Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/599

Rh The profundity of theologians and jurists constantly developed new theories as to the modes of diabolic entrance into the "possessed." One such theory was that Satan could be taken into the mouth with one's food—perhaps in the form of an insect swallowed on a leaf of salad. Another theory was that Satan entered the body when the mouth was opened to breathe, and there are well-authenticated cases of doctors and divines who, when casting out evil spirits, took especial care lest the imp might jump into their own mouths from the mouth of the patient. Another theory was that the devil entered human beings during sleep; and, at a comparatively recent period, the King of Spain was wont to sleep between two monks, to keep off the devil.

The monasteries were frequent sources of that form of mental disease which was supposed to be caused by bewitchment. From the earliest period it is evident that monastic life tended to develop insanity. Such cases as those of St. Anthony and St. Augustine are typical of its effects upon the strongest minds; but it was especially the convents for women that became the great breeding-beds of this disease. Among the large numbers of women and girls thus assembled, many of them forced into confinement against their will, for the reason that their families could give them no dower, subjected to the unsatisfied longings, suspicions, bickerings, petty jealousies, envies, and hatreds, so notorious in convent-life, mental disease was not unlikely to be developed at any moment. Hysterical excitement in nunneries took shapes sometimes comical, but more generally tragical. Noteworthy is it that the last places where executions for witchcraft took place were mainly in the neighborhood of great nunneries, and the last famous victim—of the hundreds of thousands executed in Germany for this imaginary crime—was Sister Anna Renata Sänger, sub-prioress of a nunnery near Würzburg.

The same thing was seen among young women exposed to sundry fanatical Protestant preachers: insanity, both temporary and permanent, was thus frequently developed among the Huguenots of France, and has been thus produced in America, from the