful of all was contagion; for in the most distant countries, whichhad scarcely yet heard the echo of the first concussion, the people fella sacrifice to organic poison--the untimely offspring of vital energiesthrown into violent commotion. 

CHAPTER IV--MORTALITY

We have no certain measure by which to estimate the ravages of the BlackPlague, if numerical statements were wanted, as in modern times. Let usgo back for a moment to the fourteenth century. The people were yet butlittle civilised. The Church had indeed subdued them; but they allsuffered from the ill consequences of their original rudeness. Thedominion of the law was not yet confirmed. Sovereigns had everywhere tocombat powerful enemies to internal tranquillity and security. Thecities were fortresses for their own defence. Marauders encamped on theroads. The husbandman was a feudal slave, without possessions of hisown. Rudeness was general, humanity as yet unknown to the people. Witches and heretics were burned alive. Gentle rulers were contemned asweak; wild passions, severity and cruelty, everywhere predominated. Humanlife was little regarded. Governments concerned not themselves about thenumbers of their subjects, for whose welfare it was incumbent on them toprovide. Thus, the first requisite for estimating the loss of humanlife, namely, a knowledge of the amount of the population, is altogetherwanting; and, moreover, the traditional statements of the amount of thisloss are so vague, that from this source likewise there is only room forprobable conjecture. 

Cairo lost daily, when the plague was raging with its greatest violence, from 10, 000 to 15, 000; being as many as, in modern times, great plagueshave carried off during their whole course. In China, more than thirteenmillions are said to have died; and this is in correspondence with thecertainly exaggerated accounts from the rest of Asia. India wasdepopulated. Tartary, the Tartar kingdom of Kaptschak, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia, were covered with dead bodies--the Kurds fled in vain tothe mountains. In Caramania and Caesarea none were left alive. On theroads--in the camps--in the caravansaries--unburied bodies alone wereseen; and a few cities only (Arabian historians name Maarael-Nooman, Schisur, and Harem) remained, in an unaccountable manner, free. InAleppo, 500 died daily; 22, 000 people, and most of the animals, werecarried off in Gaza, within six weeks. Cyprus lost almost all itsinhabitants; and ships without crews were often seen in theMediterranean, as afterwards in the North Sea, driving about, andspreading the plague wherever they went on shore. It was reported toPope Clement, at Avignon, that throughout the East, probably with theexception of China, 23, 840, 000 people had fallen victims to the plague. Considering the occurrences of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, wemight, on first view, suspect the accuracy of this statement. How (itmight be asked) could such great wars have been carried on--such powerfulefforts have been made; how could the Greek Empire, only a hundred yearslater, have been overthrown, if the people really had been so utterlydestroyed?

This account is nevertheless rendered credible by the ascertained fact, that the palaces of princes are less accessible to contagious diseasesthan the dwellings of the multitude; and that in places of importance, the influx from those districts which have suffered least, soon repairseven the heaviest losses. We must remember, also, that we do not gathermuch from mere numbers without an intimate knowledge of the state ofsociety. We will therefore confine ourselves to exhibiting some of themore credible accounts relative to European cities. 

In Florence there died of the Black Plague--60, 000In Venice--100, 000In Marseilles, in one month--16, 000In Siena--70, 000In Paris--50, 000In St. Denys--14, 000In Avignon--60, 000In Strasburg--16, 000In Lubeck--9, 000In Basle--14, 000In Erfurt, at least--16, 000In Weimar--5, 000In Limburg--2, 500In London, at least--100, 000In Norwich--51, 100

To which may be added--

Franciscan Friars in German--124, 434Minorites in Italy--30, 000

This short catalogue might, by a laborious and uncertain calculation, deduced from other sources, be easily further multiplied, but would stillfail to give a true picture of the depopulation which took place. Lubeck, at that time the Venice of the North, which could no longer contain themultitudes that flocked to it, was thrown into such consternation on theeruption of the plague, that the citizens destroyed themselves as if infrenzy. 

Merchants whose earnings and possessions were unbounded, coldly andwillingly renounced their earthly goods. They carried their treasures tomonasteries and churches, and laid them at the foot of the altar; butgold had no charms for the monks, for it brought them death. They shuttheir gates; yet, still it was cast to them over the convent walls. People would brook no impediment to the last pious work to which theywere driven by despair. When the plague ceased, men thought they werestill wandering among the dead, so appalling was the livid aspect of thesurvivors, in consequence of the anxiety they had undergone, and theunavoidable infection of the air. Many other cities probably presented asimilar appearance; and it is ascertained that a great number of smallcountry towns and villages, which have been estimated, and not toohighly, at 200, 000, were bereft of all their inhabitants. 

In many places in France, not more than two out of twenty of theinhabitants were left alive, and the capital felt the fury of the plague, alike in the palace and the cot. 

Two queens, one bishop, and great numbers of other distinguished persons, fell a sacrifice to it, and more than 500 a day died in the Hotel Dieu, under the faithful care of the sisters of charity, whose disinterestedcourage, in this age of horror, displayed the most beautiful traits ofhuman virtue. For although they lost their lives, evidently fromcontagion, and their numbers were several times renewed, there was stillno want of fresh candidates, who, strangers to the unchristian fear ofdeath, piously devoted themselves to their holy calling. 

The churchyards were soon unable to contain the dead, and many houses, left without inhabitants, fell to ruins. 

In Avignon, the Pope found it necessary to consecrate the Rhone, thatbodies might be thrown into the river without delay, as the churchyardswould no longer hold them; so likewise, in all populous cities, extraordinary measures were adopted, in order speedily to dispose of thedead. In Vienna, where for some time 1, 200 inhabitants died daily, theinterment of corpses in the churchyards and within the churches wasforthwith prohibited; and the dead were then arranged in layers, bythousands, in six large pits outside the city, as had already been donein Cairo and Paris. Yet, still many were secretly buried; for at alltimes the people are attached to the consecrated cemeteries of theirdead, and will not renounce the customary mode of interment. 

In many places it was rumoured that plague patients were buried alive, asmay sometimes happen through senseless alarm and indecent haste; and thusthe horror of the distressed people was everywhere increased. In Erfurt, after the churchyards were filled, 12, 000 corpses were thrown into elevengreat pits; and the like might, more or less exactly, be stated withrespect to all the larger cities. Funeral ceremonies, the lastconsolation of the survivors, were everywhere impracticable. 

In all Germany, according to a probable calculation, there seem to havedied only 1, 244, 434 inhabitants; this country, however, was more sparedthan others: Italy, on the contrary, was most severely visited. It issaid to have lost half its inhabitants; and this account is renderedcredible from the immense losses of individual cities and provinces: forin Sardinia and Corsica, according to the account of the distinguishedFlorentine, John Villani, who was himself carried off by the BlackPlague, scarcely a third part of the population remained alive; and it isrelated of the Venetians, that they engaged ships at a high rate toretreat to the islands; so that after the plague had carried off three-fourths of her inhabitants, that proud city was left forlorn anddesolate. In Padua, after the cessation of the plague, two-thirds of theinhabitants were wanting; and in Florence it was prohibited to publishthe numbers of dead, and to toll the bells at their funerals, in orderthat the living might not abandon themselves to despair. 

We have more exact accounts of England; most of the great cities sufferedincredible losses; above all, Yarmouth, in which 7, 052 died; Bristol, Oxford, Norwich, Leicester, York, and London, where in one burial groundalone, there were interred upwards of 50, 000 corpses, arranged in layers, in large pits. It is said that in the whole country scarcely a tenthpart remained alive; but this estimate is evidently too high. Smallerlosses were sufficient to cause those convulsions, whose consequenceswere felt for some centuries, in a false impulse given to civil life, andwhose indirect influence, unknown to the English, has perhaps extendedeven to modern times. 

Morals were deteriorated everywhere, and the service of God was in agreat measure laid aside; for, in many places, the churches weredeserted, being bereft of their priests. The instruction of the peoplewas impeded; covetousness became general; and when tranquillity wasrestored, the great increase of lawyers was astonishing, to whom theendless disputes regarding inheritances offered a rich harvest. The wantof priests too, throughout the country, operated very detrimentally uponthe people (the lower classes being most exposed to the ravages of theplague, whilst the houses of the nobility were, in proportion, much morespared), and it was no compensation that whole bands of ignorant laymen, who had lost their wives during the pestilence, crowded into the monasticorders, that they might participate in the respectability of thepriesthood, and in the rich heritages which fell in to the Church fromall quarters. The sittings of Parliament, of the King's Bench, and ofmost of the other courts, were suspended as long as the malady raged. Thelaws of peace availed not during the dominion of death. Pope Clementtook advantage of this state of disorder to adjust the bloody quarrelbetween Edward III and Philip VI; yet he only succeeded during the periodthat the plague commanded peace. Philip's death (1350) annulled alltreaties; and it is related that Edward, with other troops indeed, butwith the same leaders and knights, again took the field. Ireland wasmuch less heavily visited that England. The disease seems to havescarcely reached the mountainous districts of that kingdom; and Scotlandtoo would perhaps have remained free, had not the Scots availedthemselves of the discomfiture of the English to make an irruption intotheir territory, which terminated in the destruction of their army, bythe plague and by the sword, and the extension of the pestilence, throughthose who escaped, over the whole country. 

At the commencement, there was in England a superabundance of all thenecessaries of life; but the plague, which seemed then to be the soledisease, was soon accompanied by a fatal murrain among the cattle. Wandering about without herdsmen, they fell by thousands; and, as haslikewise been observed in Africa, the birds and beasts of prey are saidnot to have touched them. Of what nature this murrain may have been, canno more be determined, than whether it originated from communication withplague patients, or from other causes; but thus much is certain, that itdid not break out until after the commencement of the Black Death. Inconsequence of this murrain, and the impossibility of removing the cornfrom the fields, there was everywhere a great rise in the price of food, which to many was inexplicable, because the harvest had been plentiful;by others it was attributed to the wicked designs of the labourers anddealers; but it really had its foundation in the actual deficiencyarising from circumstances by which individual classes at all timesendeavour to profit. For a whole year, until it terminated in August, 1349, the Black Plague prevailed in this beautiful island, and everywherepoisoned the springs of comfort and prosperity. 

In other countries, it generally lasted only half a year, but returnedfrequently in individual places; on which account, some, withoutsufficient proof, assigned to it a period of seven years. 

Spain was uninterruptedly ravaged by the Black Plague till after the year1350, to which the frequent internal feuds and the wars with the Moorsnot a little contributed. Alphonso XI. , whose passion for war carriedhim too far, died of it at the siege of Gibraltar, on the 26th of March, 1350. He was the only king in Europe who fell a sacrifice to it; buteven before this period, innumerable families had been thrown intoaffliction. The mortality seems otherwise to have been smaller in Spainthan in Italy, and about as considerable as in France. 

The whole period during which the Black Plague raged with destructiveviolence in Europe was, with the exception of Russia, from the year 1347to 1350. The plagues which in the sequel often returned until the year1383, we do not consider as belonging to "the Great Mortality. " Theywere rather common pestilences, without inflammation of the lungs, suchas in former times, and in the following centuries, were excited by thematter of contagion everywhere existing, and which, on every favourableoccasion, gained ground anew, as is usually the case with this frightfuldisease. 

The concourse of large bodies of people was especially dangerous; andthus the premature celebration of the Jubilee to which Clement VI. Citedthe faithful to Rome (1350) during the great epidemic, caused a neweruption of the plague, from which it is said that scarcely one in ahundred of the pilgrims escaped. 

Italy was, in consequence, depopulated anew; and those who returned, spread poison and corruption of morals in all directions. It istherefore the less apparent how that Pope, who was in general so wise andconsiderate, and who knew how to pursue the path of reason and humanityunder the most difficult circumstances, should have been led to adopt ameasure so injurious; since he himself was so convinced of the salutaryeffect of seclusion, that during the plague in Avignon he kept upconstant fires, and suffered no one to approach him; and in otherrespects gave such orders as averted, or alleviated, much misery. 

The changes which occurred about this period in the north of Europe aresufficiently memorable to claim a few moments' attention. In Sweden twoprinces died--Haken and Knut, half-brothers of King Magnus; and inWestgothland alone, 466 priests. The inhabitants of Iceland andGreenland found in the coldness of their inhospitable climate noprotection against the southern enemy who had penetrated to them fromhappier countries. The plague caused great havoc among them. Naturemade no allowance for their constant warfare with the elements, and theparsimony with which she had meted out to them the enjoyments of life. InDenmark and Norway, however, people were so occupied with their ownmisery, that the accustomed voyages to Greenland ceased. Toweringicebergs formed at the same time on the coast of East Greenland, inconsequence of the general concussion of the earth's organism; and nomortal, from that time forward, has ever seen that shore or itsinhabitants. 

It has been observed above, that in Russia the Black Plague did not breakout until 1351, after it had already passed through the south and northof Europe. In this country also, the mortality was extraordinarilygreat; and the same scenes of affliction and despair were exhibited, ashad occurred in those nations which had already passed the ordeal: thesame mode of burial--the same horrible certainty of death--the sametorpor and depression of spirits. The wealthy abandoned their treasures, and gave their villages and estates to the churches and monasteries; thisbeing, according to the notions of the age, the surest way of securingthe favour of Heaven and the forgiveness of past sins. In Russia, too, the voice of nature was silenced by fear and horror. In the hour ofdanger, fathers and mothers deserted their children, and children theirparents. 

Of all the estimates of the number of lives lost in Europe, the mostprobable is, that altogether a fourth part of the inhabitants werecarried off. Now, if Europe at present contain 210, 000, 000 inhabitants, the population, not to take a higher estimate, which might easily byjustified, amounted to at least 105, 000, 000 in the sixteenth century. 

It may therefore be assumed, without exaggeration, that Europe lostduring the Black Death 25, 000, 000 of inhabitants. 

That her nations could so quickly overcome such a fearful concussion intheir external circumstances, and, in general, without retrograding morethan they actually did, could so develop their energies in the followingcentury, is a most convincing proof of the indestructibility of humansociety as a whole. To assume, however, that it did not suffer anyessential change internally, because in appearance everything remained asbefore, is inconsistent with a just view of cause and effect. Manyhistorians seem to have adopted such an opinion; accustomed, as usual, tojudge of the moral condition of the people solely according to thevicissitudes of earthly power, the events of battles, and the influenceof religion, but to pass over with indifference the great phenomena ofnature, which modify, not only the surface of the earth, but also thehuman mind. Hence, most of them have touched but superficially on the"Great Mortality" of the fourteenth century. We, for our parts, areconvinced that in the history of the world the Black Death is one of themost important events which have prepared the way for the present stateof Europe. 

He who studies the human mind with attention, and forms a deliberatejudgment on the intellectual powers which set people and States inmotion, may perhaps find some proofs of this assertion in the followingobservations:--at that time, the advancement of the hierarchy was, inmost countries, extraordinary; for the Church acquired treasures andlarge properties in land, even to a greater extent than after theCrusades; but experience has demonstrated that such a state of things isruinous to the people, and causes them to retrograde, as was evinced onthis occasion. 

After the cessation of the Black Plague, a greater fecundity in women waseverywhere remarkable--a grand phenomenon, which, from its occurrenceafter every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if anyoccurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the directionof general organic life. Marriages were, almost without exception, prolific; and double and triple births were more frequent than at othertimes; under which head, we should remember the strange remark, thatafter the "Great Mortality" the children were said to have got fewerteeth than before; at which contemporaries were mightily shocked, andeven later writers have felt surprise. 

If we examine the grounds of this oft-repeated assertion, we shall findthat they were astonished to see children, cut twenty, or at most, twenty-two teeth, under the supposition that a greater number had formerlyfallen to their share. Some writers of authority, as, for example, thephysician Savonarola, at Ferrara, who probably looked for twenty-eightteeth in children, published their opinions on this subject. Otherscopied from them, without seeing for themselves, as often happens inother matters which are equally evident; and thus the world believed inthe miracle of an imperfection in the human body which had been caused bythe Black Plague. 

The people gradually consoled themselves after the sufferings which theyhad undergone; the dead were lamented and forgotten; and, in the stirringvicissitudes of existence, the world belonged to the living. 

CHAPTER V--MORAL EFFECTS

The mental shock sustained by all nations during the prevalence of theBlack Plague is without parallel and beyond description. In the eyes ofthe timorous, danger was the certain harbinger of death; many fellvictims to fear on the first appearance of the distemper, and the moststout-hearted lost their confidence. Thus, after reliance on the futurehad died away, the spiritual union which binds man to his family and hisfellow-creatures was gradually dissolved. The pious closed theiraccounts with the world--eternity presented itself to their view--theironly remaining desire was for a participation in the consolations ofreligion, because to them death was disarmed of its sting. 

Repentance seized the transgressor, admonishing him to consecrate hisremaining hours to the exercise of Christian virtues. All minds weredirected to the contemplation of futurity; and children, who manifest themore elevated feelings of the soul without alloy, were frequently seen, while labouring under the plague, breathing out their spirit with prayerand songs of thanksgiving. 

An awful sense of contrition seized Christians of every communion; theyresolved to forsake their vices, to make restitution for past offences, before they were summoned hence, to seek reconciliation with their Maker, and to avert, by self-chastisement, the punishment due to their formersins. Human nature would be exalted, could the countless noble actionswhich, in times of most imminent danger, were performed in secret, berecorded for the instruction of future generations. They, however, haveno influence on the course of worldly events. They are known only tosilent eyewitnesses, and soon fall into oblivion. But hypocrisy, illusion, and bigotry stalk abroad undaunted; they desecrate what isnoble, they pervert what is divine, to the unholy purposes ofselfishness, which hurries along every good feeling in the falseexcitement of the age. Thus it was in the years of this plague. In thefourteenth century, the monastic system was still in its full vigour, thepower of the ecclesiastical orders and brotherhoods was revered by thepeople, and the hierarchy was still formidable to the temporal power. Itwas therefore in the natural constitution of society that bigoted zeal, which in such times makes a show of public acts of penance, should availitself of the semblance of religion. But this took place in such amanner, that unbridled, self-willed penitence, degenerated intolukewarmness, renounced obedience to the hierarchy, and prepared afearful opposition to the Church, paralysed as it was by antiquatedforms. 

While all countries were filled with lamentations and woe, there firstarose in Hungary, and afterwards in Germany, the Brotherhood of theFlagellants, called also the Brethren of the Cross, or Cross-bearers, whotook upon themselves the repentance of the people for the sins they hadcommitted, and offered prayers and supplications for the averting of thisplague. This Order consisted chiefly of persons of the lower class, whowere either actuated by sincere contrition, or who joyfully availedthemselves of this pretext for idleness, and were hurried along with thetide of distracting frenzy. But as these brotherhoods gained in repute, and were welcomed by the people with veneration and enthusiasm, manynobles and ecclesiastics ranged themselves under their standard; andtheir bands were not unfrequently augmented by children, honourablewomen, and nuns; so powerfully were minds of the most oppositetemperaments enslaved by this infatuation. They marched through thecities, in well-organised processions, with leaders and singers; theirheads covered as far as the eyes; their look fixed on the ground, accompanied by every token of the deepest contrition and mourning. Theywere robed in sombre garments, with red crosses on the breast, back, andcap, and bore triple scourges, tied in three or four knots, in whichpoints of iron were fixed. Tapers and magnificent banners of velvet andcloth of gold were carried before them; wherever they made theirappearance, they were welcomed by the ringing bells, and the peopleflocked from all quarters to listen to their hymns and to witness theirpenance with devotion and tears. 

In the year 1349, two hundred Flagellants first entered Strasburg, wherethey were received with great joy, and hospitably lodged by citizens. Above a thousand joined the brotherhood, which now assumed the appearanceof a wandering tribe, and separated into two bodies, for the purpose ofjourneying to the north and to the south. For more than half a year, newparties arrived weekly; and on each arrival adults and children lefttheir families to accompany them; till at length their sanctity wasquestioned, and the doors of houses and churches were closed againstthem. At Spires, two hundred boys, of twelve years of age and under, constituted themselves into a Brotherhood of the Cross, in imitation ofthe children who, about a hundred years before, had united, at theinstigation of some fanatic monks, for the purpose of recovering the HolySepulchre. All the inhabitants of this town were carried away by theillusion; they conducted the strangers to their houses with songs ofthanksgiving, to regale them for the night. The women embroideredbanners for them, and all were anxious to augment their pomp; and atevery succeeding pilgrimage their influence and reputation increased. 

It was not merely some individual parts of the country that fosteredthem: all Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, and Flanders, didhomage to the mania; and they at length became as formidable to thesecular as they were to the ecclesiastical power. The influence of thisfanaticism was great and threatening, resembling the excitement whichcalled all the inhabitants of Europe into the deserts of Syria andPalestine about two hundred and fifty years before. The appearance initself was not novel. As far back as the eleventh century, manybelievers in Asia and Southern Europe afflicted themselves with thepunishment of flagellation. Dominicus Loricatus, a monk of St. Croced'Avellano, is mentioned as the master and model of this species ofmortification of the flesh; which, according to the primitive notions ofthe Asiatic Anchorites, was deemed eminently Christian. The author ofthe solemn processions of the Flagellants is said to have been St. Anthony; for even in his time (1231) this kind of penance was so much invogue, that it is recorded as an eventful circumstance in the history ofthe world. In 1260, the Flagellants appeared in Italy as _Devoti_. "Whenthe land was polluted by vices and crimes, an unexampled spirit ofremorse suddenly seized the minds of the Italians. The fear of Christfell upon all: noble and ignoble, old and young, and even children offive years of age, marched through the streets with no covering but ascarf round the waist. They each carried a scourge of leathern thongs, which they applied to their limbs, amid sighs and tears, with suchviolence that the blood flowed from the wounds. Not only during the day, but even by night, and in the severest winter, they traversed the citieswith burning torches and banners, in thousands and tens of thousands, headed by their priests, and prostrated themselves before the altars. They proceeded in the same manner in the villages: and the woods andmountains resounded with the voices of those whose cries were raised toGod. The melancholy chaunt of the penitent alone was heard. Enemieswere reconciled; men and women vied with each other in splendid works ofcharity, as if they dreaded that Divine Omnipotence would pronounce onthem the doom of annihilation. "

The pilgrimages of the Flagellants extended throughout all the provinceof Southern Germany, as far as Saxony, Bohemia, and Poland, and evenfurther; but at length the priests resisted this dangerous fanaticism, without being able to extirpate the illusion, which was advantageous tothe hierarchy as long as it submitted to its sway. Regnier, a hermit ofPerugia, is recorded as a fanatic preacher of penitence, with whom theextravagance originated. In the year 1296 there was a great processionof the Flagellants in Strasburg; and in 1334, fourteen years before theGreat Mortality, the sermon of Venturinus, a Dominican friar of Bergamo, induced above 10, 000 persons to undertake a new pilgrimage. Theyscourged themselves in the churches, and were entertained in the market-places at the public expense. At Rome, Venturinus was derided, andbanished by the Pope to the mountains of Ricondona. He patiently enduredall--went to the Holy Land, and died at Smyrna, 1346. Hence we see thatthis fanaticism was a mania of the middle ages, which, in the year 1349, on so fearful an occasion, and while still so fresh in remembrance, needed no new founder; of whom, indeed, all the records are silent. Itprobably arose in many places at the same time; for the terror of death, which pervaded all nations and suddenly set such powerful impulses inmotion, might easily conjure up the fanaticism of exaggerated andoverpowering repentance. 

The manner and proceedings of the Flagellants of the thirteenth andfourteenth centuries exactly resemble each other. But, if during theBlack Plague, simple credulity came to their aid, which seized, as aconsolation, the grossest delusion of religious enthusiasm, yet it isevident that the leaders must have been intimately united, and haveexercised the power of a secret association. Besides, the rude band wasgenerally under the control of men of learning, some of whom at leastcertainly had other objects in view independent of those which ostensiblyappeared. Whoever was desirous of joining the brotherhood, was bound toremain in it thirty-four days, and to have fourpence per day at his owndisposal, so that he might not be burthensome to any one; if married, hewas obliged to have the sanction of his wife, and give the assurance thathe was reconciled to all men. The Brothers of the Cross were notpermitted to seek for free quarters, or even to enter a house withouthaving been invited; they were forbidden to converse with females; and ifthey transgressed these rules, or acted without discretion, they wereobliged to confess to the Superior, who sentenced them to several lashesof the scourge, by way of penance. Ecclesiastics had not, as such, anypre-eminence among them; according to their original law, which, however, was often transgressed, they could not become Masters, or take part inthe Secret Councils. Penance was performed twice every day: in themorning and evening they went abroad in pairs, singing psalms amid theringing of the bells; and when they arrived at the place of flagellation, they stripped the upper part of their bodies and put off their shoes, keeping on only a linen dress, reaching from the waist to the ankles. They then lay down in a large circle, in different positions, accordingto the nature of the crime: the adulterer with his face to the ground;the perjurer on one side, holding up three of his fingers, &c. , and werethen castigated, some more and some less, by the Master, who ordered themto rise in the words of a prescribed form. Upon this they scourgedthemselves, amid the singing of psalms and loud supplications for theaverting of the plague, with genuflexions and other ceremonies, of whichcontemporary writers give various accounts; and at the same timeconstantly boasted of their penance, that the blood of their wounds wasmingled with that of the Saviour. One of them, in conclusion, stoop upto read a letter, which it was pretended an angel had brought from heavento St. Peter's Church, at Jerusalem, stating that Christ, who was soredispleased at the sins of man, had granted, at the intercession of theHoly Virgin and of the angels, that all who should wander about forthirty-four days and scourge themselves, should be partakers of theDivine grace. This scene caused as great a commotion among the believersas the finding of the holy spear once did at Antioch; and if any amongthe clergy inquired who had sealed the letter, he was boldly answered, the same who had sealed the Gospel!

All this had so powerful an effect, that the Church was in considerabledanger; for the Flagellants gained more credit than the priests, fromwhom they so entirely withdrew themselves, that they even absolved eachother. Besides, they everywhere took possession of the churches, andtheir new songs, which went from mouth to mouth, operated strongly on theminds of the people. Great enthusiasm and originally pious feelings areclearly distinguishable in these hymns, and especially in the chief psalmof the Cross-bearers, which is still extant, and which was sung all overGermany in different dialects, and is probably of a more ancient date. Degeneracy, however, soon crept in; crimes were everywhere committed; andthere was no energetic man capable of directing the individual excitementto purer objects, even had an effectual resistance to the totteringChurch been at that early period seasonable, and had it been possible torestrain the fanaticism. The Flagellants sometimes undertook to maketrial of their power of working miracles; as in Strasburg, where theyattempted, in their own circle, to resuscitate a dead child: they, however, failed, and their unskilfulness did them much harm, though theysucceeded here and there in maintaining some confidence in their holycalling, by pretending to have the power of casting out evil spirits. 

The Brotherhood of the Cross announced that the pilgrimage of theFlagellants was to continue for a space of thirty-four years; and many ofthe Masters had doubtless determined to form a lasting league against theChurch; but they had gone too far. So early as the first year of theirestablishment, the general indignation set bounds to their intrigues: sothat the strict measures adopted by the Emperor Charles IV. , and PopeClement, who, throughout the whole of this fearful period, manifestedprudence and noble-mindedness, and conducted himself in a manner everyway worthy of his high station, were easily put into execution. 

The Sorbonne, at Paris, and the Emperor Charles, had already applied tothe Holy See for assistance against these formidable and hereticalexcesses, which had well-nigh destroyed the influence of the clergy inevery place; when a hundred of the Brotherhood of the Cross arrived atAvignon from Basle, and desired admission. The Pope, regardless of theintercession of several cardinals, interdicted their public penance, which he had not authorised; and, on pain of excommunication, prohibitedthroughout Christendom the continuance of these pilgrimages. Philip VI. , supported by the condemnatory judgment of the Sorbonne, forbade theirreception in France. Manfred, King of Sicily, at the same timethreatened them with punishment by death; and in the East they werewithstood by several bishops, among whom was Janussius, of Gnesen, andPreczlaw, of Breslau, who condemned to death one of their Masters, formerly a deacon; and, in conformity with the barbarity of the times, had him publicly burnt. In Westphalia, where so shortly before they hadvenerated the Brothers of the Cross, they now persecuted them withrelentless severity; and in the Mark, as well as in all the othercountries of Germany, they pursued them as if they had been the authorsof every misfortune. 

The processions of the Brotherhood of the Cross undoubtedly promoted thespreading of the plague; and it is evident that the gloomy fanaticismwhich gave rise to them would infuse a new poison into the alreadydesponding minds of the people. 

Still, however, all this was within the bounds of barbarous enthusiasm;but horrible were the persecutions of the Jews, which were committed inmost countries, with even greater exasperation than in the twelfthcentury, during the first Crusades. In every destructive pestilence thecommon people at first attribute the mortality to poison. No instructionavails; the supposed testimony of their eyesight is to them a proof, andthey authoritatively demand the victims of their rage. On whom, then, was it so likely to fall as on the Jews, the usurers and the strangerswho lived at enmity with the Christians? They were everywhere suspectedof having poisoned the wells or infected the air. They alone wereconsidered as having brought this fearful mortality upon the Christians. They were, in consequence, pursued with merciless cruelty; and eitherindiscriminately given up to the fury of the populace, or sentenced bysanguinary tribunals, which, with all the forms of the law, ordered themto be burnt alive. In times like these, much is indeed said of guilt andinnocence; but hatred and revenge bear down all discrimination, and thesmallest probability magnifies suspicion into certainty. These bloodyscenes, which disgraced Europe in the fourteenth century, are acounterpart to a similar mania of the age, which was manifested in thepersecutions of witches and sorcerers; and, like these, they prove thatenthusiasm, associated with hatred, and leagued with the baser passions, may work more powerfully upon whole nations than religion and legalorder; nay, that it even knows how to profit by the authority of both, inorder the more surely to satiate with blood the sword of long-suppressedrevenge. 

The persecution of the Jews commenced in September and October, 1348, atChillon, on the Lake of Geneva, where the first criminal proceedings wereinstituted against them, after they had long before been accused by thepeople of poisoning the wells; similar scenes followed in Bern andFreyburg, in January, 1349. Under the influence of excruciatingsuffering, the tortured Jews confessed themselves guilty of the crimeimputed to them; and it being affirmed that poison had in fact been foundin a well at Zoffingen, this was deemed a sufficient proof to convincethe world; and the persecution of the abhorred culprits thus appearedjustifiable. Now, though we can take as little exception at theseproceedings as at the multifarious confessions of witches, because theinterrogatories of the fanatical and sanguinary tribunals were socomplicated, that by means of the rack the required answer mustinevitably be obtained; and it is, besides, conformable to human naturethat crimes which are in everybody's mouth may, in the end, be actuallycommitted by some, either from wantonness, revenge, or desperateexasperation: yet crimes and accusations are, under circumstances likethese, merely the offspring of a revengeful, frenzied spirit in thepeople; and the accusers, according to the fundamental principles ofmorality, which are the same in every age, are the more guiltytransgressors. 

Already in the autumn of 1348 a dreadful panic, caused by this supposedempoisonment, seized all nations; in Germany especially the springs andwells were built over, that nobody might drink of them or employ theircontents for culinary purposes; and for a long time the inhabitants ofnumerous towns and villages used only river and rain water. The citygates were also guarded with the greatest caution: only confidentialpersons were admitted; and if medicine or any other article, which mightbe supposed to be poisonous, was found in the possession of astranger--and it was natural that some should have these things by themfor their private use--they were forced to swallow a portion of it. Bythis trying state of privation, distrust, and suspicion, the hatredagainst the supposed poisoners became greatly increased, and often brokeout in popular commotions, which only served still further to infuriatethe wildest passions. The noble and the mean fearlessly bound themselvesby an oath to extirpate the Jews by fire and sword, and to snatch themfrom their protectors, of whom the number was so small, that throughoutall Germany but few places can be mentioned where these unfortunatepeople were not regarded as outlaws and martyred and burnt. Solemnsummonses were issued from Bern to the towns of Basle, Freyburg in theBreisgau, and Strasburg, to pursue the Jews as poisoners. Theburgomasters and senators, indeed, opposed this requisition; but in Baslethe populace obliged them to bind themselves by an oath to burn the Jews, and to forbid persons of that community from entering their city for thespace of two hundred years. Upon this all the Jews in Basle, whosenumber could not have been inconsiderable, were enclosed in a woodenbuilding, constructed for the purpose, and burnt together with it, uponthe mere outcry of the people, without sentence or trial, which, indeed, would have availed them nothing. Soon after the same thing took place atFreyburg. A regular Diet was held at Bennefeld, in Alsace, where thebishops, lords, and barons, as also deputies of the counties and towns, consulted how they should proceed with regard to the Jews; and when thedeputies of Strasburg--not indeed the bishop of this town, who provedhimself a violent fanatic--spoke in favour of the persecuted, as nothingcriminal was substantiated against them, a great outcry was raised, andit was vehemently asked, why, if so, they had covered their wells andremoved their buckets. A sanguinary decree was resolved upon, of whichthe populace, who obeyed the call of the nobles and superior clergy, became but the too willing executioners. Wherever the Jews were notburnt, they were at least banished; and so being compelled to wanderabout, they fell into the hands of the country people, who, withouthumanity, and regardless of all laws, persecuted them with fire andsword. At Spires, the Jews, driven to despair, assembled in their ownhabitations, which they set on fire, and thus consumed themselves withtheir families. The few that remained were forced to submit to baptism;while the dead bodies of the murdered, which lay about the streets, wereput into empty wine-casks and rolled into the Rhine, lest they shouldinfect the air. The mob was forbidden to enter the ruins of thehabitations that were burnt in the Jewish quarter; for the senate itselfcaused search to be made for the treasure, which is said to have beenvery considerable. At Strasburg two thousand Jews were burnt alive intheir own burial-ground, where a large scaffold had been erected: a fewwho promised to embrace Christianity were spared, and their childrentaken from the pile. The youth and beauty of several females alsoexcited some commiseration, and they were snatched from death againsttheir will; many, however, who forcibly made their escape from the flameswere murdered in the streets. 

The senate ordered all pledges and bonds to be returned to the debtors, and divided the money among the work-people. Many, however, refused toaccept the base price of blood, and, indignant at the scenes ofbloodthirsty avarice, which made the infuriated multitude forget that theplague was raging around them, presented it to monasteries, in conformitywith the advice of their confessors. In all the countries on the Rhine, these cruelties continued to be perpetrated during the succeeding months;and after quiet was in some degree restored, the people thought to renderan acceptable service to God, by taking the bricks of the destroyeddwellings, and the tombstones of the Jews, to repair churches and toerect belfries. 

In Mayence alone, 12, 000 Jews are said to have been put to a cruel death. The Flagellants entered that place in August; the Jews, on this occasion, fell out with the Christians and killed several; but when they saw theirinability to withstand the increasing superiority of their enemies, andthat nothing could save them from destruction, they consumed themselvesand their families by setting fire to their dwellings. Thus also, inother places, the entry of the Flagellants gave rise to scenes ofslaughter; and as thirst for blood was everywhere combined with anunbridled spirit of proselytism, a fanatic zeal arose among the Jews toperish as martyrs to their ancient religion. And how was it possiblethat they could from the heart embrace Christianity, when its preceptswere never more outrageously violated? At Eslingen the whole Jewishcommunity burned themselves in their synagogue, and mothers were oftenseen throwing their children on the pile, to prevent their beingbaptised, and then precipitating themselves into the flames. In short, whatever deeds fanaticism, revenge, avarice and desperation, in fearfulcombination, could instigate mankind to perform, --and where in such acase is the limit?--were executed in the year 1349 throughout Germany, Italy, and France, with impunity, and in the eyes of all the world. Itseemed as if the plague gave rise to scandalous acts and frantic tumults, not to mourning and grief; and the greater part of those who, by theireducation and rank, were called upon to raise the voice of reason, themselves led on the savage mob to murder and to plunder. Almost allthe Jews who saved their lives by baptism were afterwards burnt atdifferent times; for they continued to be accused of poisoning the waterand the air. Christians also, whom philanthropy or gain had induced tooffer them protection, were put on the rack and executed with them. ManyJews who had embraced Christianity repented of their apostacy, and, returning to their former faith, sealed it with their death. 

The humanity and prudence of Clement VI. Must, on this occasion, also bementioned to his honour; but even the highest ecclesiastical power wasinsufficient to restrain the unbridled fury of the people. He not onlyprotected the Jews at Avignon, as far as lay in his power, but alsoissued two bulls, in which he declared them innocent; and admonished allChristians, though without success, to cease from such groundlesspersecutions. The Emperor Charles IV. Was also favourable to them, andsought to avert their destruction wherever he could; but he dared notdraw the sword of justice, and even found himself obliged to yield to theselfishness of the Bohemian nobles, who were unwilling to forego sofavourable an opportunity of releasing themselves from their Jewishcreditors, under favour of an imperial mandate. Duke Albert of Austriaburnt and pillaged those of his cities which had persecuted the Jews--avain and inhuman proceeding, which, moreover, is not exempt from thesuspicion of covetousness; yet he was unable, in his own fortress ofKyberg, to protect some hundreds of Jews, who had been received there, from being barbarously burnt by the inhabitants. Several other princesand counts, among whom was Ruprecht von der Pfalz, took the Jews undertheir protection, on the payment of large sums: in consequence of whichthey were called "Jew-masters, " and were in danger of being attacked bythe populace and by their powerful neighbours. These persecuted and ill-used people, except indeed where humane individuals took compassion onthem at their own peril, or when they could command riches to purchaseprotection, had no place of refuge left but the distant country ofLithuania, where Boleslav V. , Duke of Poland (1227-1279) had beforegranted them liberty of conscience; and King Casimir the Great(1333-1370), yielding to the entreaties of Esther, a favourite Jewess, received them, and granted them further protection; on which account, that country is still inhabited by a great number of Jews, who by theirsecluded habits have, more than any people in Europe, retained themanners of the Middle Ages. 

But to return to the fearful accusations against the Jews; it wasreported in all Europe that they were in connection with secret superiorsin Toledo, to whose decrees they were subject, and from whom they hadreceived commands respecting the coining of base money, poisoning, themurder of Christian children, &c; that they received the poison by seafrom remote parts, and also prepared it themselves from spiders, owls, and other venomous animals; but, in order that their secret might not bediscovered, that it was known only to their Rabbis and rich men. Apparently there were but few who did not consider this extravagantaccusation well founded; indeed, in many writings of the fourteenthcentury, we find great acrimony with regard to the suspectedpoison-mixers, which plainly demonstrates the prejudice existing againstthem. Unhappily, after the confessions of the first victims inSwitzerland, the rack extorted similar ones in various places. Some evenacknowledged having received poisonous powder in bags, and injunctionsfrom Toledo, by secret messengers. Bags of this description were alsooften found in wells, though it was not unfrequently discovered that theChristians themselves had thrown them in; probably to give occasion tomurder and pillage; similar instances of which may be found in thepersecutions of the witches. 

This picture needs no additions. A lively image of the Black Plague, andof the moral evil which followed in its train, will vividly representitself to him who is acquainted with nature and the constitution ofsociety. Almost the only credible accounts of the manner of living, andof the ruin which occurred in private life during this pestilence, arefrom Italy; and these may enable us to form a just estimate of thegeneral state of families in Europe, taking into consideration what ispeculiar in the manners of each country. 

"When the evil had become universal" (speaking of Florence), "the heartsof all the inhabitants were closed to feelings of humanity. They fledfrom the sick and all that belonged to them, hoping by these means tosave themselves. Others shut themselves up in their houses, with theirwives, their children and households, living on the most costly food, butcarefully avoiding all excess. None were allowed access to them; nointelligence of death or sickness was permitted to reach their ears; andthey spent their time in singing and music, and other pastimes. Others, on the contrary, considered eating and drinking to excess, amusements ofall descriptions, the indulgence of every gratification, and anindifference to what was passing around them, as the best medicine, andacted accordingly. They wandered day and night from one tavern toanother, and feasted without moderation or bounds. In this way theyendeavoured to avoid all contact with the sick, and abandoned theirhouses and property to chance, like men whose death-knell had alreadytolled. 

"Amid this general lamentation and woe, the influence and authority ofevery law, human and divine, vanished. Most of those who were in officehad been carried off by the plague, or lay sick, or had lost so manymembers of their family, that they were unable to attend to their duties;so that thenceforth every one acted as he thought proper. Others intheir mode of living chose a middle course. They ate and drank what theypleased, and walked abroad, carrying odoriferous flowers, herbs, orspices, which they smelt to from time to time, in order to invigorate thebrain, and to avert the baneful influence of the air, infected by thesick and by the innumerable corpses of those who had died of the plague. Others carried their precaution still further, and thought the surest wayto escape death was by flight. They therefore left the city; women aswell as men abandoning their dwellings and their relations, and retiringinto the country. But of these also many were carried off, most of themalone and deserted by all the world, themselves having previously set theexample. Thus it was that one citizen fled from another--a neighbourfrom his neighbours--a relation from his relations; and in the end, socompletely had terror extinguished every kindlier feeling, that thebrother forsook the brother--the sister the sister--the wife her husband;and at last, even the parent his own offspring, and abandoned them, unvisited and unsoothed, to their fate. Those, therefore, that stood inneed of assistance fell a prey to greedy attendants, who, for anexorbitant recompense, merely handed the sick their food and medicine, remained with them in their last moments, and then not unfrequentlybecame themselves victims to their avarice and lived not to enjoy theirextorted gain. Propriety and decorum were extinguished among thehelpless sick. Females of rank seemed to forget their naturalbashfulness, and committed the care of their persons, indiscriminately, to men and women of the lowest order. No longer were women, relatives orfriends, found in the house of mourning, to share the grief of thesurvivors--no longer was the corpse accompanied to the grave byneighbours and a numerous train of priests, carrying wax tapers andsinging psalms, nor was it borne along by other citizens of equal rank. Many breathed their last without a friend to soothe their dying pillow;and few indeed were they who departed amid the lamentations and tears oftheir friends and kindred. Instead of sorrow and mourning, appearedindifference, frivolity and mirth; this being considered, especially bythe females, as conducive to health. Seldom was the body followed byeven ten or twelve attendants; and instead of the usual bearers andsextons, mercenaries of the lowest of the populace undertook the officefor the sake of gain; and accompanied by only a few priests, and oftenwithout a single taper, it was borne to the very nearest church, andlowered into the grave that was not already too full to receive it. Amongthe middling classes, and especially among the poor, the misery was stillgreater. Poverty or negligence induced most of these to remain in theirdwellings, or in the immediate neighbourhood; and thus they fell bythousands; and many ended their lives in the streets by day and by night. The stench of putrefying corpses was often the first indication to theirneighbours that more deaths had occurred. The survivors, to preservethemselves from infection, generally had the bodies taken out of thehouses and laid before the doors; where the early morning found them inheaps, exposed to the affrighted gaze of the passing stranger. It was nolonger possible to have a bier for every corpse--three or four weregenerally laid together--husband and wife, father and mother, with two orthree children, were frequently borne to the grave on the same bier; andit often happened that two priests would accompany a coffin, bearing thecross before it, and be joined on the way by several other funerals; sothat instead of one, there were five or six bodies for interment. "

Thus far Boccacio. On the conduct of the priests, another contemporaryobserves: "In large and small towns they had withdrawn themselves throughfear, leaving the performance of ecclesiastical duties to the few whowere found courageous and faithful enough to undertake them. " But weought not on that account to throw more blame on them than on others; forwe find proofs of the same timidity and heartlessness in every class. During the prevalence of the Black Plague, the charitable ordersconducted themselves admirably, and did as much good as can be done byindividual bodies in times of great misery and destruction, whencompassion, courage, and the nobler feelings are found but in the few, while cowardice, selfishness and ill-will, with the baser passions intheir train, assert the supremacy. In place of virtue which had beendriven from the earth, wickedness everywhere reared her rebelliousstandard, and succeeding generations were consigned to the dominion ofher baleful tyranny. 

CHAPTER VI--PHYSICIANS

If we now turn to the medical talent which encountered the "GreatMortality, " the Middle Ages must stand excused, since even the modernsare of opinion that the art of medicine is not able to cope with theOriental plague, and can afford deliverance from it only underparticularly favourable circumstances. We must bear in mind, also, thathuman science and art appear particularly weak in great pestilences, because they have to contend with the powers of nature, of which theyhave no knowledge; and which, if they had been, or could be, comprehendedin their collective effects, would remain uncontrollable by them, principally on account of the disordered condition of human society. Moreover, every new plague has its peculiarities, which are the lesseasily discovered on first view because, during its ravages, fear andconsternation humble the proud spirit. 

The physicians of the fourteenth century, during the Black Death, didwhat human intellect could do in the actual condition of the healing art;and their knowledge of the disease was by no means despicable. They, like the rest of mankind, have indulged in prejudices, and defended them, perhaps, with too much obstinacy: some of these, however, were founded onthe mode of thinking of the age, and passed current in those days asestablished truths; others continue to exist to the present hour. 

Their successors in the nineteenth century ought not therefore to vaunttoo highly the pre-eminence of their knowledge, for they too will besubjected to the severe judgment of posterity--they too will, withreason, be accused of human weakness and want of foresight. 

The medical faculty of Paris, the most celebrated of the fourteenthcentury, were commissioned to deliver their opinion on the causes of theBlack Plague, and to furnish some appropriate regulations with regard toliving during its prevalence. This document is sufficiently remarkableto find a place here. 

"We, the Members of the College of Physicians of Paris, have, aftermature consideration and consultation on the present mortality, collectedthe advice of our old masters in the art, and intend to make known thecauses of this pestilence more clearly than could be done according tothe rules and principles of astrology and natural science; we, therefore, declare as follows:--

"It is known that in India and the vicinity of the Great Sea, theconstellations which combated the rays of the sun, and the warmth of theheavenly fire, exerted their power especially against that sea, andstruggled violently with its waters. (Hence vapours often originatewhich envelop the sun, and convert his light into darkness. ) Thesevapours alternately rose and fell for twenty-eight days; but, at last, sun and fire acted so powerfully upon the sea that they attracted a greatportion of it to themselves, and the waters of the ocean arose in theform of vapour; thereby the waters were in some parts so corrupted thatthe fish which they contained died. These corrupted waters, however, theheat of the sun could not consume, neither could other wholesome water, hail or snow and dew, originate therefrom. On the contrary, this vapourspread itself through the air in many places on the earth, and envelopedthem in fog. 

"Such was the case all over Arabia, in a part of India, in Crete, in theplains and valleys of Macedonia, in Hungary, Albania, and Sicily. Shouldthe same thing occur in Sardinia, not a man will be left alive, and thelike will continue so long as the sun remains in the sign of Leo, on allthe islands and adjoining countries to which this corrupted sea-windextends, or has already extended, from India. If the inhabitants ofthose parts do not employ and adhere to the following or similar meansand precepts, we announce to them inevitable death, except the grace ofChrist preserve their lives. 

"We are of opinion that the constellations, with the aid of nature, strive by virtue of their Divine might, to protect and heal the humanrace; and to this end, in union with the rays of the sun, acting throughthe power of fire, endeavour to break through the mist. Accordingly, within the next ten days, and until the 17th of the ensuing month ofJuly, this mist will be converted into a stinking deleterious rain, whereby the air will be much purified. Now, as soon as this rain shallannounce itself by thunder or hail, every one of you should protecthimself from the air; and, as well before as after the rain, kindle alarge fire of vine-wood, green laurel, or other green wood; wormwood andcamomile should also be burnt in great quantity in the market-places, inother densely inhabited localities, and in the houses. Until the earthis again completely dry, and for three days afterwards, no one ought togo abroad in the fields. During this time the diet should be simple, andpeople should be cautious in avoiding exposure in the cool of theevening, at night, and in the morning. Poultry and water-fowl, youngpork, old beef, and fat meat in general, should not be eaten; but, on thecontrary, meat of a proper age, of a warm and dry, but on no account of aheating and exciting nature. Broth should be taken, seasoned with groundpepper, ginger, and cloves, especially by those who are accustomed tolive temperately, and are yet choice in their diet. Sleep in the day-time is detrimental; it should be taken at night until sunrise, orsomewhat longer. At breakfast one should drink little; supper should betaken an hour before sunset, when more may be drunk than in the morning. Clear light wine, mixed with a fifth or six part of water, should be usedas a beverage. Dried or fresh fruits, with wine, are not injurious, buthighly so without it. Beet-root and other vegetables, whether eatenpickled or fresh, are hurtful; on the contrary, spicy pot-herbs, as sageor rosemary, are wholesome. Cold, moist, watery food in is generalprejudicial. Going out at night, and even until three o'clock in themorning, is dangerous, on account of dew. Only small river fish shouldbe used. Too much exercise is hurtful. The body should be kept warmerthan usual, and thus protected from moisture and cold. Rain-water mustnot be employed in cooking, and every one should guard against exposureto wet weather. If it rain, a little fine treacle should be taken afterdinner. Fat people should not sit in the sunshine. Good clear wineshould be selected and drunk often, but in small quantities, by day. Olive oil as an article of food is fatal. Equally injurious are fastingand excessive abstemiousness, anxiety of mind, anger, and immoderatedrinking. Young people, in autumn especially, must abstain from allthese things if they do not wish to run a risk of dying of dysentery. Inorder to keep the body properly open, an enema, or some other simplemeans, should be employed when necessary. Bathing is injurious. Menmust preserve chastity as they value their lives. Every one shouldimpress this on his recollection, but especially those who reside on thecoast, or upon an island into which the noxious wind has penetrated. "

On what occasion these strange precepts were delivered can no longer beascertained, even if it were an object to know it. It must beacknowledged, however, that they do not redound to the credit either ofthe faculty of Paris, or of the fourteenth century in general. Thisfamous faculty found themselves under the painful necessity of being wiseat command, and of firing a point-blank shot of erudition at an enemy whoenveloped himself in a dark mist, of the nature of which they had noconception. In concealing their ignorance by authoritative assertions, they suffered themselves, therefore, to be misled; and while endeavouringto appear to the world with _eclat_, only betrayed to the intelligenttheir lamentable weakness. Now some might suppose that, in the conditionof the sciences of the fourteenth century, no intelligent physiciansexisted; but this is altogether at variance with the laws of humanadvancement, and is contradicted by history. The real knowledge of anage is shown only in the archives of its literature. Here alone thegenius of truth speaks audibly--here alone men of talent deposit theresults of their experience and reflection without vanity or a selfishobject. There is no ground for believing that in the fourteenth centurymen of this kind were publicly questioned regarding their views; and itis, therefore, the more necessary that impartial history should take uptheir cause, and do justice to their merits. 

The first notice on this subject is due to a very celebrated teacher inPerugia, Gentilis of Foligno, who, on the 18th of June, 1348, fell asacrifice to the plague, in the faithful discharge of his duty. Attachedto Arabian doctrines, and to the universally respected Galen, he, incommon with all his contemporaries, believed in a putrid corruption ofthe blood in the lungs and in the heart, which was occasioned by thepestilential atmosphere, and was forthwith communicated to the wholebody. He thought, therefore, that everything depended upon a sufficientpurification of the air, by means of large blazing fires of odoriferouswood, in the vicinity of the healthy as well as of the sick, and alsoupon an appropriate manner of living, so that the putridity might notoverpower the diseased. In conformity with notions derived from theancients, he depended upon bleeding and purging, at the commencement ofthe attack, for the purpose of purification; ordered the healthy to washthemselves frequently with vinegar or wine, to sprinkle their dwellingswith vinegar, and to smell often to camphor, or other volatilesubstances. Hereupon he gave, after the Arabian fashion, detailed rules, with an abundance of different medicines, of whose healing powerswonderful things were believed. He had little stress upon super-lunarinfluences, so far as respected the malady itself; on which account, hedid not enter into the great controversies of the astrologers, but alwayskept in view, as an object of medical attention, the corruption of theblood in the lungs and heart. He believed in a progressive infectionfrom country to country, according to the notions of the present day; andthe contagious power of the disease, even in the vicinity of thoseaffected by plague, was, in his opinion, beyond all doubt. On this pointintelligent contemporaries were all agreed; and, in truth, it required nogreat genius to be convinced of so palpable a fact. Besides, correctnotions of contagion have descended from remote antiquity, and weremaintained unchanged in the fourteenth century. So far back as the ageof Plato a knowledge of the contagious power of malignant inflammationsof the eye, of which also no physician of the Middle Ages entertained adoubt, was general among the people; yet in modern times surgeons havefilled volumes with partial controversies on this subject. The wholelanguage of antiquity has adapted itself to the notions of the peoplerespecting the contagion of pestilential diseases; and their terms were, beyond comparison, more expressive than those in use among the moderns. 

Arrangements for the protection of the healthy against contagiousdiseases, the necessity of which is shown from these notions, wereregarded by the ancients as useful; and by man, whose circumstancespermitted it, were carried into effect in their houses. Even a totalseparation of the sick from the healthy, that indispensable means ofprotection against infection by contact, was proposed by physicians ofthe second century after Christ, in order to check the spreading ofleprosy. But it was decidedly opposed, because, as it was alleged, thehealing art ought not to be guilty of such harshness. This mildness ofthe ancients, in whose manner of thinking inhumanity was so often and soundisguisedly conspicuous, might excite surprise if it were anything morethan apparent. The true ground of the neglect of public protectionagainst pestilential diseases lay in the general notion and constitutionof human society--it lay in the disregard of human life, of which thegreat nations of antiquity have given proofs in every page of theirhistory. Let it not be supposed that they wanted knowledge respectingthe propagation of contagious diseases. On the contrary, they were aswell informed on this subject as the modern; but this was shown whereindividual property, not where human life, on the grand scale was to beprotected. Hence the ancients made a general practice of arresting theprogress of murrains among cattle by a separation of the diseased fromthe healthy. Their herds alone enjoyed that protection which they heldit impracticable to extend to human society, because they had no wish todo so. That the governments in the fourteenth century were not yet sofar advanced as to put into practice general regulations for checking theplague needs no especial proof. Physicians could, therefore, only advisepublic purifications of the air by means of large fires, as had oftenbeen practised in ancient times; and they were obliged to leave it toindividual families either to seek safety in flight, or to shutthemselves up in their dwellings, a method which answers in commonplagues, but which here afforded no complete security, because such wasthe fury of the disease when it was at its height, that the atmosphere ofwhole cities was penetrated by the infection. 

Of the astral influence which was considered to have originated the"Great Mortality, " physicians and learned men were as completelyconvinced as of the fact of its reality. A grand conjunction of thethree superior planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, in the sign ofAquarius, which took place, according to Guy de Chauliac, on the 24th ofMarch, 1345, was generally received as its principal cause. In fixingthe day, this physician, who was deeply versed in astrology, did notagree with others; whereupon there arose various disputations, of weightin that age, but of none in ours. People, however, agree in this--thatconjunctions of the planets infallibly prognosticated great events; greatrevolutions of kingdoms, new prophets, destructive plagues, and otheroccurrences which bring distress and horror on mankind. No medicalauthor of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries omits an opportunity ofrepresenting them as among the general prognostics of great plagues; norcan we, for our part, regard the astrology of the Middle Ages as a mereoffspring of superstition. It has not only, in common with all ideaswhich inspire and guide mankind, a high historical importance, entirelyindependent of its error or truth--for the influence of both is equallypowerful--but there are also contained in it, as in alchemy, grandthoughts of antiquity, of which modern natural philosophy is so littleashamed that she claims them as her property. Foremost among these isthe idea of general life which diffuses itself throughout the wholeuniverse, expressed by the greatest Greek sages, and transmitted to theMiddle Ages, through the new Platonic natural philosophy. To thisimpression of an universal organism, the assumption of a reciprocalinfluence of terrestrial bodies could not be foreign, nor did this ceaseto correspond with a higher view of nature, until astrologers oversteppedthe limits of human knowledge with frivolous and mystical calculations. 

Guy de Chauliac considers the influence of the conjunction, which washeld to be all-potent, as the chief general cause of the Black Plague;and the diseased state of bodies, the corruption of the fluids, debility, obstruction, and so forth, as the especial subordinate causes. By these, according to his opinion, the quality of the air, and of the otherelements, was so altered that they set poisonous fluids in motion towardsthe inward parts of the body, in the same manner as the magnet attractsiron; whence there arose in the commencement fever and the spitting ofblood; afterwards, however, a deposition in the form on glandularswellings and inflammatory boils. Herein the notion of an epidemicconstitution was set forth clearly, and conformably to the spirit of theage. Of contagion, Guy de Chauliac was completely convinced. He soughtto protect himself against it by the usual means; and it was probably hewho advised Pope Clement VI. To shut himself up while the plague lasted. The preservation of this Pope's life, however, was most beneficial to thecity of Avignon, for he loaded the poor with judicious acts of kindness, took care to have proper attendants provided, and paid physicians himselfto afford assistance wherever human aid could avail--an advantage which, perhaps, no other city enjoyed. Nor was the treatment of plague-patientsin Avignon by any means objectionable; for, after the usual depletions bybleeding and aperients, where circumstances required them, theyendeavoured to bring the buboes to suppuration; they made incisions intothe inflammatory boils, or burned them with a red-hot iron, a practicewhich at all times proves salutary, and in the Black Plague saved manylives. In this city, the Jews, who lived in a state of the greatestfilth, were most severely visited, as also the Spaniards, whom Chalinaccuses of great intemperance. 

Still more distinct notions on the causes of the plague were stated tohis contemporaries in the fourteenth century by Galeazzo di Santa Sofia, a learned man, a native of Padua, who likewise treated plague-patients atVienna, though in what year is undetermined. He distinguishes carefully_pestilence_ from _epidemy_ and _endemy_. The common notion of the twofirst accords exactly with that of an epidemic constitution, for bothconsist, according to him, in an unknown change or corruption of the air;with this difference, that pestilence calls forth diseases of differentkinds; epidemy, on the contrary, always the same disease. As an exampleof an epidemy, he adduces a cough (influenza) which was observed in allclimates at the same time without perceptible cause; but he recognisedthe approach of a pestilence, independently of unusual natural phenomena, by the more frequent occurrence of various kinds of fever, to which themodern physicians would assign a nervous and putrid character. Theendemy originates, according to him, only in local telluric changes--indeleterious influences which develop themselves in the earth and in thewater, without a corruption of the air. These notions were variouslyjumbled together in his time, like everything which human understandingseparates by too fine a line of limitation. The estimation of cosmicalinfluences, however, in the epidemy and pestilence, is well worthy ofcommendation; and Santa Sofia, in this respect, not only agrees with themost intelligent persons of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, buthe has also promulgated an opinion which must, even now, serve as afoundation for our scarcely commenced investigations into cosmicalinfluences. Pestilence and epidemy consist not in alterations of thefour primary qualities, but in a corruption of the air, powerful, thoughquite immaterial, and not cognoscible by the senses--(corruptio aeris nonsubstantialis, sed qualitativa) in a disproportion of the imponderablesin the atmosphere, as it would be expressed by the moderns. The causesof the pestilence and epidemy are, first of all, astral influences, especially on occasions of planetary conjunctions; then extensiveputrefaction of animal and vegetable bodies, and terrestrial corruptions(corruptio in terra): to which also bad diet and want may contribute. Santa Sofia considers the putrefaction of locusts, that had perished inthe sea and were again thrown up, combined with astral and terrestrialinfluences, as the cause of the pestilence in the eventful year of the"Great Mortality. "

All the fevers which were called forth by the pestilence are, accordingto him, of the putrid kind; for they originate principally from putridityof the heart's blood, which inevitably follows the inhalation of infectedair. The Oriental Plague is, sometimes, but by no means alwaysoccasioned by _pestilence_ (?), which imparts to it a character(_qualitas occulta_) hostile to human nature. It originates frequentlyfrom other causes, among which this physician was aware that contagionwas to be reckoned; and it deserves to be remarked that he held epidemicsmall-pox and measles to be infallible forerunners of the plague, as dothe physicians and people of the East at the present day. 

In the exposition of his therapeutical views of the plague, a clearnessof intellect is again shown by Santa Sofia, which reflects credit on theage. It seemed to him to depend, 1st, on an evacuation of putrid mattersby purgatives and bleeding; yet he did not sanction the employment ofthese means indiscriminately and without consideration; least of allwhere the condition of the blood was healthy. He also declared himselfdecidedly against bleeding _ad deliquium_ (_venae sectio eradicativa_). 2nd, Strengthening of the heart and prevention of putrescence. 3rd, Appropriate regimen. 4th, Improvement of the air. 5th, Appropriatetreatment of tumid glands and inflammatory boils, with emollient, or evenstimulating poultices (mustard, lily-bulbs), as well as with red-hot goldand iron. Lastly, 6th, Attention to prominent symptoms. The stores ofthe Arabian pharmacy, which he brought into action to meet all theseindications, were indeed very considerable; it is to be observed, however, that, for the most part, gentle means were accumulated, which, in case of abuse, would do no harm: for the character of the Arabiansystem of medicine, whose principles were everywhere followed at thistime, was mildness and caution. On this account, too, we cannot believethat a very prolix treatise by Marsigli di Santa Sofia, a contemporaryrelative of Galeazzo, on the prevention and treatment of plague, can havecaused much harm, although perhaps, even in the fourteenth century, anagreeable latitude and confident assertions respecting things which nomortal has investigated, or which it is quite a matter of indifference todistinguish, were considered as proofs of a valuable practical talent. 

The agreement of contemporary and later writers shows that the publishedviews of the most celebrated physicians of the fourteenth century werethose generally adopted. Among these, Chalin de Vinario is the mostexperienced. Though devoted to astrology still more than hisdistinguished contemporary, he acknowledges the great power ofterrestrial influences, and expresses himself very sensibly on theindisputable doctrine of contagion, endeavouring thereby to apologise formany surgeons and physicians of his time who neglected their duty. Heasserted boldly and with truth, "_that all epidemic diseases might becomecontagious_, _and all fevers epidemic_, " which attentive observers of allsubsequent ages have confirmed. 

He delivered his sentiments on blood-letting with sagacity, as anexperienced physician; yet he was unable, as may be imagined, to moderatethe desire for bleeding shown by the ignorant monks. He was averse todraw blood from the veins of patients under fourteen years of age; butcounteracted inflammatory excitement in them by cupping, and endeavouredto moderate the inflammation of the tumid glands by leeches. Most ofthose who were bled, died; he therefore reserved this remedy for theplethoric; especially for the papal courtiers and the hypocriticalpriests, whom he saw gratifying their sensual desires, and imitatingEpicurus, whilst they pompously pretended to follow Christ. Herecommended burning the boils with a red-hot iron only in the plaguewithout fever, which occurred in single cases; and was always ready tocorrect those over-hasty surgeons who, with fire and violent remedies, did irremediable injury to their patients. Michael Savonarola, professorin Ferrara (1462), reasoning on the susceptibility of the human frame tothe influence of pestilential infection, as the cause of such variousmodifications of disease, expresses himself as a modern physician wouldon this point; and an adoption of the principle of contagion was thefoundation of his definition of the plague. No less worthy ofobservation are the views of the celebrated Valescus of Taranta, who, during the final visitation of the Black Death, in 1382, practised as aphysician at Montpellier, and handed down to posterity what has beenrepeated in innumerable treatises on plague, which were written duringthe fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 

Of all these notions and views regarding the plague, whose development wehave represented, there are two especially, which are prominent inhistorical importance:--1st, The opinion of learned physicians, that thepestilence, or epidemic constitution, is the parent of various kinds ofdisease; that the plague sometimes, indeed, but by no means always, originates from it: that, to speak in the language of the moderns, thepestilence bears the same relation to contagion that a predisposing causedoes to an occasional cause; and 2ndly, the universal conviction of thecontagious power of that disease. 

Contagion gradually attracted more notice: it was thought that in it themost powerful occasional cause might be avoided; the possibility ofprotecting whole cities by separation became gradually more evident; andso horrifying was the recollection of the eventful year of the "GreatMortality, " that before the close of the fourteenth century, ere the illeffects of the Black Plague had ceased, nations endeavoured to guardagainst the return of this enemy by an earnest and effectual defence. 

The first regulation which was issued for this purpose, originated withViscount Bernabo, and is dated the 17th January, 1374. "Every plague-patient was to be taken out of the city into the fields, there to die orto recover. Those who attended upon a plague-patient, were to remainapart for ten days before they again associated with anybody. Thepriests were to examine the diseased, and point out to specialcommissioners the persons infected, under punishment of the confiscationof their goods and of being burned alive. Whoever imported the plague, the state condemned his goods to confiscation. Finally, none exceptthose who were appointed for that purpose were to attend plague-patients, under penalty of death and confiscation. "

These orders, in correspondence with the spirit of the fourteenthcentury, are sufficiently decided to indicate a recollection of the goodeffects of confinement, and of keeping at a distance those suspected ofhaving plague. It was said that Milan itself, by a rigorous barricade ofthree houses in which the plague had broken out, maintained itself freefrom the "Great Mortality" for a considerable time; and examples of thepreservation of individual families, by means of a strict separation, were certainly very frequent. That these orders must have causeduniversal affliction from their uncommon severity, as we know to havebeen especially the case in the city of Reggio, may be easily conceived;but Bernabo did not suffer himself to be deterred from his purpose byfear--on the contrary, when the plague returned in the year 1383, heforbade the admission of people from infected places into his territorieson pain of death. We have now, it is true, no account how far hesucceeded; yet it is to be supposed that he arrested the disease, for ithad long lost the property of the Black Death, to spread abroad in theair the contagious matter which proceeded from the lungs, charged withputridity, and to taint the atmosphere of whole cities by the vastnumbers of the sick. Now that it had resumed its milder form, so that itinfected only by contact, it admitted being confined within individualdwellings, as easily as in modern times. 

Bernabo's example was imitated; nor was there any century moreappropriate for recommending to governments strong regulations againstthe plague that the fourteenth; for when it broke out in Italy, in theyear 1399, and still demanded new victims, it was for the sixteenth time, without reckoning frequent visitations of measles and small-pox. In thissame year, Viscount John, in milder terms than his predecessor, orderedthat no stranger should be admitted from infected places, and that thecity gates should be strictly guarded. Infected houses were to beventilated for at least eight or ten days, and purified from noxiousvapours by fires, and by fumigations with balsamic and aromaticsubstances. Straw, rags, and the like were to be burned; and thebedsteads which had been used, set out for four days in the rain or thesunshine, so that by means of the one or the other, the morbific vapourmight be destroyed. No one was to venture to make use of clothes or bedsout of infected dwellings unless they had been previously washed anddried either at the fire or in the sun. People were, likewise, to avoid, as long as possible, occupying houses which had been frequented by plague-patients. 

We cannot precisely perceive in these an advance towards generalregulations; and perhaps people were convinced of the insurmountableimpediments which opposed the separation of open inland countries, wherebodies of people connected together could not be brought, even by themost obdurate severity, to renounce the habit of profitable intercourse. 

Doubtless it is nature which has done the most to banish the Orientalplague from western Europe, where the increasing cultivation of theearth, and the advancing order in civilised society, have prevented itfrom remaining domesticated, which it most probably was in the moreancient times. 

In the fifteenth century, during which it broke out seventeen times indifferent places in Europe, it was of the more consequence to oppose abarrier to its entrance from Asia, Africa, and Greece (which had becomeTurkish); for it would have been difficult for it to maintain itselfindigenously any longer. Among the southern commercial states, however, which were called on to make the greatest exertions to this end, it wasprincipally Venice, formerly so severely attacked by the Black Plague, that put the necessary restraint upon perilous profits of the merchant. Until towards the end of the fifteenth century, the very considerableintercourse with the East was free and unimpeded. Ships of commercialcities had often brought over the plague: nay, the former irruption ofthe "Great Mortality" itself had been occasioned by navigators. For, asin the latter end of autumn, 1347, four ships full of plague-patientsreturned from the Levant to Genoa, the disease spread itself there withastonishing rapidity. On this account, in the following year, theGenoese forbade the entrance of suspected ships into their port. Thesesailed to Pisa and other cities on the coast, where already nature hadmade such mighty preparations for the reception of the Black Plague, andwhat we have already described took place in consequence. 

In the year 1485, when, among the cities of northern Italy, Milanespecially felt the scourge of the plague, a special Council of Health, consisting of three nobles, was established at Venice, who probably triedeverything in their power to prevent the entrance of this disease, andgradually called into activity all those regulations which have served inlater times as a pattern for the other southern states of Europe. Theirendeavours were, however, not crowned with complete success; on whichaccount their powers were increased, in the year 1504, by granting themthe right of life and death over those who violated the regulations. Bills of health were probably first introduced in the year 1527, during afatal plague which visited Italy for five years (1525-30), and calledforth redoubled caution. 

The first lazarettos were established upon islands at some distance fromthe city, seemingly as early as the year 1485. Here all strangers comingfrom places where the existence of plague was suspected were detained. Ifit appeared in the city itself, the sick were despatched with theirfamilies to what was called the Old Lazaretto, were there furnished withprovisions and medicines, and when they were cured, were detained, together with all those who had had intercourse with them, still fortydays longer in the New Lazaretto, situated on another island. All theseregulations were every year improved, and their needful rigour wasincreased, so that from the year 1585 onwards, no appeal was allowed fromthe sentence of the Council of Health; and the other commercial nationsgradually came to the support of the Venetians, by adopting correspondingregulations. Bills of health, however, were not general until the year1665. 

The appointment of a forty days' detention, whence quarantines derivetheir name, was not dictated by caprice, but probably had a medicalorigin, which is derivable in part from the doctrine of critical days;for the fortieth day, according to the most ancient notions, has beenalways regarded as the last of ardent diseases, and the limit ofseparation between these and those which are chronic. It was the customto subject lying-in women for forty days to a more exact superintendence. There was a good deal also said in medical works of forty-day epochs inthe formation of the foetus, not to mention that the alchemists expectedmore durable revolutions in forty days, which period they called thephilosophical month. 

This period being generally held to prevail in natural processes, itappeared reasonable to assume, and legally to establish it, as thatrequired for the development of latent principles of contagion, sincepublic regulations cannot dispense with decisions of this kind, eventhough they should not be wholly justified by the nature of the case. Great stress has likewise been laid on theological and legal grounds, which were certainly of greater weight in the fifteenth century than inthe modern times. 

On this matter, however, we cannot decide, since our only object here isto point out the origin of a political means of protection against adisease which has been the greatest impediment to civilisation within thememory of man; a means that, like Jenner's vaccine, after the small-poxhad ravaged Europe for twelve hundred years, has diminished the checkwhich mortality puts on the progress of civilisation, and thus given tothe life and manners of the nations of this part of the world a newdirection, the result of which we cannot foretell. 

THE DANCING MANIA

CHAPTER I--THE DANCING MANIA IN GERMANY AND THE NETHERLANDS

SECT. 1--ST. JOHN'S DANCE

The effects of the Black Death had not yet subsided, and the graves ofmillions of its victims were scarcely closed, when a strange delusionarose in Germany, which took possession of the minds of men, and, inspite of the divinity of our nature, hurried away body and soul into themagic circle of hellish superstition. It was a convulsion which in themost extraordinary manner infuriated the human frame, and excited theastonishment of contemporaries for more than two centuries, since whichtime it has never reappeared. It was called the dance of St. John or ofSt. Vitus, on account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it wascharacterised, and which gave to those affected, whilst performing theirwild dance, and screaming and foaming with fury, all the appearance ofpersons possessed. It did not remain confined to particular localities, but was propagated by the sight of the sufferers, like a demoniacalepidemic, over the whole of Germany and the neighbouring countries to thenorth-west, which were already prepared for its reception by theprevailing opinions of the time. 

So early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women were seen at Aix-la-Chapelle, who had come out of Germany, and who, united by one commondelusion, exhibited to the public both in the streets and in the churchesthe following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in hand, andappearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, untilat length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They thencomplained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies ofdeath, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round theirwaists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaintuntil the next attack. This practice of swathing was resorted to onaccount of the tympany which followed these spasmodic ravings, but thebystanders frequently relieved patients in a less artificial manner, bythumping and trampling upon the parts affected. While dancing theyneither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions throughthe senses, but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring upspirits whose names they shrieked out; and some of them afterwardsasserted that they felt as if they had been immersed in a stream ofblood, which obliged them to leap so high. Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open and the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary, according as the religious notions of the age were strangely andvariously reflected in their imaginations. 

Where the disease was completely developed, the attack commenced withepileptic convulsions. Those affected fell to the ground senseless, panting and labouring for breath. They foamed at the mouth, and suddenlyspringing up began their dance amidst strange contortions. Yet themalady doubtless made its appearance very variously, and was modified bytemporary or local circumstances, whereof non-medical contemporaries butimperfectly noted the essential particulars, accustomed as they were toconfound their observation of natural events with their notions of theworld of spirits. 

It was but a few months ere this demoniacal disease had spread from Aix-la-Chapelle, where it appeared in July, over the neighbouringNetherlands. In Liege, Utrecht, Tongres, and many other towns ofBelgium, the dancers appeared with garlands in their hair, and theirwaists girt with cloths, that they might, as soon as the paroxysm wasover, receive immediate relief on the attack of the tympany. Thisbandage was, by the insertion of a stick, easily twisted tight: many, however, obtained more relief from kicks and blows, which they foundnumbers of persons ready to administer: for, wherever the dancersappeared, the people assembled in crowds to gratify their curiosity withthe frightful spectacle. At length the increasing number of the affectedexcited no less anxiety than the attention that was paid to them. Intowns and villages they took possession of the religious houses, processions were everywhere instituted on their account, and masses weresaid and hymns were sung, while the disease itself, of the demoniacalorigin of which no one entertained the least doubt, excited everywhereastonishment and horror. In Liege the priests had recourse to exorcisms, and endeavoured by every means in their power to allay an evil whichthreatened so much danger to themselves; for the possessed assembling inmultitudes, frequently poured forth imprecations against them, andmenaced their destruction. They intimidated the people also to such adegree that there was an express ordinance issued that no one should makeany but square-toed shoes, because these fanatics had manifested a morbiddislike to the pointed shoes which had come into fashion immediatelyafter the "Great Mortality" in 1350. They were still more irritated atthe sight of red colours, the influence of which on the disordered nervesmight lead us to imagine an extraordinary accordance between thisspasmodic malady and the condition of infuriated animals; but in the St. John's dancers this excitement was probably connected with apparitionsconsequent upon their convulsions. There were likewise some of them whowere unable to endure the sight of persons weeping. The clergy seemed tobecome daily more and more confirmed in their belief that those who wereaffected were a kind of sectarians, and on this account they hastenedtheir exorcisms as much as possible, in order that the evil might notspread amongst the higher classes, for hitherto scarcely any but the poorhad been attacked, and the few people of respectability among the laityand clergy who were to be found among them, were persons whose naturalfrivolity was unable to withstand the excitement of novelty, even thoughit proceeded from a demoniacal influence. Some of the affected hadindeed themselves declared, when under the influence of priestly forms ofexorcism, that if the demons had been allowed only a few weeks' moretime, they would have entered the bodies of the nobility and princes, andthrough these have destroyed the clergy. Assertions of this sort, whichthose possessed uttered whilst in a state which may be compared with thatof magnetic sleep, obtained general belief, and passed from mouth tomouth with wonderful additions. The priesthood were, on this account, somuch the more zealous in their endeavours to anticipate every dangerousexcitement of the people, as if the existing order of things could havebeen seriously threatened by such incoherent ravings. Their exertionswere effectual, for exorcism was a powerful remedy in the fourteenthcentury; or it might perhaps be that this wild infatuation terminated inconsequence of the exhaustion which naturally ensued from it; at allevents, in the course of ten or eleven months the St. John's dancers wereno longer to be found in any of the cities of Belgium. The evil, however, was too deeply rooted to give way altogether to such feebleattacks. 

A few months after this dancing malady had made its appearance at Aix-la-Chapelle, it broke out at Cologne, where the number of those possessedamounted to more than five hundred, and about the same time at Metz, thestreets of which place are said to have been filled with eleven hundreddancers. Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels, and this richcommercial city became the scene of the most ruinous disorder. Secretdesires were excited, and but too often found opportunities for wildenjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by vice and misery, availedthemselves of this new complaint to gain a temporary livelihood. Girlsand boys quitted their parents, and servants their masters, to amusethemselves at the dances of those possessed, and greedily imbibed thepoison of mental infection. Above a hundred unmarried women were seenraving about in consecrated and unconsecrated places, and theconsequences were soon perceived. Gangs of idle vagabonds, whounderstood how to imitate to the life the gestures and convulsions ofthose really affected, roved from place to place seeking maintenance andadventures, and thus, wherever they went, spreading this disgustingspasmodic disease like a plague; for in maladies of this kind thesusceptible are infected as easily by the appearance as by the reality. At last it was found necessary to drive away these mischievous guests, who were equally inaccessible to the exorcisms of the priests and theremedies of the physicians. It was not, however, until after four monthsthat the Rhenish cities were able to suppress these impostures, which hadso alarmingly increased the original evil. In the meantime, when oncecalled into existence, the plague crept on, and found abundant food inthe tone of thought which prevailed in the fourteenth and fifteenthcenturies, and even, though in a minor degree, throughout the sixteenthand seventeenth, causing a permanent disorder of the mind, and exhibitingin those cities to whose inhabitants it was a novelty, scenes as strangeas they were detestable. 

SECT. 2--ST. VITUS'S DANCE

Strasburg was visited by the "Dancing Plague" in the year 1418, and thesame infatuation existed among the people there, as in the towns ofBelgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at the sight of thoseaffected, excited attention at first by their confused and absurdbehaviour, and then by their constantly following swarms of dancers. These were seen day and night passing through the streets, accompanied bymusicians playing on bagpipes, and by innumerable spectators attracted bycuriosity, to which were added anxious parents and relations, who came tolook after those among the misguided multitude who belonged to theirrespective families. Imposture and profligacy played their part in thiscity also, but the morbid delusion itself seems to have predominated. Onthis account religion could only bring provisional aid, and therefore thetown council benevolently took an interest in the afflicted. Theydivided them into separate parties, to each of which they appointedresponsible superintendents to protect them from harm, and perhaps alsoto restrain their turbulence. They were thus conducted on foot and incarriages to the chapels of St. Vitus, near Zabern and Rotestein, wherepriests were in attendance to work upon their misguided minds by massesand other religious ceremonies. After divine worship was completed, theywere led in solemn procession to the altar, where they made some smalloffering of alms, and where it is probable that many were, through theinfluence of devotion and the sanctity of the place, cured of thislamentable aberration. It is worthy of observation, at all events, thatthe Dancing Mania did not recommence at the altars of the saint, and thatfrom him alone assistance was implored, and through his miraculousinterposition a cure was expected, which was beyond the reach of humanskill. The personal history of St. Vitus is by no means important inthis matter. He was a Sicilian youth, who, together with Modestus andCrescentia, suffered martyrdom at the time of the persecution of theChristians, under Diocletian, in the year 303. The legends respectinghim are obscure, and he would certainly have been passed over withoutnotice among the innumerable apocryphal martyrs of the first centuries, had not the transfer of his body to St. Denys, and thence, in the year836, to Corvey, raised him to a higher rank. From this time forth it maybe supposed that many miracles were manifested at his new sepulchre, which were of essential service in confirming the Roman faith among theGermans, and St. Vitus was soon ranked among the fourteen saintly helpers(Nothhelfer or Apotheker). His altars were multiplied, and the peoplehad recourse to them in all kinds of distresses, and revered him as apowerful intercessor. As the worship of these saints was, however, atthat time stripped of all historical connections, which were purposelyobliterated by the priesthood, a legend was invented at the beginning ofthe fifteenth century, or perhaps even so early as the fourteenth, thatSt. Vitus had, just before he bent his neck to the sword, prayed to Godthat he might protect from the Dancing Mania all those who shouldsolemnise the day of his commemoration, and fast upon its eve, and thatthereupon a voice from heaven was heard, saying, "Vitus, thy prayer isaccepted. " Thus St. Vitus became the patron saint of those afflictedwith the Dancing Plague, as St. Martin of Tours was at one time thesuccourer of persons in small-pox, St. Antonius of those suffering underthe "hellish fire, " and as St. Margaret was the Juno Lucina of puerperalwomen. 

SECT. 3--CAUSES

The connection which John the Baptist had with the Dancing Mania of thefourteenth century was of a totally different character. He wasoriginally far from being a protecting saint to those who were attacked, or one who would be likely to give them relief from a malady consideredas the work of the devil. On the contrary, the manner in which he wasworshipped afforded an important and very evident cause for itsdevelopment. From the remotest period, perhaps even so far back as thefourth century, St. John's day was solemnised with all sorts of strangeand rude customs, of which the originally mystical meaning was variouslydisfigured among different nations by superadded relics of heathenism. Thus the Germans transferred to the festival of St. John's day an ancientheathen usage, the kindling of the "Nodfyr, " which was forbidden them bySt. Boniface, and the belief subsists even to the present day that peopleand animals that have leaped through these flames, or their smoke, areprotected for a whole year from fevers and other diseases, as if by akind of baptism by fire. Bacchanalian dances, which have originated insimilar causes among all the rude nations of the earth, and the wildextravagancies of a heated imagination, were the constant accompanimentsof this half-heathen, half-Christian festival. At the period of which weare treating, however, the Germans were not the only people who gave wayto the ebullitions of fanaticism in keeping the festival of St. John theBaptist. Similar customs were also to be found among the nations ofSouthern Europe and of Asia, and it is more than probable that the Greekstransferred to the festival of John the Baptist, who is also held in highesteem among the Mahomedans, a part of their Bacchanalian mysteries, anabsurdity of a kind which is but too frequently met with in humanaffairs. How far a remembrance of the history of St. John's death mayhave had an influence on this occasion, we would leave learnedtheologians to decide. It is only of importance here to add that inAbyssinia, a country entirely separated from Europe, where Christianityhas maintained itself in its primeval simplicity against Mahomedanism, John is to this day worshipped, as protecting saint of those who areattacked with the dancing malady. In these fragments of the dominion ofmysticism and superstition, historical connection is not to be found. 

When we observe, however, that the first dancers in Aix-la-Chapelleappeared in July with St. John's name in their mouths, the conjecture isprobable that the wild revels of St. John's day, A. D. 1374, gave rise tothis mental plague, which thenceforth has visited so many thousands withincurable aberration of mind, and disgusting distortions of body. 

This is rendered so much the more probable because some months previouslythe districts in the neighbourhood of the Rhine and the Main had met withgreat disasters. So early as February, both these rivers had overflowedtheir banks to a great extent; the walls of the town of Cologne, on theside next the Rhine, had fallen down, and a great many villages had beenreduced to the utmost distress. To this was added the miserablecondition of western and southern Germany. Neither law nor edict couldsuppress the incessant feuds of the Barons, and in Franconia especially, the ancient times of club law appeared to be revived. Security ofproperty there was none; arbitrary will everywhere prevailed; corruptionof morals and rude power rarely met with even a feeble opposition; whenceit arose that the cruel, but lucrative, persecutions of the Jews were inmany places still practised through the whole of this century with theirwonted ferocity. Thus, throughout the western parts of Germany, andespecially in the districts bordering on the Rhine, there was a wretchedand oppressed populace; and if we take into consideration that amongtheir numerous bands many wandered about, whose consciences weretormented with the recollection of the crimes which they had committedduring the prevalence of the Black Plague, we shall comprehend how theirdespair sought relief in the intoxication of an artificial delirium. There is hence good ground for supposing that the frantic celebration ofthe festival of St. John, A. D. 1374, only served to bring to a crisis amalady which had been long impending; and if we would further inquire howa hitherto harmless usage, which like many others had but served to keepup superstition, could degenerate into so serious a disease, we must takeinto account the unusual excitement of men's minds, and the consequencesof wretchedness and want. The bowels, which in many were debilitated byhunger and bad food, were precisely the parts which in most cases wereattacked with excruciating pain, and the tympanitic state of theintestines points out to the intelligent physician an origin of thedisorder which is well worth consideration. 

SECT. 4--MORE ANCIENT DANCING PLAGUES

The Dancing Mania of the year 1374 was, in fact, no new disease, but aphenomenon well known in the Middle Ages, of which many wondrous storieswere traditionally current among the people. In the year 1237 upwards ofa hundred children were said to have been suddenly seized with thisdisease at Erfurt, and to have proceeded dancing and jumping along theroad to Arnstadt. When they arrived at that place they fell exhausted tothe ground, and, according to an account of an old chronicle, many ofthem, after they were taken home by their parents, died, and the restremained affected, to the end of their lives, with a permanent tremor. Another occurrence was related to have taken place on the Moselle Bridgeat Utrecht, on the 17th day of June, A. D. 1278, when two hundred fanaticsbegan to dance, and would not desist until a priest passed, who wascarrying the Host to a person that was sick, upon which, as if inpunishment of their crime, the bridge gave way, and they were alldrowned. A similar event also occurred so early as the year 1027, nearthe convent church of Kolbig, not far from Bernburg. According to an oft-repeated tradition, eighteen peasants, some of whose names are stillpreserved, are said to have disturbed divine service on Christmas Eve bydancing and brawling in the churchyard, whereupon the priest, Ruprecht, inflicted a curse upon them, that they should dance and scream for awhole year without ceasing. This curse is stated to have been completelyfulfilled, so that the unfortunate sufferers at length sank knee-deepinto the earth, and remained the whole time without nourishment, untilthey were finally released by the intercession of two pious bishops. Itis said that, upon this, they fell into a deep sleep, which lasted threedays, and that four of them died; the rest continuing to suffer all theirlives from a trembling of their limbs. It is not worth while to separatewhat may have been true, and what the addition of crafty priests, in thisstrangely distorted story. It is sufficient that it was believed, andrelated with astonishment and horror, throughout the Middle Ages; so thatwhen there was any exciting cause for this delirious raving and wild ragefor dancing, it failed not to produce its effects upon men whose thoughtswere given up to a belief in wonders and apparitions. 

This disposition of mind, altogether so peculiar to the Middle Ages, andwhich, happily for mankind, has yielded to an improved state ofcivilisation and the diffusion of popular instruction, accounts for theorigin and long duration of this extraordinary mental disorder. The goodsense of the people recoiled with horror and aversion from this heavyplague, which, whenever malevolent persons wished to curse theirbitterest enemies and adversaries, was long after used as a malediction. The indignation also that was felt by the people at large against theimmorality of the age, was proved by their ascribing this frightfulaffliction to the inefficacy of baptism by unchaste priests, as ifinnocent children were doomed to atone, in after-years, for thisdesecration of the sacrament administered by unholy hands. We havealready mentioned what perils the priests in the Netherlands incurredfrom this belief. They now, indeed, endeavoured to hasten theirreconciliation with the irritated, and, at that time, very degeneratepeople, by exorcisms, which, with some, procured them greater respectthan ever, because they thus visibly restored thousands of those who wereaffected. In general, however, there prevailed a want of confidence intheir efficacy, and then the sacred rites had as little power inarresting the progress of this deeply-rooted malady as the prayers andholy services subsequently had at the altars of the greatly-reveredmartyr St. Vitus. We may therefore ascribe it to accident merely, and toa certain aversion to this demoniacal disease, which seemed to lie beyondthe reach of human skill, that we meet with but few and imperfect noticesof the St. Vitus's dance in the second half of the fifteenth century. Thehighly-coloured descriptions of the sixteenth century contradict thenotion that this mental plague had in any degree diminished in itsseverity, and not a single fact is to be found which supports the opinionthat any one of the essential symptoms of the disease, not even exceptingthe tympany, had disappeared, or that the disorder itself had becomemilder in its attacks. The physicians never, as it seems, throughout thewhole of the fifteenth century, undertook the treatment of the DancingMania, which, according to the prevailing notions, appertainedexclusively to the servants of the Church. Against demoniacal disordersthey had no remedies, and though some at first did promulgate the opinionthat the malady had its origin in natural circumstances, such as a hottemperament, and other causes named in the phraseology of the schools, yet these opinions were the less examined as it did not appear worthwhile to divide with a jealous priesthood the care of a host of fanaticalvagabonds and beggars. 

SECT. 5--PHYSICIANS

It was not until the beginning of the sixteenth century that the St. Vitus's dance was made the subject of medical research, and stripped ofits unhallowed character as a work of demons. This was effected byParacelsus, that mighty but, as yet, scarcely comprehended reformer ofmedicine, whose aim it was to withdraw diseases from the pale ofmiraculous interpositions and saintly influences, and explain theircauses upon principles deduced from his knowledge of the human frame. "Wewill not, however, admit that the saints have power to inflict diseases, and that these ought to be named after them, although many there are who, in their theology, lay great stress on this supposition, ascribing themrather to God than to nature, which is but idle talk. We dislike suchnonsensical gossip as is not supported by symptoms, but only by faith--athing which is not human, whereon the gods themselves set no value. "

Such were the words which Paracelsus addressed to his contemporaries, whowere, as yet, incapable of appreciating doctrines of this sort; for thebelief in enchantment still remained everywhere unshaken, and faith inthe world of spirits still held men's minds in so close a bondage thatthousands were, according to their own conviction, given up as a prey tothe devil; while at the command of religion, as well as of law, countlesspiles were lighted, by the flames of which human society was to bepurified. 

Paracelsus divides the St. Vitus's dance into three kinds. First, thatwhich arises from imagination (_Vitista_, _Chorea imaginativa_, _aestimativa_), by which the original Dancing Plague is to be understood. Secondly, that which arises from sensual desires, depending on the will(_Chorea lasciva_). Thirdly, that which arises from corporeal causes(Chorea naturalis, coacta), which, according to a strange notion of hisown, he explained by maintaining that in certain vessels which aresusceptible of an internal pruriency, and thence produce laughter, theblood is set in commotion in consequence of an alteration in the vitalspirits, whereby involuntary fits of intoxicating joy and a propensity todance are occasioned. To this notion he was, no doubt, led from havingobserved a milder form of St. Vitus's dance, not uncommon in his time, which was accompanied by involuntary laughter; and which bore aresemblance to the hysterical laughter of the moderns, except that it wascharacterised by more pleasurable sensations and by an extravagantpropensity to dance. There was no howling, screaming, and jumping, as inthe severer form; neither was the disposition to dance by any meansinsuperable. Patients thus affected, although they had not a completecontrol over their understandings, yet were sufficiently self-possessedduring the attack to obey the directions which they received. There wereeven some among them who did not dance at all, but only felt aninvoluntary impulse to allay the internal sense of disquietude, which isthe usual forerunner of an attack of this kind, by laughter and quickwalking carried to the extent of producing fatigue. This disorder, sodifferent from the original type, evidently approximates to the modernchorea; or, rather, is in perfect accordance with it, even to the lessessential symptom of laughter. A mitigation in the form of the DancingMania had thus clearly taken place at the commencement of the sixteenthcentury. 

On the communication of the St. Vitus's dance by sympathy, Paracelsus, inhis peculiar language, expresses himself with great spirit, and shows aprofound knowledge of the nature of sensual impressions, which find theirway to the heart--the seat of joys and emotions--which overpower theopposition of reason; and whilst "all other qualities and natures" aresubdued, incessantly impel the patient, in consequence of his originalcompliance, and his all-conquering imagination, to imitate what he hasseen. On his treatment of the disease we cannot bestow any great praise, but must be content with the remark that it was in conformity with thenotions of the age in which he lived. For the first kind, which oftenoriginated in passionate excitement, he had a mental remedy, the efficacyof which is not to be despised, if we estimate its value in connectionwith the prevalent opinions of those times. The patient was to make animage of himself in wax or resin, and by an effort of thought toconcentrate all his blasphemies and sins in it. "Without theintervention of any other persons, to set his whole mind and thoughtsconcerning these oaths in the image;" and when he had succeeded in this, he was to burn the image, so that not a particle of it should remain. Inall this there was no mention made of St. Vitus, or any of the othermediatory saints, which is accounted for by the circumstance that at thistime an open rebellion against the Romish Church had begun, and theworship of saints was by many rejected as idolatrous. For the secondkind of St. Vitus's dance, arising from sensual irritation, with whichwomen were far more frequently affected than men, Paracelsus recommendedharsh treatment and strict fasting. He directed that the patients shouldbe deprived of their liberty; placed in solitary confinement, and made tosit in an uncomfortable place, until their misery brought them to theirsenses and to a feeling of penitence. He then permitted them graduallyto return to their accustomed habits. Severe corporal chastisement wasnot omitted; but, on the other hand, angry resistance on the part of thepatient was to be sedulously avoided, on the ground that it mightincrease his malady, or even destroy him: moreover, where it seemedproper, Paracelsus allayed the excitement of the nerves by immersion incold water. On the treatment of the third kind we shall not hereenlarge. It was to be effected by all sorts of wonderful remedies, composed of the quintessences; and it would require, to render itintelligible, a more extended exposition of peculiar principles thansuits our present purpose. 

SECT. 6--DECLINE AND TERMINATION OF THE DANCING PLAGUE

About this time the St. Vitus's dance began to decline, so that milderforms of it appeared more frequently, while the severer cases became morerare; and even in these, some of the important symptoms graduallydisappeared. Paracelsus makes no mention of the tympanites as takingplace after the attacks, although it may occasionally have occurred; andSchenck von Graffenberg, a celebrated physician of the latter half of thesixteenth century, speaks of this disease as having been frequent only inthe time of his forefathers; his descriptions, however, are applicable tothe whole of that century, and to the close of the fifteenth. The St. Vitus's dance attacked people of all stations, especially those who led asedentary life, such as shoemakers and tailors; but even the most robustpeasants abandoned their labours in the fields, as if they were possessedby evil spirits; and thus those affected were seen assemblingindiscriminately, from time to time, at certain appointed places, and, unless prevented by the lookers-on, continuing to dance withoutintermission, until their very last breath was expended. Their fury andextravagance of demeanour so completely deprived them of their senses, that many of them dashed their brains out against the walls and cornersof buildings, or rushed headlong into rapid rivers, where they found awatery grave. Roaring and foaming as they were, the bystanders couldonly succeed in restraining them by placing benches and chairs in theirway, so that, by the high leaps they were thus tempted to take, theirstrength might be exhausted. As soon as this was the case, they fell asit were lifeless to the ground, and, by very slow degrees, againrecovered their strength. Many there were who, even with all thisexertion, had not expended the violence of the tempest which raged withinthem, but awoke with newly-revived powers, and again and again mixed withthe crowd of dancers, until at length the violent excitement of theirdisordered nerves was allayed by the great involuntary exertion of theirlimbs; and the mental disorder was calmed by the extreme exhaustion ofthe body. Thus the attacks themselves were in these cases, as in theirnature they are in all nervous complaints, necessary crises of an inwardmorbid condition which was transferred from the sensorium to the nervesof motion, and, at an earlier period, to the abdominal plexus, where adeep-seated derangement of the system was perceptible from the secretionof flatus in the intestines. 

The cure effected by these stormy attacks was in many cases so perfect, that some patients returned to the factory or the plough as if nothinghad happened. Others, on the contrary, paid the penalty of their follyby so total a loss of power, that they could not regain their formerhealth, even by the employment of the most strengthening remedies. Medical men were astonished to observe that women in an advanced state ofpregnancy were capable of going through an attack of the disease withoutthe slightest injury to their offspring, which they protected merely by abandage passed round the waist. Cases of this kind were not infrequentso late as Schenck's time. That patients should be violently affected bymusic, and their paroxysms brought on and increased by it, is naturalwith such nervous disorders, where deeper impressions are made throughthe ear, which is the most intellectual of all the organs, than throughany of the other senses. On this account the magistrates hired musiciansfor the purpose of carrying the St. Vitus's dancers so much the quickerthrough the attacks, and directed that athletic men should be sent amongthem in order to complete the exhaustion, which had been often observedto produce a good effect. At the same time there was a prohibitionagainst wearing red garments, because, at the sight of this colour, thoseaffected became so furious that they flew at the persons who wore it, andwere so bent upon doing them an injury that they could with difficulty berestrained. They frequently tore their own clothes whilst in theparoxysm, and were guilty of other improprieties, so that the moreopulent employed confidential attendants to accompany them, and to takecare that they did no harm either to themselves or others. Thisextraordinary disease was, however, so greatly mitigated in Schenck'stime, that the St. Vitus's dancers had long since ceased to stroll fromtown to town; and that physician, like Paracelsus, makes no mention ofthe tympanitic inflation of the bowels. Moreover, most of those affectedwere only annually visited by attacks; and the occasion of them was somanifestly referable to the prevailing notions of that period, that ifthe unqualified belief in the supernatural agency of saints could havebeen abolished, they would not have had any return of the complaint. Throughout the whole of June, prior to the festival of St. John, patientsfelt a disquietude and restlessness which they were unable to overcome. They were dejected, timid, and anxious; wandered about in an unsettledstate, being tormented with twitching pains, which seized them suddenlyin different parts, and eagerly expected the eve of St. John's day, inthe confident hope that by dancing at the altars of this saint, or of St. Vitus (for in the Breisgau aid was equally sought from both), they wouldbe freed from all their sufferings. This hope was not disappointed; andthey remained, for the rest of the year, exempt from any further attack, after having thus, by dancing and raving for three hours, satisfied anirresistible demand of nature. There were at that period two chapels inthe Breisgau visited by the St. Vitus's dancers; namely, the Chapel ofSt. Vitus at Biessen, near Breisach, and that of St. John, nearWasenweiler; and it is probable that in the south-west of Germany thedisease was still in existence in the seventeenth century. 

However, it grew every year more rare, so that at the beginning of theseventeenth century it was observed only occasionally in its ancientform. Thus in the spring of the year 1623, G. Horst saw some women whoannually performed a pilgrimage to St. Vitus's chapel at Drefelhausen, near Weissenstein, in the territory of Ulm, that they might wait fortheir dancing fit there, in the same manner as those in the Breisgau did, according to Schenck's account. They were not satisfied, however, with adance of three hours' duration, but continued day and night in a state ofmental aberration, like persons in an ecstasy, until they fell exhaustedto the ground; and when they came to themselves again they felt relievedfrom a distressing uneasiness and painful sensation of weight in theirbodies, of which they had complained for several weeks prior to St. Vitus's Day. 

After this commotion they remained well for the whole year; and such wastheir faith in the protecting power of the saint, that one of them hadvisited this shrine at Drefelhausen more than twenty times, and anotherhad already kept the saint's day for the thirty-second time at thissacred station. 

The dancing fit itself was excited here, as it probably was in otherplaces, by music, from the effects of which the patients were thrown intoa state of convulsion. Many concurrent testimonies serve to show thatmusic generally contributed much to the continuance of the St. Vitus'sdance, originated and increased its paroxysms, and was sometimes thecause of their mitigation. So early as the fourteenth century the swarmsof St. John's dancers were accompanied by minstrels playing upon noisyinstruments, who roused their morbid feelings; and it may readily besupposed that by the performance of lively melodies, and the stimulatingeffects which the shrill tones of fifes and trumpets would produce, aparoxysm that was perhaps but slight in itself, might, in many cases, beincreased to the most outrageous fury, such as in later times waspurposely induced in order that the force of the disease might beexhausted by the violence of its attack. Moreover, by means ofintoxicating music a kind of demoniacal festival for the rude multitudewas established, which had the effect of spreading this unhappy maladywider and wider. Soft harmony was, however, employed to calm theexcitement of those affected, and it is mentioned as a character of thetunes played with this view to the St. Vitus's dancers, that theycontained transitions from a quick to a slow measure, and passedgradually from a high to a low key. It is to be regretted that no traceof this music has reached out times, which is owing partly to thedisastrous events of the seventeenth century, and partly to thecircumstance that the disorder was looked upon as entirely national, andonly incidentally considered worthy of notice by foreign men of learning. If the St. Vitus's dance was already on the decline at the commencementof the seventeenth century, the subsequent events were altogether adverseto its continuance. Wars carried on with animosity, and with varioussuccess, for thirty years, shook the west of Europe; and although theunspeakable calamities which they brought upon Germany, both during theircontinuance and in their immediate consequences, were by no meansfavourable to the advance of knowledge, yet, with the vehemence of apurifying fire, they gradually effected the intellectual regeneration ofthe Germans; superstition, in her ancient form, never again appeared, andthe belief in the dominion of spirits, which prevailed in the middleages, lost for ever its once formidable power. 

CHAPTER II--THE DANCING MANIA IN ITALY

SECT. 1--TARANTISM

It was of the utmost advantage to the St. Vitus's dancers that they madechoice of a favourite patron saint; for, not to mention that people wereinclined to compare them to the possessed with evil spirits described inthe Bible, and thence to consider them as innocent victims to the powerof Satan, the name of their great intercessor recommended them to generalcommiseration, and a magic boundary was thus set to every harsh feeling, which might otherwise have proved hostile to their safety. Otherfanatics were not so fortunate, being often treated with the mostrelentless cruelty, whenever the notions of the middle ages eitherexcused or commanded it as a religious duty. Thus, passing over theinnumerable instances of the burning of witches, who were, after all, only labouring under a delusion, the Teutonic knights in Prussia notunfrequently condemned those maniacs to the stake who imagined themselvesto be metamorphosed into wolves--an extraordinary species of insanity, which, having existed in Greece before our era, spread, in process oftime over Europe, so that it was communicated not only to the Romaic, butalso to the German and Sarmatian nations, and descended from the ancientsas a legacy of affliction to posterity. In modern times Lycanthropy--suchwas the name given to this infatuation--has vanished from the earth, butit is nevertheless well worthy the consideration of the observer of humanaberrations, and a history of it by some writer who is equally wellacquainted with the middle ages as with antiquity is still a desideratum. We leave it for the present without further notice, and turn to a maladymost extraordinary in all its phenomena, having a close connection withthe St. Vitus's dance, and, by a comparison of facts which are altogethersimilar, affording us an instructive subject for contemplation. Weallude to the disease called Tarantism, which made its first appearancein Apulia, and thence spread over the other provinces of Italy, where, during some centuries, it prevailed as a great epidemic. In the presenttimes, it has vanished, or at least has lost altogether its originalimportance, like the St. Vitus's dance, lycanthropy, and witchcraft. 

SECT. 2--MOST ANCIENT TRACES--CAUSES

The learned Nicholas Perotti gives the earliest account of this strangedisorder. Nobody had the least doubt that it was caused by the bite ofthe tarantula, a ground-spider common in Apulia: and the fear of thisinsect was so general that its bite was in all probability much oftenerimagined, or the sting of some other kind of insect mistaken for it, thanactually received. The word tarantula is apparently the same asterrantola, a name given by the Italians to the stellio of the oldRomans, which was a kind of lizard, said to be poisonous, and invested bycredulity with such extraordinary qualities, that, like the serpent ofthe Mosaic account of the Creation, it personified, in the imaginationsof the vulgar, the notion of cunning, so that even the jurists designateda cunning fraud by the appellation of a "stellionatus. " Perottiexpressly assures us that this reptile was called by the Romanstarantula; and since he himself, who was one of the most distinguishedauthors of his time, strangely confounds spiders and lizards together, sothat he considers the Apulian tarantula, which he ranks among the classof spiders, to have the same meaning as the kind of lizard called [Greektext], it is the less extraordinary that the unlearned country people ofApulia should confound the much-dreaded ground-spider with the fabulousstar-lizard, and appropriate to the one the name of the other. Thederivation of the word tarantula, from the city of Tarentum, or the riverThara, in Apulia, on the banks of which this insect is said to have beenmost frequently found, or, at least, its bite to have had the mostvenomous effect, seems not to be supported by authority. So much for thename of this famous spider, which, unless we are greatly mistaken, throwsno light whatever upon the nature of the disease in question. Naturalistswho, possessing a knowledge of the past, should not misapply theirtalents by employing them in establishing the dry distinction of forms, would find here much that calls for research, and their efforts wouldclear up many a perplexing obscurity. 

Perotti states that the tarantula--that is, the spider so called--was notmet with in Italy in former times, but that in his day it had becomecommon, especially in Apulia, as well as in some other districts. Hedeserves, however, no great confidence as a naturalist, notwithstandinghis having delivered lectures in Bologna on medicine and other sciences. He at least has neglected to prove his assertion, which is not borne outby any analogous phenomenon observed in modern times with regard to thehistory of the spider species. It is by no means to be admitted that thetarantula did not make its appearance in Italy before the diseaseascribed to its bite became remarkable, even though tempests more violentthan those unexampled storms which arose at the time of the Black Deathin the middle of the fourteenth century had set the insect world inmotion; for the spider is little if at all susceptible of those cosmicalinfluences which at times multiply locusts and other winged insects to awonderful extent, and compel them to migrate. 

The symptoms which Perotti enumerates as consequent on the bite of thetarantula agree very exactly with those described by later writers. Thosewho were bitten, generally fell into a state of melancholy, and appearedto be stupefied, and scarcely in possession of their senses. Thiscondition was, in many cases, united with so great a sensibility tomusic, that at the very first tones of their favourite melodies theysprang up, shouting for joy, and danced on without intermission, untilthey sank to the ground exhausted and almost lifeless. In others, thedisease did not take this cheerful turn. They wept constantly, and as ifpining away with some unsatisfied desire, spent their days in thegreatest misery and anxiety. Others, again, in morbid fits of love, casttheir longing looks on women, and instances of death are recorded, whichare said to have occurred under a paroxysm of either laughing or weeping. 

From this description, incomplete as it is, we may easily gather thattarantism, the essential symptoms of which are mentioned in it, could nothave originated in the fifteenth century, to which Perotti's accountrefers; for that author speaks of it as a well-known malady, and statesthat the omission to notice it by older writers was to be ascribed solelyto the want of education in Apulia, the only province probably where thedisease at that time prevailed. A nervous disorder that had arrived atso high a degree of development must have been long in existence, anddoubtless had required an elaborate preparation by the concurrence ofgeneral causes. 

The symptoms which followed the bite of venomous spiders were well knownto the ancients, and had excited the attention of their best observers, who agree in their descriptions of them. It is probable that among thenumerous species of their phalangium, the Apulian tarantula is included, but it is difficult to determine this point with certainty, moreespecially because in Italy the tarantula was not the only insect whichcaused this nervous affection, similar results being likewise attributedto the bite of the scorpion. Lividity of the whole body, as well as ofthe countenance, difficulty of speech, tremor of the limbs, icy coldness, pale urine, depression of spirits, headache, a flow of tears, nausea, vomiting, sexual excitement, flatulence, syncope, dysuria, watchfulness, lethargy, even death itself, were cited by them as the consequences ofbeing bitten by venomous spiders, and they made little distinction as totheir kinds. To these symptoms we may add the strange rumour, repeatedthroughout the middle ages, that persons who were bitten, ejected by thebowels and kidneys, and even by vomiting, substances resembling aspider's web. 

Nowhere, however, do we find any mention made that those affected felt anirresistible propensity to dancing, or that they were accidentally curedby it. Even Constantine of Africa, who lived 500 years after Aetius, and, as the most learned physician of the school of Salerno, wouldcertainly not have passed over so acceptable a subject of remark, knowsnothing of such a memorable course of this disease arising from poison, and merely repeats the observations of his Greek predecessors. Gariopontus, a Salernian physician of the eleventh century, was the firstto describe a kind of insanity, the remote affinity of which to thetarantula disease is rendered apparent by a very striking symptom. Thepatients in their sudden attacks behaved like maniacs, sprang up, throwing their arms about with wild movements, and, if perchance a swordwas at hand, they wounded themselves and others, so that it becamenecessary carefully to secure them. They imagined that they heard voicesand various kinds of sounds, and if, during this state of illusion, thetones of a favourite instrument happened to catch their ear, theycommenced a spasmodic dance, or ran with the utmost energy which theycould muster until they were totally exhausted. These dangerous maniacs, who, it would seem, appeared in considerable numbers, were looked upon asa legion of devils, but on the causes of their malady this obscure writeradds nothing further than that he believes (oddly enough) that it maysometimes be excited by the bite of a mad dog. He calls the diseaseAnteneasmus, by which is meant no doubt the Enthusiasmus of the Greekphysicians. We cite this phenomenon as an important forerunner oftarantism, under the conviction that we have thus added to the evidencethat the development of this latter must have been founded oncircumstances which existed from the twelfth to the end of the fourteenthcentury; for the origin of tarantism itself is referable, with the utmostprobability, to a period between the middle and the end of this century, and is consequently contemporaneous with that of the St. Vitus's dance(1374). The influence of the Roman Catholic religion, connected as thiswas, in the middle ages, with the pomp of processions, with publicexercises of penance, and with innumerable practices which stronglyexcited the imaginations of its votaries, certainly brought the mind to avery favourable state for the reception of a nervous disorder. Accordingly, so long as the doctrines of Christianity were blended withso much mysticism, these unhallowed disorders prevailed to an importantextent, and even in our own days we find them propagated with thegreatest facility where the existence of superstition produces the sameeffect, in more limited districts, as it once did among whole nations. But this is not all. Every country in Europe, and Italy perhaps morethan any other, was visited during the middle ages by frightful plagues, which followed each other in such quick succession that they gave theexhausted people scarcely any time for recovery. The Orientalbubo-plague ravaged Italy sixteen times between the years 1119 and 1340. Small-pox and measles were still more destructive than in modern times, and recurred as frequently. St. Anthony's fire was the dread of town andcountry; and that disgusting disease, the leprosy, which, in consequenceof the Crusades, spread its insinuating poison in all directions, snatched from the paternal hearth innumerable victims who, banished fromhuman society, pined away in lonely huts, whither they were accompaniedonly by the pity of the benevolent and their own despair. All thesecalamities, of which the moderns have scarcely retained any recollection, were heightened to an incredible degree by the Black Death, which spreadboundless devastation and misery over Italy. Men's minds were everywheremorbidly sensitive; and as it happened with individuals whose senses, when they are suffering under anxiety, become more irritable, so thattrifles are magnified into objects of great alarm, and slight shocks, which would scarcely affect the spirits when in health, gave rise in themto severe diseases, so was it with this whole nation, at all times soalive to emotions, and at that period so sorely oppressed with thehorrors of death. 

The bite of venomous spiders, or rather the unreasonable fear of itsconsequences, excited at such a juncture, though it could not have doneso at an earlier period, a violent nervous disorder, which, like St. Vitus's dance in Germany, spread by sympathy, increasing in severity asit took a wider range, and still further extending its ravages from itslong continuance. Thus, from the middle of the fourteenth century, thefuries of _the Dance_ brandished their scourge over afflicted mortals;and music, for which the inhabitants of Italy, now probably for the firsttime, manifested susceptibility and talent, became capable of excitingecstatic attacks in those affected, and then furnished the magical meansof exorcising their melancholy. 

SECT. 3--INCREASE

At the close of the fifteenth century we find that tarantism had spreadbeyond the boundaries of Apulia, and that the fear of being bitten byvenomous spiders had increased. Nothing short of death itself wasexpected from the wound which these insects inflicted, and if those whowere bitten escaped with their lives, they were said to be seen piningaway in a desponding state of lassitude. Many became weak-sighted orhard of hearing, some lost the power of speech, and all were insensibleto ordinary causes of excitement. Nothing but the flute or the cithernafforded them relief. At the sound of these instruments they awoke as itwere by enchantment, opened their eyes, and moving slowly at first, according to the measure of the music, were, as the time quickened, gradually hurried on to the most passionate dance. It was generallyobservable that country people, who were rude, and ignorant of music, evinced on these occasions an unusual degree of grace, as if they hadbeen well practised in elegant movements of the body; for it is apeculiarity in nervous disorders of this kind, that the organs of motionare in an altered condition, and are completely under the control of theover-strained spirits. Cities and villages alike resounded throughoutthe summer season with the notes of fifes, clarinets, and Turkish drums;and patients were everywhere to be met with who looked to dancing astheir only remedy. Alexander ab Alexandro, who gives this account, saw ayoung man in a remote village who was seized with a violent attack oftarantism. He listened with eagerness and a fixed stare to the sound ofa drum, and his graceful movements gradually became more and moreviolent, until his dancing was converted into a succession of franticleaps, which required the utmost exertion of his whole strength. In themidst of this over-strained exertion of mind and body the music suddenlyceased, and he immediately fell powerless to the ground, where he laysenseless and motionless until its magical effect again aroused him to arenewal of his impassioned performances. 

At the period of which we are treating there was a general conviction, that by music and dancing the poison of the tarantula was distributedover the whole body, and expelled through the skin, but that if thereremained the slightest vestige of it in the vessels, this became apermanent germ of the disorder, so that the dancing fits might again andagain be excited ad infinitum by music. This belief, which resembled thedelusion of those insane persons who, being by artful management freedfrom the imagined causes of their sufferings, are but for a short timereleased from their false notions, was attended with the most injuriouseffects: for in consequence of it those affected necessarily became bydegrees convinced of the incurable nature of their disorder. Theyexpected relief, indeed, but not a cure, from music; and when the heat ofsummer awakened a recollection of the dances of the preceding year, they, like the St. Vitus's dancers of the same period before St. Vitus's day, again grew dejected and misanthropic, until, by music and dancing, theydispelled the melancholy which had become with them a kind of sensualenjoyment. 

Under such favourable circumstances, it is clear that tarantism mustevery year have made further progress. The number of those affected byit increased beyond all belief, for whoever had either actually been, oreven fancied that he had been, once bitten by a poisonous spider orscorpion, made his appearance annually wherever the merry notes of thetarantella resounded. Inquisitive females joined the throng and caughtthe disease, not indeed from the poison of the spider, but from themental poison which they eagerly received through the eye; and thus thecure of the tarantati gradually became established as a regular festivalof the populace, which was anticipated with impatient delight. 

Without attributing more to deception and fraud than to the peculiarnature of a progressive mental malady, it may readily be conceived thatthe cases of this strange disorder now grew more frequent. Thecelebrated Matthioli, who is worthy of entire confidence, gives hisaccount as an eye-witness. He saw the same extraordinary effectsproduced by music as Alexandro, for, however tortured with pain, howeverhopeless of relief the patients appeared, as they lay stretched on thecouch of sickness, at the very first sounds of those melodies which madean impression on them--but this was the case only with the tarantellascomposed expressly for the purpose--they sprang up as if inspired withnew life and spirit, and, unmindful of their disorder, began to move inmeasured gestures, dancing for hour together without fatigue, until, covered with a kindly perspiration, they felt a salutary degree oflassitude, which relieved them for a time at least, perhaps even for awhole year, from their defection and oppressive feeling of generalindisposition. Alexandro's experience of the injurious effects resultingfrom a sudden cessation of the music was generally confirmed byMatthioli. If the clarinets and drums ceased for a single moment, which, as the most skilful payers were tired out by the patients, could not buthappen occasionally, they suffered their limbs to fall listless, againsank exhausted to the ground, and could find no solace but in a renewalof the dance. On this account care was taken to continue the music untilexhaustion was produced; for it was better to pay a few extra musicians, who might relieve each other, than to permit the patient, in the midst ofthis curative exercise, to relapse into so deplorable a state ofsuffering. The attack consequent upon the bite of the tarantula, Matthioli describes as varying much in its manner. Some became morbidlyexhilarated, so that they remained for a long while without sleep, laughing, dancing, and singing in a state of the greatest excitement. Others, on the contrary, were drowsy. The generality felt nausea andsuffered from vomiting, and some had constant tremors. Complete maniawas no uncommon occurrence, not to mention the usual dejection of spiritsand other subordinate symptoms. 

SECT. 4--IDIOSYNCRASIES--MUSIC

Unaccountable emotions, strange desires, and morbid sensual irritationsof all kinds, were as prevalent as in the St. Vitus's dance and similargreat nervous maladies. So late as the sixteenth century patients wereseen armed with glittering swords which, during the attack, theybrandished with wild gestures, as if they were going to engage in afencing match. Even women scorned all female delicacy, and, adoptingthis impassioned demeanour, did the same; and this phenomenon, as well asthe excitement which the tarantula dancers felt at the sight of anythingwith metallic lustre, was quite common up to the period when, in moderntimes, the disease disappeared. 

The abhorrence of certain colours, and the agreeable sensations producedby others, were much more marked among the excitable Italians than wasthe case in the St. Vitus's dance with the more phlegmatic Germans. Redcolours, which the St. Vitus's dancers detested, they generally liked, sothat a patient was seldom seen who did not carry a red handkerchief forhis gratification, or greedily feast his eyes on any articles of redclothing worn by the bystanders. Some preferred yellow, others blackcolours, of which an explanation was sought, according to the prevailingnotions of the times, in the difference of temperaments. Others, again, were enraptured with green; and eye-witnesses describe this rage forcolours as so extraordinary, that they can scarcely find words with whichto express their astonishment. No sooner did the patients obtain a sightof the favourite colour than, new as the impression was, they rushed likeinfuriated animals towards the object, devoured it with their eagerlooks, kissed and caressed it in every possible way, and graduallyresigning themselves to softer sensations, adopted the languishingexpression of enamoured lovers, and embraced the handkerchief, orwhatever other article it might be, which was presented to them, with themost intense ardour, while the tears streamed from their eyes as if theywere completely overwhelmed by the inebriating impression on theirsenses. 

The dancing fits of a certain Capuchin friar in Tarentum excited so muchcuriosity, that Cardinal Cajetano proceeded to the monastery, that hemight see with his own eyes what was going on. As soon as the monk, whowas in the midst of his dance, perceived the spiritual prince clothed inhis red garments, he no longer listened to the tarantella of themusicians, but with strange gestures endeavoured to approach theCardinal, as if he wished to count the very threads of his scarlet robe, and to allay his intense longing by its odour. The interference of thespectators, and his own respect, prevented his touching it, and thus theirritation of his senses not being appeased, he fell into a state of suchanguish and disquietude, that he presently sank down in a swoon, fromwhich he did not recover until the Cardinal compassionately gave him hiscape. This he immediately seized in the greatest ecstasy, and pressednow to his breast, now to his forehead and cheeks, and then againcommenced his dance as if in the frenzy of a love fit. 

At the sight of colours which they disliked, patients flew into the mostviolent rage, and, like the St. Vitus's dancers when they saw redobjects, could scarcely be restrained from tearing the clothes of thosespectators who raised in them such disagreeable sensations. 

Another no less extraordinary symptom was the ardent longing for the seawhich the patients evinced. As the St. John's dancers of the fourteenthcentury saw, in the spirit, the heavens open and display all thesplendour of the saints, so did those who were suffering under the biteof the tarantula feel themselves attracted to the boundless expanse ofthe blue ocean, and lost themselves in its contemplation. Some songs, which are still preserved, marked this peculiar longing, which wasmoreover expressed by significant music, and was excited even by the baremention of the sea. Some, in whom this susceptibility was carried to thegreatest pitch, cast themselves with blind fury into the blue waves, asthe St. Vitus's dancers occasionally did into rapid rivers. Thiscondition, so opposite to the frightful state of hydrophobia, betrayeditself in others only in the pleasure afforded them by the sight of clearwater in glasses. These they bore in their hands while dancing, exhibiting at the same time strange movements, and giving way to the mostextravagant expressions of their feeling. They were delighted also when, in the midst of the space allotted for this exercise, more ample vessels, filled with water, and surrounded by rushes and water plants, wereplaced, in which they bathed their heads and arms with evident pleasure. Others there were who rolled about on the ground, and were, by their owndesire, buried up to the neck in the earth, in order to alleviate themisery of their condition; not to mention an endless variety of othersymptoms which showed the perverted action of the nerves. 

All these modes of relief, however, were as nothing in comparison withthe irresistible charms of musical sound. Attempts had indeed been madein ancient times to mitigate the pain of sciatica, or the paroxysms ofmania, by the soft melody of the flute, and, what is still moreapplicable to the present purpose, to remove the danger arising from thebite of vipers by the same means. This, however, was tried only to avery small extent. But after being bitten by the tarantula, there was, according to popular opinion, no way of saving life except by music; andit was hardly considered as an exception to the general rule, that everynow and then the bad effects of a wound were prevented by placing aligature on the bitten limb, or by internal medicine, or that strongpersons occasionally withstood the effects of the poison, without theemployment of any remedies at all. It was much more common, and is quitein accordance with the nature of so exquisite a nervous disease, to hearaccounts of many who, when bitten by the tarantula, perished miserablybecause the tarantella, which would have afforded them deliverance, wasnot played to them. It was customary, therefore, so early as thecommencement of the seventeenth century, for whole bands of musicians totraverse Italy during the summer months, and, what is quite unexampledeither in ancient or modern times, the cure of the Tarantati in thedifferent towns and villages was undertaken on a grand scale. Thisseason of dancing and music was called "the women's little carnival, " forit was women more especially who conducted the arrangements; so thatthroughout the whole country they saved up their spare money, for thepurpose of rewarding the welcome musicians, and many of them neglectedtheir household employments to participate in this festival of the sick. Mention is even made of one benevolent lady (Mita Lupa) who had expendedher whole fortune on this object. 

The music itself was of a kind perfectly adapted to the nature of themalady, and it made so deep an impression on the Italians, that even tothe present time, long since the extinction of the disorder, they haveretained the tarantella, as a particular species of music employed forquick, lively dancing. The different kinds of tarantella weredistinguished, very significantly, by particular names, which hadreference to the moods observed in the patients. Whence it appears thatthey aimed at representing by these tunes even the idiosyncrasies of themind as expressed in the countenance. Thus there was one kind oftarantella which was called "Panno rosso, " a very lively, impassionedstyle of music, to which wild dithyrambic songs were adapted; another, called "Panno verde, " which was suited to the milder excitement of thesenses caused by green colours, and set to Idyllian songs of verdantfields and shady groves. A third was named "Cinque tempi:" a fourth"Moresca, " which was played to a Moorish dance; a fifth, "Catena;" and asixth, with a very appropriate designation, "Spallata, " as if it wereonly fit to be played to dancers who were lame in the shoulder. This wasthe slowest and least in vogue of all. For those who loved water theytook care to select love songs, which were sung to corresponding music, and such persons delighted in hearing of gushing springs and rushingcascades and streams. It is to be regretted that on this subject we areunable to give any further information, for only small fragments ofsongs, and a very few tarantellas, have been preserved which belong to aperiod so remote as the beginning of the seventeenth, or at furthest theend of the sixteenth century. 

The music was almost wholly in the Turkish style (aria Turchesca), andthe ancient songs of the peasantry of Apulia, which increased in numberannually, were well suited to the abrupt and lively notes of the Turkishdrum and the shepherd's pipe. These two instruments were the favouritesin the country, but others of all kinds were played in towns andvillages, as an accompaniment to the dances of the patients and the songsof the spectators. If any particular melody was disliked by thoseaffected, they indicated their displeasure by violent gestures expressiveof aversion. They could not endure false notes, and it is remarkablethat uneducated boors, who had never in their lives manifested anyperception of the enchanting power of harmony, acquired, in this respect, an extremely refined sense of hearing, as if they had been initiated intothe profoundest secrets of the musical art. It was a matter of everyday's experience, that patients showed a predilection for certaintarantellas, in preference to others, which gave rise to the compositionof a great variety of these dances. They were likewise very capriciousin their partialities for particular instruments; so that some longed forthe shrill notes of the trumpet, others for the softest music produced bythe vibration of strings. 

Tarantism was at its greatest height in Italy in the seventeenth century, long after the St. Vitus's Dance of Germany had disappeared. It was notthe natives of the country only who were attacked by this complaint. Foreigners of every colour and of every race, negroes, gipsies, Spaniards, Albanians, were in like manner affected by it. Against theeffects produced by the tarantula's bite, or by the sight of thesufferers, neither youth nor age afforded any protection; so that evenold men of ninety threw aside their crutches at the sound of thetarantella, and, as if some magic potion, restorative of youth andvigour, were flowing through their veins, joined the most extravagantdancers. Ferdinando saw a boy five years old seized with the dancingmania, in consequence of the bite of a tarantula, and, what is almostpast belief, were it not supported by the testimony of so credible an eye-witness, even deaf people were not exempt from this disorder, so potentin its effect was the very sight of those affected, even without theexhilarating emotions caused by music. 

Subordinate nervous attacks were much more frequent during this centurythan at any former period, and an extraordinary icy coldness was observedin those who were the subject of them; so that they did not recover theirnatural heat until they had engaged in violent dancing. Their anguishand sense of oppression forced from them a cold perspiration; thesecretion from the kidneys was pale, and they had so great a dislike toeverything cold, that when water was offered them they pushed it awaywith abhorrence. Wine, on the contrary, they all drank willingly, without being heated by it, or in the slightest degree intoxicated. During the whole period of the attack they suffered from spasms in thestomach, and felt a disinclination to take food of any kind. They usedto abstain some time before the expected seizures from meat and fromsnails, which they thought rendered them more severe, and their greatthirst for wine may therefore in some measure be attributable to the wantof a more nutritious diet; yet the disorder of the nerves was evidentlyits chief cause, and the loss of appetite, as well as the necessity forsupport by wine, were its effects. Loss of voice, occasional blindness, vertigo, complete insanity, with sleeplessness, frequent weeping withoutany ostensible cause, were all usual symptoms. Many patients foundrelief from being placed in swings or rocked in cradles; others requiredto be roused from their state of suffering by severe blows on the solesof their feet; others beat themselves, without any intention of making adisplay, but solely for the purpose of allaying the intense nervousirritation which they felt; and a considerable number were seen withtheir bellies swollen, like those of the St. John's dancers, while theviolence of the intestinal disorder was indicated in others by obstinateconstipation or diarrhoea and vomiting. These pitiable objects graduallylost their strength and their colour, and creeping about with injectedeyes, jaundiced complexions, and inflated bowels, soon fell into a stateof profound melancholy, which found food and solace in the solemn tollingof the funeral bell, and in an abode among the tombs of cemeteries, as isrelated of the Lycanthropes of former times. 

The persuasion of the inevitable consequences of being bitten by thetarantula, exercised a dominion over men's minds which even thehealthiest and strongest could not shake off. So late as the middle ofthe sixteenth century, the celebrated Fracastoro found the robust bailiffof his landed estate groaning, and, with the aspect of a person in theextremity of despair, suffering the very agonies of death from a sting inthe neck, inflicted by an insect which was believed to be a tarantula. Hekindly administered without delay a potion of vinegar and Armenian bole, the great remedy of those days for the plague of all kinds of animalpoisons, and the dying man was, as if by a miracle, restored to life andthe power of speech. Now, since it is quite out of the question that thebole could have anything to do with the result in this case, notwithstanding Fracastoro's belief in its virtues, we can only accountfor the cure by supposing, that a confidence in so great a physicianprevailed over this fatal disease of the imagination, which wouldotherwise have yielded to scarcely any other remedy except thetarantella. Ferdinando was acquainted with women who, for thirty yearsin succession, had overcome the attacks of this disorder by a renewal oftheir annual dance--so long did they maintain their belief in the yetundestroyed poison of the tarantula's bite, and so long did that mentalaffection continue to exist, after it had ceased to depend on anycorporeal excitement. 

Wherever we turn, we find that this morbid state of mind prevailed, andwas so supported by the opinions of the age, that it needed only astimulus in the bite of the tarantula, and the supposed certainty of itsvery disastrous consequences, to originate this violent nervous disorder. Even in Ferdinando's time there were many who altogether denied thepoisonous effects of the tarantula's bite, whilst they considered thedisorder, which annually set Italy in commotion, to be a melancholydepending on the imagination. They dearly expiated this scepticism, however, when they were led, with an inconsiderate hardihood, to testtheir opinions by experiment; for many of them became the subjects ofsevere tarantism, and even a distinguished prelate, Jo. Baptist Quinzato, Bishop of Foligno, having allowed himself, by way of a joke, to be bittenby a tarantula, could obtain a cure in no other way than by being, through the influence of the tarantella, compelled to dance. Othersamong the clergy, who wished to shut their ears against music, becausethey considered dancing derogatory to their station, fell into adangerous state of illness by thus delaying the crisis of the malady, andwere obliged at last to save themselves from a miserable death bysubmitting to the unwelcome but sole means of cure. Thus it appears thatthe age was so little favourable to freedom of thought, that even themost decided sceptics, incapable of guarding themselves against therecollection of what had been presented to the eye, were subdued by apoison, the powers of which they had ridiculed, and which was in itselfinert in its effect. 

SECT. 5--HYSTERIA

Different characteristics of the morbidly excited vitality having beenrendered prominent by tarantism in different individuals, it could notbut happen that other derangements of the nerves would assume the form ofthis whenever circumstances favoured such a transition. This was moreespecially the case with hysteria, that proteiform and mutable disorder, in which the imaginations, the superstitions, and the follies of all ageshave been evidently reflected. The "Carnevaletto delle Donne" appearedmost opportunely for those who were hysterical. Their disease receivedfrom it, as it had at other times from other extraordinary customs, apeculiar direction; so that, whether bitten by the tarantula or not, theyfelt compelled to participate in the dances of those affected, and tomake their appearance at this popular festival, where they had anopportunity of triumphantly exhibiting their sufferings. Let us herepause to consider the kind of life which the women in Italy led. Lonely, and deprived by cruel custom of social intercourse, that fairest of allenjoyments, they dragged on a miserable existence. Cheerfulness and aninclination to sensual pleasures passed into compulsory idleness, and, inmany, into black despondency. Their imaginations became disordered--apallid countenance and oppressed respiration bore testimony to theirprofound sufferings. How could they do otherwise, sunk as they were insuch extreme misery, than seize the occasion to burst forth from theirprisons and alleviate their miseries by taking part in the delights ofmusic? Nor should we here pass unnoticed a circumstance whichillustrates, in a remarkable degree, the psychological nature ofhysterical sufferings, namely, that many chlorotic females, by joiningthe dancers at the Carnevaletto, were freed from their spasms andoppression of breathing for the whole year, although the corporeal causeof their malady was not removed. After such a result, no one could calltheir self-deception a mere imposture, and unconditionally condemn it assuch. 

This numerous class of patients certainly contributed not a little to themaintenance of the evil, for their fantastic sufferings, in whichdissimulation and reality could scarcely be distinguished even bythemselves, much less by their physicians, were imitated in the same wayas the distortions of the St. Vitus's dancers by the impostors of thatperiod. It was certainly by these persons also that the number ofsubordinate symptoms was increased to an endless extent, as may beconceived from the daily observation of hysterical patients who, from amorbid desire to render themselves remarkable, deviate from the laws ofmoral propriety. Powerful sexual excitement had often the most decidedinfluence over their condition. Many of them exposed themselves in themost indecent manner, tore their hair out by the roots, with howling andgnashing of their teeth; and when, as was sometimes the case, theirunsatisfied passion hurried them on to a state of frenzy, they closedtheir existence by self destruction; it being common at that time forthese unfortunate beings to precipitate themselves into the wells. 

It might hence seem that, owing to the conduct of patients of thisdescription, so much of fraud and falsehood would be mixed up with theoriginal disorder that, having passed into another complaint, it musthave been itself destroyed. This, however, did not happen in the firsthalf of the seventeenth century; for, as a clear proof that tarantismremained substantially the same and quite unaffected by hysteria, therewere in many places, and in particular at Messapia, fewer women affectedthan men, who, in their turn, were in no small proportion led intotemptation by sexual excitement. In other places, as, for example, atBrindisi, the case was reversed, which may, as in other complaints, be insome measure attributable to local causes. Upon the whole it appears, from concurrent accounts, that women by no means enjoyed the distinctionof being attacked by tarantism more frequently than men. 

It is said that the cicatrix of the tarantula bite, on the yearly or half-yearly return of the fit, became discoloured, but on this point thedistinct testimony of good observers is wanting to deprive the assertionof its utter improbability. 

It is not out of place to remark here that, about the same time thattarantism attained its greatest height in Italy, the bite of venomousspiders was more feared in distant parts of Asia likewise than it hadever been within the memory of man. There was this difference, however--that the symptoms supervening on the occurrence of this accidentwere not accompanied by the Apulian nervous disorder, which, as has beenshown in the foregoing pages, had its origin rather in the melancholictemperament of the inhabitants of the south of Italy than in the natureof the tarantula poison itself. This poison is therefore, doubtless, tobe considered only as a remote cause of the complaint, which, but forthat temperament, would be inadequate to its production. The Persiansemployed a very rough means of counteracting the bad consequences of apoison of this sort. They drenched the wounded person with milk, andthen, by a violent rotatory motion in a suspended box, compelled him tovomit. 

SECT. 6--DECREASE

The Dancing Mania, arising from the tarantula bite, continued with allthose additions of self-deception and of the dissimulation which is sucha constant attendant on nervous disorders of this kind, through the wholecourse of the seventeenth century. It was indeed, gradually on thedecline, but up to the termination of this period showed suchextraordinary symptoms that Baglivi, one of the best physicians of thattime, thought he did a service to science by making them the subject of adissertation. He repeats all the observations of Ferdinando, andsupports his own assertions by the experience of his father, a physicianat Lecce, whose testimony, as an eye-witness, may be admitted asunexceptionable. 

The immediate consequences of the tarantula bite, the supervening nervousdisorder, and the aberrations and fits of those who suffered fromhysteria, he describes in a masterly style, not does he ever suffer hiscredulity to diminish the authenticity of his account, of which he hasbeen unjustly accused by later writers. 

Finally, tarantism has declined more and more in modern times, and is nowlimited to single cases. How could it possibly have maintained itselfunchanged in the eighteenth century, when all the links which connectedit with the Middle Ages had long since been snapped asunder? Imposturegrew more frequent, and wherever the disease still appeared in itsgenuine form, its chief cause, namely, a peculiar cast of melancholy, which formerly had been the temperament of thousands, was now possessedonly occasionally by unfortunate individuals. It might, therefore, notunreasonably be maintained that the tarantism of modern times bearsnearly the same relation to the original malady as the St. Vitus's dancewhich still exists, and certainly has all along existed, bears, incertain cases, to the original dancing mania of the dancers of St. John. 

To conclude. Tarantism, as a real disease, has been denied in toto, andstigmatised as an imposition by most physicians and naturalists, who inthis controversy have shown the narrowness of their views and their utterignorance of history. In order to support their opinion they haveinstituted some experiments apparently favourable to it, but undercircumstances altogether inapplicable, since, for the most part, theyselected as the subjects of them none but healthy men, who were totallyuninfluenced by a belief in this once so dreaded disease. Fromindividual instances of fraud and dissimulation, such as are found inconnection with most nervous affections without rendering their reality amatter of any doubt, they drew a too hasty conclusion respecting thegeneral phenomenon, of which they appeared not to know that it hadcontinued for nearly four hundred years, having originated in theremotest periods of the Middle Ages. The most learned and the most acuteamong these sceptics is Serao the Neapolitan. His reasonings amount tothis, that he considers the disease to be a very marked form ofmelancholia, and compares the effect of the tarantula bite upon it tostimulating with spurs a horse which is already running. The reality ofthat effect he thus admits, and, therefore, directly confirms what inappearance only he denies. By shaking the already vacillating belief inthis disorder he is said to have actually succeeded in rendering it lessfrequent, and in setting bounds to imposture; but this no more disprovesthe reality of its existence than the oft repeated detection ofimposition has been able in modern times to banish magnetic sleep fromthe circle of natural phenomena, though such detection has, on its side, rendered more rare the incontestable effects of animal magnetism. Otherphysicians and naturalists have delivered their sentiments on tarantism, but as they have not possessed an enlarged knowledge of its history theirviews do not merit particular exposition. It is sufficient for thecomprehension of everyone that we have presented the facts from allextraneous speculation. 

CHAPTER III--THE DANCING MANIA IN ABYSSINIA

SECT. 1--TIGRETIER

Both the St. Vitus's dance and tarantism belonged to the ages in whichthey appeared. They could not have existed under the same latitude atany other epoch, for at no other period were the circumstances whichprepared the way for them combined in a similar relation to each other, and the mental as well as corporeal temperaments of nations, which dependon causes such as have been stated, are as little capable of renewal asthe different stages of life in individuals. This gives so much the moreimportance to a disease but cursorily alluded to in the foregoing pages, which exists in Abyssinia, and which nearly resembles the original maniaof the St. John's dancers, inasmuch as it exhibits a perfectly similarecstasy, with the same violent effect on the nerves of motion. It occursmost frequently in the Tigre country, being thence call Tigretier, and isprobably the same malady which is called in Ethiopian languageAstaragaza. On this subject we will introduce the testimony of NathanielPearce, an eye-witness, who resided nine years in Abyssinia. "TheTigretier, " he says he, "is more common among the women than among themen. It seizes the body as if with a violent fever, and from that turnsto a lingering sickness, which reduces the patients to skeletons, andoften kills them if the relations cannot procure the proper remedy. During this sickness their speech is changed to a kind of stuttering, which no one can understand but those afflicted with the same disorder. When the relations find the malady to be the real tigretier, they jointogether to defray the expense of curing it; the first remedy they ingeneral attempt is to procure the assistance of a learned Dofter, whoreads the Gospel of St. John, and drenches the patient with cold waterdaily for the space of seven days, an application that very often provesfatal. The most effectual cure, though far more expensive than theformer, is as follows:--The relations hire for a certain sum of money aband of trumpeters, drummers, and fifers, and buy a quantity of liquor;then all the young men and women of the place assemble at the patient'shouse to perform the following most extraordinary ceremony. 

"I was once called in by a neighbour to see his wife, a very young woman, who had the misfortune to be afflicted with this disorder; and the manbeing an old acquaintance of mine, and always a close comrade in thecamp, I went every day, when at home, to see her, but I could not be ofany service to her, though she never refused my medicines. At this timeI could not understand a word she said, although she talked very freely, nor could any of her relations understand her. She could not bear thesight of a book or a priest, for at the sight of either she struggled, and was apparently seized with acute agony, and a flood of tears, likeblood mingled with water, would pour down her face from her eyes. Shehad lain three months in this lingering state, living upon so little thatit seemed not enough to keep a human body alive; at last her husbandagreed to employ the usual remedy, and, after preparing for themaintenance of the band during the time it would take to effect the cure, he borrowed from all his neighbours their silver ornaments, and loadedher legs, arms and neck with them. 

"The evening that the band began to play I seated myself close by herside as she lay upon the couch, and about two minutes after the trumpetshad begun to sound I observed her shoulders begin to move, and soonafterwards her head and breast, and in less than a quarter of an hour shesat upon her couch. The wild look she had, though sometimes she smiled, made me draw off to a greater distance, being almost alarmed to see onenearly a skeleton move with such strength; her head, neck, shoulders, hands and feet all made a strong motion to the sound of the music, and inthis manner she went on by degrees, until she stood up on her legs uponthe floor. Afterwards she began to dance, and at times to jump about, and at last, as the music and noise of the singers increased, she oftensprang three feet from the ground. When the music slackened she wouldappear quite out of temper, but when it became louder she would smile andbe delighted. During this exercise she never showed the least symptom ofbeing tired, though the musicians were thoroughly exhausted; and whenthey stopped to refresh themselves by drinking and resting a little shewould discover signs of discontent. 

"Next day, according to the custom in the cure of this disorder, she wastaken into the market-place, where several jars of maize or tsug were setin order by the relations, to give drink to the musicians and dancers. When the crowd had assembled, and the music was ready, she was broughtforth and began to dance and throw herself into the maddest posturesimaginable, and in this manner she kept on the whole day. Towardsevening she began to let fall her silver ornaments from her neck, arms, and legs, one at a time, so that in the course of three hours she wasstripped of every article. A relation continually kept going after heras she danced, to pick up the ornaments, and afterwards delivered them tothe owners from whom they were borrowed. As the sun went down she made astart with such swiftness that the fastest runner could not come up withher, and when at the distance of about two hundred yards she dropped on asudden as if shot. Soon afterwards a young man, on coming up with her, fired a matchlock over her body, and struck her upon the back with thebroad side of his large knife, and asked her name, to which she answeredas when in her common senses--a sure proof of her being cured; for duringthe time of this malady those afflicted with it never answer to theirChristian names. She was now taken up in a very weak condition andcarried home, and a priest came and baptised her again in the name of theFather, Son, and Holy Ghost, which ceremony concluded her cure. Some aretaken in this manner to the market-place for many days before they can becured, and it sometimes happens that they cannot be cured at all. I haveseen them in these fits dance with a _bruly_, or bottle of maize, upontheir heads without spilling the liquor, or letting the bottle fall, although they have put themselves into the most extravagant postures. 

"I could not have ventured to write this from hearsay, nor could Iconceive it possible, until I was obliged to put this remedy in practiceupon my own wife, who was seized with the same disorder, and then I wascompelled to have a still nearer view of this strange disorder. I atfirst thought that a whip would be of some service, and one day attempteda few strokes when unnoticed by any person, we being by ourselves, and Ihaving a strong suspicion that this ailment sprang from the weak minds ofwomen, who were encouraged in it for the sake of the grandeur, richdress, and music which accompany the cure. But how much was I surprised, the moment I struck a light blow, thinking to do good, to find that shebecame like a corpse, and even the joints of her fingers became so stiffthat I could not straighten them; indeed, I really thought that she wasdead, and immediately made it known to the people in the house that shehad fainted, but did not tell them the cause, upon which they immediatelybrought music, which I had for many days denied them, and which soonrevived her; and I then left the house to her relations to cure her at myexpense, in the manner I have before mentioned, though it took a muchlonger time to cure my wife than the woman I have just given an accountof. One day I went privately, with a companion, to see my wife dance, and kept at a short distance, as I was ashamed to go near the crowd. Onlooking steadfastly upon her, while dancing or jumping, more like a deerthan a human being, I said that it certainly was not my wife; at which mycompanion burst into a fit of laughter, from which he could scarcelyrefrain all the way home. Men are sometimes afflicted with this dreadfuldisorder, but not frequently. Among the Amhara and Galla it is not socommon. "

Such is the account of Pearce, who is every way worthy of credit, andwhose lively description renders the traditions of former timesrespecting the St. Vitus's dance and tarantism intelligible, even tothose who are sceptical respecting the existence of a morbid state of themind and body of the kind described, because, in the present advancedstate of civilisation among the nations of Europe, opportunities for itsdevelopment no longer occur. The credibility of this energetic but by nomeans ambitious man is not liable to the slightest suspicion, for, owingto his want of education, he had no knowledge of the phenomena inquestion, and his work evinces throughout his attractive and unpretendingimpartiality. 

Comparison is the mother of observation, and may here elucidate onephenomenon by another--the past by that which still exists. Oppression, insecurity, and the influence of a very rude priestcraft, are thepowerful causes which operated on the Germans and Italians of the MiddleAges, as they now continue to operate on the Abyssinians of the presentday. However these people may differ from us in their descent, theirmanners and their customs, the effects of the above mentioned causes arethe same in Africa as they were in Europe, for they operate on manhimself independently of the particular locality in which he may beplanted; and the conditions of the Abyssinians of modern times is, inregard to superstition, a mirror of the condition of the European nationsof the middle ages. Should this appear a bold assertion it will bestrengthened by the fact that in Abyssinia two examples of superstitionsoccur which are completely in accordance with occurrences of the MiddleAges that took place contemporarily with the dancing mania. _TheAbyssinians have their Christian flagellants, and there exists among thema belief in a Zoomorphism, which presents a lively image of thelycanthropy of the Middle Ages_. Their flagellants are called Zackarys. They are united into a separate Christian fraternity, and make theirprocessions through the towns and villages with great noise and tumult, scourging themselves till they draw blood, and wounding themselves withknives. They boast that they are descendants of St. George. It isprecisely in Tigre, the country of the Abyssinian dancing mania, wherethey are found in the greatest numbers, and where they have, in theneighbourhood of Axum, a church of their own, dedicated to their patronsaint, _Oun Arvel_. Here there is an ever-burning lamp, and theycontrive to impress a belief that this is kept alight by supernaturalmeans. They also here keep a holy water, which is said to be a cure forthose who are affected by the dancing mania. 

The Abyssinian Zoomorphism is a no less important phenomenon, and showsitself a manner quite peculiar. The blacksmiths and potters form amongthe Abyssinians a society or caste called in Tigre _Tebbib_, and inAmhara _Buda_, which is held in some degree of contempt, and excludedfrom the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, because it is believed that theycan change themselves into hyaenas and other beasts of prey, on whichaccount they are feared by everybody, and regarded with horror. Theyartfully contrive to keep up this superstition, because by thisseparation they preserve a monopoly of their lucrative trades, and as inother respects they are good Christians (but few Jews or Mahomedans liveamong them), they seem to attach no great consequence to theirexcommunication. As a badge of distinction they wear a golden ear-ring, which is frequently found in the ears of Hyaenas that are killed, withoutits having ever been discovered how they catch these animals, so as todecorate them with this strange ornament, and this removes in the mindsof the people all doubt as to the supernatural powers of the smiths andpotters. To the Budas is also ascribed the gift of enchantment, especially that of the influence of the evil eye. They nevertheless liveunmolested, and are not condemned to the flames by fanatical priests, asthe lycanthropes were in the Middle Ages. 

CHAPTER IV--SYMPATHY

Imitation--compassion--sympathy, these are imperfect designations for acommon bond of union among human beings--for an instinct which connectsindividuals with the general body, which embraces with equal force reasonand folly, good and evil, and diminishes the praise of virtue as well asthe criminality of vice. In this impulse there are degrees, but noessential differences, from the first intellectual efforts of the infantmind, which are in a great measure based on imitation, to that morbidcondition of the soul in which the sensible impression of a nervousmalady fetters the mind, and finds its way through the eye directly tothe diseased texture, as the electric shock is propagated by contact frombody to body. To this instinct of imitation, when it exists in itshighest degree, is united a loss of all power over the will, which occursas soon as the impression on the senses has become firmly established, producing a condition like that of small animals when they are fascinatedby the look of a serpent. By this mental bondage morbid sympathy isclearly and definitely distinguished from all subordinate degrees of thisinstinct, however closely allied the imitation of a disorder may seem tobe to that of a mere folly, of an absurd fashion, of an awkward habit inspeech and manner, or even of a confusion of ideas. Even these latterimitations, however, directed as they are to foolish and perniciousobjects, place the self-independence of the greater portion of mankind ina very doubtful light, and account for their union into a social whole. Still more nearly allied to morbid sympathy than the imitation ofenticing folly, although often with a considerable admixture of thelatter, is the diffusion of violent excitements, especially those of areligious or political character, which have so powerfully agitated thenations of ancient and modern times, and which may, after an incipientcompliance, pass into a total loss of power over the will, and an actualdisease of the mind. Far be it from us to attempt to awaken all thevarious tones of this chord, whose vibrations reveal the profound secretswhich lie hid in the inmost recesses of the soul. We might well wantpowers adequate to so vast an undertaking. Our business here is onlywith that morbid sympathy by the aid of which the dancing mania of theMiddle Ages grew into a real epidemic. In order to make this apparent bycomparison, it may not be out of place, at the close of this inquiry, tointroduce a few striking examples:--

1. "At a cotton manufactory at Hodden Bridge, in Lancashire, a girl, onthe fifteenth of February, 1787, put a mouse into the bosom of anothergirl, who had a great dread of mice. The girl was immediately throwninto a fit, and continued in it, with the most violent convulsions, fortwenty-four hours. On the following day three more girls were seized inthe same manner, and on the 17th six more. By this time the alarm was sogreat that the whole work, in which 200 or 300 were employed, was totallystopped, and an idea prevailed that a particular disease had beenintroduced by a bag of cotton opened in the house. On Sunday the 18th, Dr. St. Clare was sent for from Preston; before he arrived three morewere seized, and during that night and the morning of the 19th, elevenmore, making in all twenty-four. Of these, twenty-one were young women, two were girls of about ten years of age, and one man, who had been muchfatigued with holding the girls. Three of the number lived about twomiles from the place where the disorder first broke out, and three atanother factory at Clitheroe, about five miles distant, which last andtwo more were infected entirely from report, not having seen the otherpatients, but, like them and the rest of the country, strongly impressedwith the idea of the plague being caught from the cotton. The symptomswere anxiety, strangulation, and very strong convulsions; and these wereso violent as to last without any intermission from a quarter of an hourto twenty-four hours, and to require four or five persons to prevent thepatients from tearing their hair and dashing their heads against thefloor or walls. Dr. St. Clare had taken with him a portable electricalmachine, and by electric shocks the patients were universally relievedwithout exception. As soon as the patients and the country were assuredthat the complaint was merely nervous, easily cured, and not introducedby the cotton, no fresh person was affected. To dissipate theirapprehensions still further, the best effects were obtained by causingthem to take a cheerful glass and join in a dance. On Tuesday the 20th, they danced, and the next day were all at work, except two or three, whowere much weakened by their fits. "

The occurrence here described is remarkable on this account, that therewas no important predisposing cause for convulsions in these young women, unless we consider as such their miserable and confined life in the work-rooms of a spinning manufactory. It did not arise from enthusiasm, noris it stated that the patients had been the subject of any other nervousdisorders. In another perfectly analogous case, those attacked were allsuffering from nervous complaints, which roused a morbid sympathy in themat the sight of a person seized with convulsions. This, together withthe supervention of hysterical fits, may aptly enough be compared totarantism. 

2. "A young woman of the lowest order, twenty-one years of age, and of astrong frame, came on the 13th of January, 1801, to visit a patient inthe Charite Hospital at Berlin, where she had herself been previouslyunder treatment for an inflammation of the chest with tetanic spasms, andimmediately on entering the ward, fell down in strong convulsions. Atthe sight of her violent contortions six other female patientsimmediately became affected in the same way, and by degrees eight morewere in like manner attacked with strong convulsions. All these patientswere from sixteen to twenty-five years of age, and suffered withoutexception, one from spasms in the stomach, another from palsy, a thirdfrom lethargy, a fourth from fits with consciousness, a fifth fromcatalepsy, a sixth from syncope, &c. The convulsions, which alternatedin various ways with tonic spasms, were accompanied by loss ofsensibility, and were invariably preceded by languor with heavy sleep, which was followed by the fits in the course of a minute or two; and itis remarkable that in all these patients their former nervous disorders, not excepting paralysis, disappeared, returning, however, after thesubsequent removal of their new complaint. The treatment, during thecourse of which two of the nurses, who were young women, suffered similarattacks, was continued for four months. It was finally successful, andconsisted principally in the administration of opium, at that time thefavourite remedy. "

Now every species of enthusiasm, every strong affection, every violentpassion, may lead to convulsions--to mental disorders--to a concussion ofthe nerves, from the sensorium to the very finest extremities of thespinal chord. The whole world is full of examples of this afflictingstate of turmoil, which, when the mind is carried away by the force of asensual impression that destroys its freedom, is irresistibly propagatedby imitation. Those who are thus infected do not spare even their ownlives, but as a hunted flock of sheep will follow their leader and rushover a precipice, so will whole hosts of enthusiasts, deluded by theirinfatuation, hurry on to a self-inflicted death. Such has ever been thecase, from the days of the Milesian virgins to the modern associationsfor self-destruction. Of all enthusiastic infatuations, however, that ofreligion is the most fertile in disorders of the mind as well as of thebody, and both spread with the greatest facility by sympathy. Thehistory of the Church furnishes innumerable proofs of this, but we needgo no further than the most recent times. 

3. In a methodist chapel at Redruth, a man during divine service criedout with a loud voice, "What shall I do to be saved?" at the same timemanifesting the greatest uneasiness and solicitude respecting thecondition of his soul. Some other members of the congregation, followinghis example, cried out in the same form of words, and seemed shortlyafter to suffer the most excruciating bodily pain. This strangeoccurrence was soon publicly known, and hundreds of people who had comethither, either attracted by curiosity or a desire from other motives tosee the sufferers, fell into the same state. The chapel remained openfor some days and nights, and from that point the new disorder spreaditself, with the rapidity of lightning, over the neighbouring towns ofCamborne, Helston, Truro, Penryn and Falmouth, as well as over thevillages in the vicinity. Whilst thus advancing, it decreased in somemeasure at the place where it had first appeared, and it confined itselfthroughout to the Methodist chapels. It was only by the words which havebeen mentioned that it was excited, and it seized none but people of thelowest education. Those who were attacked betrayed the greatest anguish, and fell into convulsions; others cried out, like persons possessed, thatthe Almighty would straightway pour out His wrath upon them, that thewailings of tormented spirits rang in their ears, and that they saw hellopen to receive them. The clergy, when in the course of their sermonsthey perceived that persons were thus seized, earnestly exhorted them toconfess their sins, and zealously endeavoured to convince them that theywere by nature enemies to Christ; that the anger of God had thereforefallen upon them; and that if death should surprise them in the midst oftheir sins the eternal torments of hell would be their portion. The over-excited congregation upon this repeated their words, which naturally musthave increased the fury of their convulsive attacks. When the discoursehad produced its full effect the preacher changed his subject; remindedthose who were suffering of the power of the Saviour, as well as of thegrace of God, and represented to them in glowing colours the joys ofheaven. Upon this a remarkable reaction sooner or later took place. Those who were in convulsions felt themselves raised from the lowestdepths of misery and despair to the most exalted bliss, and triumphantlyshouted out that their bonds were loosed, their sins were forgiven, andthat they were translated to the wonderful freedom of the children ofGod. In the meantime their convulsions continued, and they remainedduring this condition so abstracted from every earthly thought that theystayed two and sometimes three days and nights together in the chapels, agitated all the time by spasmodic movements, and taking neither reposenor nourishment. According to a moderate computation, 4, 000 people were, within a very short time, affected with this convulsive malady. 

The course and symptoms of the attacks were in general as follows:--Therecame on at first a feeling of faintness, with rigour and a sense ofweight at the pit of the stomach, soon after which the patient cried out, as if in the agonies of death or the pains of labour. The convulsionsthen began, first showing themselves in the muscles of the eyelids, though the eyes themselves were fixed and staring. The most frightfulcontortions of the countenance followed, and the convulsions now tooktheir course downwards, so that the muscles of the neck and trunk wereaffected, causing a sobbing respiration, which was performed with greateffort. Tremors and agitation ensued, and the patients screamed outviolently, and tossed their heads about from side to side. As thecomplaint increased it seized the arms, and its victims beat theirbreasts, clasped their hands, and made all sorts of strange gestures. Theobserver who gives this account remarked that the lower extremities werein no instance affected. In some cases exhaustion came on in a very fewminutes, but the attack usually lasted much longer, and there were evencases in which it was known to continue for sixty or seventy hours. Manyof those who happened to be seated when the attack commenced bent theirbodies rapidly backwards and forwards during its continuance, making acorresponding motion with their arms, like persons sawing wood. Othersshouted aloud, leaped about, and threw their bodies into every possibleposture, until they had exhausted their strength. Yawning took place atthe commencement in all cases, but as the violence of the disorderincreased the circulation and respiration became accelerated, so that thecountenance assumed a swollen and puffed appearance. When exhaustioncame on patients usually fainted, and remained in a stiff and motionlessstate until their recovery. The disorder completely resembled the St. Vitus's dance, but the fits sometimes went on to an extraordinarilyviolent extent, so that the author of the account once saw a woman whowas seized with these convulsions resist the endeavours of four or fivestrong men to restrain her. Those patients who did not lose theirconsciousness were in general made more furious by every attempt to quietthem by force, on which account they were in general suffered to continueunmolested until nature herself brought on exhaustion. Those affectedcomplained more or less of debility after the attacks, and casessometimes occurred in which they passed into other disorders; thus somefell into a state of melancholy, which, however, in consequence of theirreligious ecstasy, was distinguished by the absence of fear and despair;and in one patient inflammation of the brain is said to have taken place. No sex or age was exempt from this epidemic malady. Children five yearsold and octogenarians were alike affected by it, and even men of the mostpowerful frame were subject to its influence. Girls and young women, however, were its most frequent victims. 

4. For the last hundred years a nervous affection of a perfectly similarkind has existed in the Shetland Islands, which furnishes a strikingexample, perhaps the only one now existing, of the very lastingpropagation by sympathy of this species of disorders. The origin of themalady was very insignificant. An epileptic woman had a fit in church, and whether it was that the minds of the congregation were excited bydevotion, or that, being overcome at the sight of the strong convulsions, their sympathy was called forth, certain it is that many adult women, andeven children, some of whom were of the male sex, and not more than sixyears old, began to complain forthwith of palpitation, followed byfaintness, which passed into a motionless and apparently catalepticcondition. These symptoms lasted more than an hour, and probablyrecurred frequently. In the course of time, however, this malady is saidto have undergone a modification, such as it exhibits at the present day. Women whom it has attacked will suddenly fall down, toss their armsabout, writhe their bodies into various shapes, move their heads suddenlyfrom side to side, and with eyes fixed and staring, utter the most dismalcries. If the fit happen on any occasion of pubic diversion, they will, as soon as it has ceased, mix with their companions and continue theiramusement as if nothing had happened. Paroxysms of this kind used toprevail most during the warm months of summer, and about fifty years agothere was scarcely a Sabbath in which they did not occur. Strongpassions of the mind, induced by religious enthusiasm, are also excitingcauses of these fits, but like all such false tokens of divine workings, they are easily encountered by producing in the patient a different frameof mind, and especially by exciting a sense of shame: thus those affectedare under the control of any sensible preacher, who knows how to"administer to a mind diseased, " and to expose the folly of voluntarilyyielding to a sympathy so easily resisted, or of inviting such attacks byaffectation. An intelligent and pious minister of Shetland informed thephysician, who gives an account of this disorder as an eye-witness, thatbeing considerably annoyed on his first introduction into the country bythese paroxysms, whereby the devotions of the church were much impeded, he obviated their repetition by assuring his parishioners that notreatment was more effectual than immersion in cold water; and as hiskirk was fortunately contiguous to a freshwater lake, he gave notice thatattendants should be at hand during divine service to ensure the propermeans of cure. The sequel need scarcely be told. The fear of beingcarried out of the church, and into the water, acted like a charm; not asingle Naiad was made, and the worthy minister for many years had reasonto boast of one of the best regulated congregations in Scotland. As thephysician above alluded to was attending divine service in the kirk ofBaliasta, on the Isle of Unst, a female shriek, the indication of aconvulsion fit, was heard; the minister, Mr. Ingram, of Fetlar, veryproperly stopped his discourse until the disturber was removed; and afteradvising all those who thought they might be similarly affected to leavethe church, he gave out in the meantime a psalm. The congregation wasthus preserved from further interruption; yet the effect of sympathy wasnot prevented, for as the narrator of the account was leaving the churchhe saw several females writhing and tossing about their arms on the greengrass, who durst not, for fear of a censure from the pulpit, exhibitthemselves after this manner within the sacred walls of the kirk. 

In the production of this disorder, which no doubt still exists, fanaticism certainly had a smaller share than the irritable state ofwomen out of health, who only needed excitement, no matter of what kind, to throw them into prevailing nervous paroxysms. When, however, thatpowerful cause of nervous disorders takes the lead, we find far moreremarkable symptoms developed, and it then depends on the mentalcondition of the people among whom they appear whether in their spreadthey shall take a narrow or an extended range--whether confined to somesmall knot of zealots they are to vanish without a trace, or whether theyare to attain even historical importance. 

5. The appearance of the _Convulsionnaires_ in France, whoseinhabitants, from the greater mobility of their blood, have in generalbeen the less liable to fanaticism, is in this respect instructive andworthy of attention. In the year 1727 there died in the capital of thatcountry the Deacon Paris, a zealous opposer of the Ultramontanists, division having arisen in the French Church on account of the bull"Unigenitus. " People made frequent visits to his tomb in the cemetery ofSt. Medard, and four years afterwards (in September, 1731) a rumour wasspread that miracles took place there. Patients were seized withconvulsions and tetanic spasms, rolled upon the ground like personspossessed, were thrown into violent contortions of their heads and limbs, and suffered the greatest oppression, accompanied by quickness andirregularity of pulse. This novel occurrence excited the greatestsensation all over Paris, and an immense concourse of people resorteddaily to the above-named cemetery in order to see so wonderful aspectacle, which the Ultramontanists immediately interpreted as a work ofSatan, while their opponents ascribed it to a divine influence. Thedisorder soon increased, until it produced, in nervous women, _clairvoyance_ (_Schlafwachen_), a phenomenon till then unknown; for onefemale especially attracted attention, who, blindfold, and, as it wasbelieved, by means of the sense of smell, read every writing that wasplaced before her, and distinguished the characters of unknown persons. The very earth taken from the grave of the Deacon was soon thought topossess miraculous power. It was sent to numerous sick persons at adistance, whereby they were said to have been cured, and thus thisnervous disorder spread far beyond the limits of the capital, so that atone time it was computed that there were more than eight hundred decidedConvulsionnaires, who would hardly have increased so much in numbers hadnot Louis XV directed that the cemetery should be closed. The disorderitself assumed various forms, and augmented by its attacks the generalexcitement. Many persons, besides suffering from the convulsions, becamethe subjects of violent pain, which required the assistance of theirbrethren of the faith. On this account they, as well as those whoafforded them aid, were called by the common title of _Secourists_. Themodes of relief adopted were remarkably in accordance with those whichwere administered to the St. John's dancers and the Tarantati, and theywere in general very rough; for the sufferers were beaten and goaded invarious parts of the body with stones, hammers, swords, clubs, &c. , ofwhich treatment the defenders of this extraordinary sect relate the mostastonishing examples in proof that severe pain is imperatively demandedby nature in this disorder as an effectual counter-irritant. TheSecourists used wooden clubs in the same manner as paviors use theirmallets, and it is stated that some _Convulsionnaires_ have borne dailyfrom six to eight thousand blows thus inflicted without danger. OneSecourist administered to a young woman who was suffering under spasm ofthe stomach the most violent blows on that part, not to mention othersimilar cases which occurred everywhere in great numbers. Sometimes thepatients bounded from the ground, impelled by the convulsions, like fishwhen out of water; and this was so frequently imitated at a later periodthat the women and girls, when they expected such violent contortions, not wishing to appear indecent, put on gowns make like sacks, closed atthe feet. If they received any bruises by falling down they were healedwith earth from the grave of the uncanonised saint. They usually, however, showed great agility in this respect, and it is scarcelynecessary to remark that the female sex especially was distinguished byall kinds of leaping and almost inconceivable contortions of body. Somespun round on their feet with incredible rapidity, as is related of thedervishes; others ran their heads against walls, or curved their bodieslike rope-dancers, so that their heels touched their shoulders. 

All this degenerated at length into decided insanity. A certainConvulsionnaire, at Vernon, who had formerly led rather a loose course oflife, employed herself in confessing the other sex; in other places womenof this sect were seen imposing exercises of penance on priests, duringwhich these were compelled to kneel before them. Others played withchildren's rattles, or drew about small carts, and gave to these childishacts symbolical significations. One Convulsionnaire even made believe toshave her chin, and gave religious instruction at the same time, in orderto imitate Paris, the worker of miracles, who, during this operation, andwhilst at table, was in the habit of preaching. Some had a board placedacross their bodies, upon which a whole row of men stood; and as, in thisunnatural state of mind, a kind of pleasure is derived from excruciatingpain, some too were seen who caused their bosoms to be pinched withtongs, while others, with gowns closed at the feet, stood upon theirheads, and remained in that position longer than would have been possiblehad they been in health. Pinault, the advocate, who belonged to thissect, barked like a dog some hours every day, and even this foundimitation among the believers. 

The insanity of the Convulsionnaires lasted without interruption untilthe year 1790, and during these fifty-nine years called forth morelamentable phenomena that the enlightened spirits of the eighteenthcentury would be willing to allow. The grossest immorality found in thesecret meetings of the believers a sure sanctuary, and in theirbewildering devotional exercises a convenient cloak. It was of no availthat, in the year 1762, the Grand Secours was forbidden by act ofparliament; for thenceforth this work was carried on in secrecy, and withgreater zeal than ever; it was in vain, too, that some physicians, andamong the rest the austere, pious Hecquet, and after him Lorry, attributed the conduct of the Convulsionnaires to natural causes. Men ofdistinction among the upper classes, as, for instance, Montgeron thedeputy, and Lambert an ecclesiastic (obt. 1813), stood forth as thedefenders of this sect; and the numerous writings which were exchanged onthe subject served, by the importance which they thus attached to it, togive it stability. The revolution finally shook the structure of thispernicious mysticism. It was not, however, destroyed; for even duringthe period of the greatest excitement the secret meetings were still keptup; prophetic books, by Convulsionnaires of various denominations, haveappeared even in the most recent times, and only a few years ago (in1828) this once celebrated sect still existed, although without theconvulsions and the extraordinarily rude aid of the brethren of thefaith, which, amidst the boasted pre-eminence of French intellectualadvancement, remind us most forcibly of the dark ages of the St. John'sdancers. 

6. Similar fanatical sects exhibit among all nations of ancient andmodern times the same phenomena. An overstrained bigotry is in itself, and considered in a medical point of view, a destructive irritation ofthe senses, which draws men away from the efficiency of mental freedom, and peculiarly favours the most injurious emotions. Sensual ebullitions, with strong convulsions of the nerves, appear sooner or later, andinsanity, suicidal disgust of life, and incurable nervous disorders, arebut too frequently the consequences of a perverse, and, indeed, hypocritical zeal, which has ever prevailed, as well in the assemblies ofthe Maenades and Corybantes of antiquity as under the semblance ofreligion among the Christians and Mahomedans. 

There are some denominations of English Methodists which surpass, ifpossible, the French Convulsionnaires; and we may here mention inparticular the Jumpers, among whom it is still more difficult than in theexample given above to draw the line between religious ecstasy and aperfect disorder of the nerves; sympathy, however, operates perhaps moreperniciously on them than on other fanatical assemblies. The sect ofJumpers was founded in the year 1760, in the county of Cornwall, by twofanatics, who were, even at that time, able to collect together aconsiderable party. Their general doctrine is that of the Methodists, and claims our consideration here only in so far as it enjoins themduring their devotional exercises to fall into convulsions, which theyare able to effect in the strangest manner imaginable. By the use ofcertain unmeaning words they work themselves up into a state of religiousfrenzy, in which they seem to have scarcely any control over theirsenses. They then begin to jump with strange gestures, repeating thisexercise with all their might until they are exhausted, so that it notunfrequently happens that women who, like the Maenades, practise thesereligious exercises, are carried away from the midst of them in a stateof syncope, whilst the remaining members of the congregations, for milestogether, on their way home, terrify those whom they meet by the sight ofsuch demoniacal ravings. There are never more than a few ecstatics, who, by their example, excite the rest to jump, and these are followed by thegreatest part of the meeting, so that these assemblages of the Jumpersresemble for hours together the wildest orgies, rather than congregationsmet for Christian edification. 

In the United States of North America communities of Methodists haveexisted for the last sixty years. The reports of credible witnesses oftheir assemblages for divine service in the open air (camp meetings), towhich many thousands flock from great distances, surpass, indeed, allbelief; for not only do they there repeat all the insane acts of theFrench Convulsionnaires and of the English Jumpers, but the disorder oftheir minds and of their nerves attains at these meetings a still greaterheight. Women have been seen to miscarry whilst suffering under thestate of ecstasy and violent spasms into which they are thrown, andothers have publicly stripped themselves and jumped into the rivers. Theyhave swooned away by hundreds, worn out with ravings and fits; and of theBarkers, who appeared among the Convulsionnaires only here and there, insingle cases of complete aberration of intellect, whole bands are seenrunning on all fours, and growling as if they wished to indicate, even bytheir outward form, the shocking degradation of their human nature. Atthese camp-meetings the children are witnesses of this mad infatuation, and as their weak nerves are with the greatest facility affected bysympathy, they, together with their parents, fall into violent fits, though they know nothing of their import, and many of them retain forlife some severe nervous disorder which, having arisen from fright andexcessive excitement, will not afterwards yield to any medical treatment. 

But enough of these extravagances, which even in our now days embitterthe lives of so many thousands, and exhibit to the world in the nineteenthcentury the same terrific form of mental disturbance as the St. Vitus'sdance once did to the benighted nations of the Middle Ages.