Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/90

 systems." "Strange to say," remarks Zerffi—meaning, no doubt, "it is hardly necessary to say that"—"the red-hot iron was never applied, for the hysterical attacks ceased as if by magic."

In another case mentioned by Zerffi, a revival mania in a large school near Cologne was similarly brought to an abrupt end. The Government sent an inspector. He found that the boys had visions of Christ, the Virgin, and departed saints. He threatened to close the school if these visions continued, and thus to exclude the students from all the prospects which their studies afforded them. "The effect was as magical as the red-hot iron remedy—the revivals ceased as if by magic."

The following singular cases are related in Zimmermann's "Solitude": A nun, in a very large convent in France, began to mew like a cat. At last all the nuns began to mew together every day at a certain time, and continued mewing for several hours together. This daily cat concert continued until the nuns were informed that a company of soldiers was placed by the police before the entrance of the convent, and that the soldiers were provided with rods with which they would whip the nuns until they promised not to mew any more. . . . In the fifteenth century, a nun in a German convent fell to biting her companions. In the course of a short time all the nuns of this convent began biting each other. The news of this infatuation among the nuns soon spread, and excited the same elsewhere; the biting mania passing from convent to convent through a great part of German}'. It afterward visited the nunneries of Holland, and even spread as far as Rome." No suggestion of bodily disease is made in either case. But any one who considers how utterly unnatural is the manner of life in monastic communities will not need the evidence derived from the spread of such preposterous habits to be assured that in convents the perfectly sane mind in a perfectly healthy body must be the exception rather than the rule.

The dancing mania, which spread through a large part of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, although it eventually attacked persons who were seemingly in robust health, yet had its origin in disease. Dr. Hecker, who has given the most complete account we have of this strange mania, in his "Epidemics of the Middle Ages," says that when the disease was completely developed the attack commenced with epileptic convulsions. "Those affected fell to the ground senseless, panting and laboring for breath. They foamed at the mouth, and suddenly springing up began their dance amid strange contortions. They formed circles hand in hand, and appearing to have lest all control over their senses continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in clothes bound tightly round their waists; upon which they again recovered,