Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/91

Rh and remained free from complaint until the next attack. . . . While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions through the senses; but they were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits, whose names they shrieked out; and some of them afterward asserted that they felt as if they had been immersed in a stream of blood, 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 and variously reflected in their imaginations." The epidemic attacked people of all stations, but especially those who led a sedentary life, such as shoemakers and tailors; yet even the most robust peasants finally yielded to it. They "abandoned their labors in the fields as if they were possessed by evil spirits, and those affected were seen assembling indiscriminately from time to time, at certain appointed places, and, unless prevented by the lookers-on, continued to dance without intermission, until their very last breath was expended. Their fury and extravagance of demeanor so completely deprived them of their senses, that many of them dashed their brains out against the walls and corners of buildings, or rushed headlong into rapid rivers, where they found a watery grave. Roaring and foaming as they were, the bystanders could only succeed in restraining them by placing benches and chairs in their way, so that, by the high leaps they were thus tempted to take, their strength might be exhausted. As soon as this was the case they fell, as it were, lifeless to the ground, and by very slow degrees recovered their strength. Many there were who even with all this exertion had not expended the violence of the tempest which raged within them, but awoke with newly revived powers and again and again mixed with the crowd of dancers; until at length the violent excitement of their disordered nerves was allayed by the great involuntary exertion of their limbs, and the mental disorder was calmed by the exhaustion of the body. The cure effected by these stormy attacks was in many cases so perfect that some patients returned to the factory or plow, as if nothing had happened. Others, on the contrary, paid the penalty of their folly by so total a loss of power that they could not regain their former health, even by the employment of the most strengthening remedies."

It may be doubted, perhaps, by some whether such instances as these illustrate so much the state to which the mind is reduced when the body is diseased, as the state to which the body is reduced when the mind is diseased, though, as we have seen, the dancing mania when fully developed followed always on bodily illness. In the cases we now have to deal with, the diseased condition of the body was unmistakable.

Mrs. Hemans on her death-bed said that it was impossible for imagination to picture or pen to describe the delightful visions which passed before her mind. They made her waking hours more delightful than those passed in sleep. It is evident that these visions had their origin in the