Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/233

Rh made out by experiment." When illustrious savants like these were firm believers in demonism, it need not cause us any surprise to see eight hundred sorcerers burnt at the stake within sixteen years in Lorraine alone, or five hundred at Geneva in three months.

The first effective blow was aimed at this superstition by Wier, a physician of Cleves, who was the true founder of mental pathology. Knowing well the temper of his time, he moved with extreme caution. He classes demons in sundry categories, and reckons their number by millions. Having thus given an exhibition of his orthodoxy, he next throws all the blame on the devil. It is he, and not the witch or the sorcerer, that is to be punished. As possession is simply a form of disease, the possessed should rather be treated medically than burned at the stake. Wier brings facts to show that the phenomena of possession are all explainable without supposing any diabolic interference. His was the period of the invention of printing, of the discovery of America, of the Protestant Reformation—the age of Galileo and of Kepler. It might have been supposed that the sixteenth century would have seen the end of demonism in Europe. But no; the princesses of the house of Medici brought in their train to France a horde of astrologers, necromancers, disciples of Locusta, fortune-tellers, etc. Three famous cases of possession marked the beginning of the seventeenth century: that at Labourd in 1609; that of the Ursulines at Aix in 1611; and of the Ursulines at Loudun, from 1632 to 1639.

The phenomenon of insensibility to pain is one of not very rare occurrence. This insensibility may be confined to a single member, or some particular locality, or it may extend to the whole body. During the middle ages all sorcerers were supposed to bear the mark of the devil, viz., the spot touched by the fiend when taking possession of his subject. This spot was insensible to pain, and was discovered by prodding the unfortunate culprit with a long needle, here and there, all over the body until it was found.

So general was the prevalence, among the inmates of convents, of a peculiar form of hysteria, that it got the name of possession des nonnains (nonnain, nun). Its pathology is clear: melancholia attended by hallucinations, illusions of the sense of touch, and an irresistible desire of suicide. Take the remarkable case of the nuns of Saint-Louis de Louviers (1642), which engaged the attention of the Parliament of Rouen. The principal heroine of this sad history was Madeline Bavent, who, on being shut up in a dungeon, spent four hours in endeavoring to put an end to her life, by driving a large nail into her bowels, and turning it round and round. She was clearly the subject of hystero-melancholia, but her judges decided that she was possessed of a devil. But at length the belief in demonism was forced to give way before the gradual advance of science, and in 1672 Colbert induced Louis XIV. to sign the famous ordinance forbidding the