THE EPIDEMICS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.[8]
This extremely interesting work of Dr Hecker’s consists of three several treatises, or historical sketches, published at different times, and here collected in a single volume. They are translated and published under the direction of the Sydenham Society—a society which has been the means of introducing to the medical profession, and to the English reader, some of the most eminent works of German physicians and physiologists. It is seldom, indeed, that their publications are of the popular and amusing description of the one we have selected for notice; but, speaking of them as a series, they are of that high philosophic character which must render them acceptable to every man of liberal education. How far they are accessible to the public at large we have not the means of knowing, nor whether the purchase of any single volume is a practicable matter to a non-subscriber; but, at all events, means, we think, ought to be taken to place the whole series on the shelves of every public library.
The great plague of the fourteenth century, called in GermanyThe Black Death, from the dark spots of fatal omen which appeared on the bodies of its victims; theDancing Mania, which afterwards broke out both in Germany and Italy; and theSweating Sickness, which had its origin in England, but extended itself also widely upon the Continent—these form the three subjects of Dr Hecker’s book. The dancing mania, known in Germany as St John’s or St Vitus’s Dance, and in Italy as the poison of the Tarantula or Tarantism, will be most likely to present us with novel and curious facts, and we shall be tempted to linger longest upon this topic. Readers of all kinds, whether of Thucydides, or Boccaccio, or Defoe, are familiar with the phenomena and events which characterise a plague, and which bear a great resemblance to each other in all periods of history. We shall, therefore, refrain from dwelling at any length upon the well-known terrors of the Great Mortality or the Black Death.
Yet the subject is one of undying interest. The Great Plague is, in this respect, like the Great Revolution of France; you may read fifty histories of it, and pronounce it to be a topic thoroughly worn out and exhausted; and yet when the fifty-first history is put into your hands, the chance is that you will be led on, and will read to the very last page with almost undiminished interest. The charm is alike in both cases. It is that our humanity is seen in its moments of great, if not glorious excitement—ofplenary inspirationof some kind, though it be of an evil spirit—seen in moments when all its passions, good and bad, and the bad chiefly, stand out revealed in full unfettered strength. And the history, in both cases, is of perpetual value and significance to us. Plagues, as our own generation can testify, are no more eradicated or banished from the cities of mankind than political revolutions. They read a lesson to us which, terrible as it is, we are still slow in learning.
We are often haunted with the dread of over-population. This fear may perhaps be encountered by another of a quite opposite description, when we read that in the fourteenth century one quarter at least of the population of the Old World was swept away in the short space of four years! Such is the calculation which Dr Hecker makes, on the best sources of information within his reach. If such devastating plagues arise, as our author thinks, from great physical causes over which man has no control, from an atmospheric poison not traceable to his ignorance or vice, and which no advancement in science can prevent or expel, there is indeed room for an undefined dread of periodical depopulations, putting to the rout all human calculations and all human forethought. But on this point we have our doubts.
“An inquiry into the causes of the Black Death,” says our author, “will not be without important results in the study of the plagues which have visited the world, although it cannot advance beyond generalisation without entering upon a field hitherto uncultivated, and, to this hour, entirely unknown. Mighty revolutions in the organism of the earth, of which we have credible information, had preceded it. From China to the Atlantic the foundations of the earth were shaken—throughout Asia and Europe the atmosphere was in commotion, and endangered, by its baneful influence, both vegetable and animal life.” When, however, Dr Hecker proceeds to specify the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and other terrific events which shook the foundations of the earth from China to the Atlantic, we do not find that the enumeration at all bears out this general description. A large proportion of such disastrous phenomena as he has been able to collect relate to China; and although the plague should be proved to have travelled from the East, it is not traced, as an identical disease, so far eastward as to China, and therefore is but vaguely connected with the great droughts and violent rains which afflicted that region of the earth. Nearer at home, in Europe, we have mention made of “frequent thunderstorms,” and an eruption of Ætna, but thunderstorms and a volcanic eruption have not, on other occasions, given rise to a plague; not to add, that if the atmosphere of Europe was tainted from causes of this kind, springing from its own soil and its own climate, it would be quite superfluous to trace the disease to the East at all. We should merely say that a similar disease broke out in different countries at the same time, demonstrating some quite cosmical or universal cause. The most important fact which is mentioned here, as proving some wide atmospheric derangement, is the “thick stinking mist seen to advance from the East and spread itself over Italy.” But Dr Hecker himself adds, that at such a time natural occurrences would be transformed or exaggerated into miracles; and we are quite sure that any really extraordinary event, occurring simultaneously with the plague, would, without further inquiry, be described as the cause of it. An unusual mist, just as a comet or any unusual meteor, appearing at the time, would be charged with the calamity.
On so obscure a subject we have no desire to advance any dogmatic opinion. There are facts connected with this and other great epidemics which, to men of cautious research, have seemed to point to some widespreading poison, some subtle, deleterious matter diffused through the air, or some abnormal condition of the atmosphere itself. Such there may be, acting either as immediate or predisposing cause of the disease. But to our apprehension, all plagues and pestilences have been bred from two well-known and sufficient causes—famine and filth. Scanty and unwholesome diet first disorders and debilitates the frame, fevers ensue, the foul atmosphere of crowded unventilated dwellings becomes impregnated by breathings that have passed through putrid lungs; and thus the disease, especially in a hot climate, attains to that malignity that the stricken wretch, move him where you will, becomes the centre of infection to all around him, and from his pestiferous dwelling there creeps a poison which invades even the most salubrious portion of the town; which, stealing through the garden-gate and over the flower-beds, enters even into the very palace itself. Doubtless other causes may co-operate, as unusual rains and fogs; the fact that a murrain amongst cattle sometimes accompanies or precedes a plague, indicates local causes of this description; but the true source of the disease lies in the city man has built, in his improvidence or injustice, his ignorance or his sloth.
It is thus that Dr Hecker speaks of the manner in which the disease may be propagated, so far as the agency of man is concerned:—we do not seem to want any quite cosmical influence.
“Thus much from authentic sources of the nature of the Black Death. The descriptions which have been communicated contain, with a few unimportant exceptions, all the symptoms of the Oriental plague, which have been observed in more modern times. No doubt can obtain on this point. The facts are placed clearly before our eyes. We must, however, bear in mind that this violent disease does not always appear in the same form; and that, while the essence of the poison which it produces, and which is separated so abundantly from the body of the patient, remains unchanged, it is proteoform in its varieties, from the almost imperceptible vesicle, unaccompanied by fever, which exists for some time before it extends its poison inwardly, and then excites fevers and buboes, to the fatal form in which carbuncular inflammations fall upon the most important viscera.
“Such was the form which the plague assumed in the fourteenth century, for the accompanying chest affection, which appeared in all the countries whereof we have received any account, cannot, on a comparison with similar and familiar symptoms, be considered as any other than the inflammation in the lungs of modern medicine, a disease which at present only appears sporadically, and owing to a putrid decomposition of the fluids is probably combined with hemorrhages from the vessels of the lungs. Now as every carbuncle, whether it be cutaneous or internal, generates in abundance the matter of contagion which has given rise to it, so therefore must the breaths of the affected have been poisonous in this plague, and on this account its power of contagion wonderfully increased; wherefore the opinion appears incontrovertible that, owing to the accumulated numbers of the diseased, not only individual chambers and houses, but whole cities, were infected; which, moreover, in the middle ages, were, with few exceptions,narrowly built, kept in a filthy state, and surrounded with stagnant ditches. Flight was in consequence of no avail to the timid; for some, though they had sedulously avoided all communication with the diseased and the suspected, yet their clothes were saturated with the pestifierous atmosphere, and every inspiration imparted to them the seeds of the destructive malady which, in the greater number of cases, germinated with but too much fertility. Add to which the usual propagation of the plague through clothes, beds, and a thousand other things to which the pestilential poison adheres,—a propagation which, from want of caution, must have been infinitely multiplied; and since articles of this kind, removed from the access of air, not only retain the matter of contagion for an indefinite period, but also increase its activity, and engender it like a living being, frightful ill consequences followed for many years after the first fury of the pestilence was passed.”
It may be worth noticing that Dr Hecker, or his translator, uses the terms contagion and infection indiscriminately; nor is the question entered into whether the disease is capable of being propagated by mere contact, without inhaling the morbific matter, or becoming inoculated with it through some puncture in the skin. Dr Hecker nowhere gives countenance to such a supposition. The poison would hardly penetrate by mere touch through a sound and healthy skin. Such a belief, however, was likely enough to prevail at a time when we are told that “even the eyes of the patient were considered as sources of contagion, which had the power of acting at a distance, whether on account of their unwonted lustre or the distortion which they always suffer in plague, or whether in conformity with an ancient notion, according to which the sight was considered as the bearer of a demoniacal enchantment.”
Avignon is here mentioned as the first city in which the plague broke out in Europe. We have a report of it from a contemporary physician, Guy de Chauliac, a courageous man, it seems, who “vindicated the honour of medicine by bidding defiance to danger, boldly and constantly assisting the affected, and disdaining the excuse of his colleagues, who held the Arabian notion, that medical aid was unavailing, and that the contagion justified flight.” The plague appeared twice in Avignon, first in the year 1348, and twelve years later, in 1360, “when it returned from Germany.” On the first occasion it raged chiefly amongst the poor; on the second more amongst the higher classes, destroying a great many children, whom it had formerly spared, and but few women. We presume that on the second occasion the plague was re-introduced at once amongst the merchant class of the city, and this would account for fewer women falling victims to it, because men of this class could take precautions for the safety of their wives and daughters. But why a greater number of children should have died, when the women were comparatively spared, is what we will make no attempt to explain.
How fatal it proved at Florence, Boccaccio has recorded. It is from him we learn with certainty that other animals besides man were capable of being infected by the disease—a fact of no little interest in the history of the plague. He mentions that he himself saw two hogs, on the rags of a person who had died of plague, after staggering about for a short time, fall down dead as if they had taken poison. A multitude of dogs, cats, fowls, and other domesticated animals, were, he tells us, fellow-sufferers with man.
In Germany the mortality was not so great as in Italy, but the disease assumed the same character. In France, it is said, many were struck as if by lightning, and died on the spot—and this more frequently among the young and strong than the old. Throughout England the disease spread with great rapidity, men dying in some cases immediately, in others within twelve hours, or at latest in two days. Here, as elsewhere, the inflammatory boils and buboes were recognised at once as prognosticating a fatal issue. It first broke out in the county of Dorset. Few places seem to have escaped; and the mortality was so great that contemporary annalists have reported (with what degree of accuracy we cannot say) that throughout the whole land not more than a tenth part of the inhabitants had survived.
The north of Europe did not escape, nor did all the snows of Russia protect her from this invasion. In Norway the disease broke out in a frightful manner. Nor was the sea a refuge; sailors found no safety in their ships; vessels were seen driving about on the ocean and drifting on the shore, whose crews had perished to the last man.
It is a terrible history, this of a plague. Nevertheless, if we were capable of surveying such events from an elevated position, where past and future were revealed to our view, and the whole scheme of creation unfolded to our knowledge, we should doubtless discover that even plagues and pestilences play their parts for the welfare and advancement of the human race. Nor are we without some glimpses of their utility. Viewing the matter, in the first place, in a quite physiological light, let us suppose that disease has been generated in a great city, that debilitated parents give birth to feeble offspring, that the fever, or whatever it may be, is wasting the strength of whole classes of the population, is it not better that such disease should attain a power and virulence that will enable it to sweep off at once a whole infected generation, men, women, and children, leaving the population to be replaced by the healthier who would survive? would not this be better than to allow the disease to perpetuate itself indefinitely, and thus to continue to multiply from an infected stock? The poison passes on, and searches out other neighbourhoods where the like terrible remedy is needed. Ay, but it passes, you say, into cities and districts where no such curative process, no such restoration of thebreed, was called for. But it is always thus with the great laws of nature, or of Providence. Thus far, and no farther! is said to the pestilence as well as to the ocean; but the line along the beach is not kept or measured with that petty precision which a land-surveyor would assuredly have suggested. Man’s greatness arises in part from this struggle with an external nature, which threatens from time to time to overwhelm him. There is, according to his measurement of things, a dreadful surplus of power and activity, both in the organic and the inorganic world. Nowhere are the forces of nature exactly graduated to suit his taste or convenience. Happily not. Man would sink into the tameness and insipidity of an Arcadian shepherd, or the sheep he feeds and fondles, if every wind that blew were exactly tempered to his own susceptibility.
But the moral effects of plague and pestilence—what good thing can be said of them? A general dissoluteness, an unblushing villany, for the most part prevails: a few instances of heroic virtue brighten out above the corrupted mass. Well, is it nothing, then, that from time to time our nature should be fully revealed to us in its utmost strength for good or for evil? A very hideous revelation it may sometimes be, but not the less salutary on this account. The mask of hypocrisy is torn off a whole city; in one moment is revealed to a whole people what its morality, what its piety is worth. Of the island of Cyprus, we are told, that an earthquake shook its foundations, and was accompanied by so frightful a hurricane that the inhabitants,who had slain their Mahometan slavesin order that they might not themselves be subjected by them, fled in dismay in all directions. Who had slain their Mahometan slaves! Their Christianity had brought them thus far on the road of moral culture! At Lübeck, the Venice of the North, the wealthy merchants were not, in this extremity, unmindful of the safety of their souls; they spent their last strength in carrying their treasures to monasteries and churches. Useless for all other purposes, their gold would now purchase heaven. To such intelligent views of Christianity had they attained! But the treasure had no longer any charm for the monks; it might be infected; and even with them the thirst for gold was in abeyance. They shut their gates upon it; yet still it was cast to them over the convent walls. “People would not brook an impediment to the last pious work to which they were driven by despair.”
Did all desert their post, or belie their professions? No; far from it. Amongst other instances, take that of the Sisters of Charity at theHotel Dieu. “Though they lost their lives evidently from contagion, and their numbers were several times renewed, there was still no want of fresh candidates, who, strangers to the unchristian fear of death, piously devoted themselves to their holy calling.”
But how cruel had their fears made the base multitude of Christendom! They rose against the Jews. They sought an enemy. The wells were poisoned; the Jews had poisoned them. Sordid natures invariably strive to lose the sense of their own calamity in a vindictive passion against some supposed author of it. For this reason it is, that, whatever the nature of the public distress may be, they always fasten it upon some human antagonist, whom they can have the luxury of hating and reviling. If they cannot cure, they can at least revenge themselves.
“The noble and the mean fearlessly bound themselves by an oath to extirpate the Jews by fire and sword, and to snatch them from their protectors, of whom the number was so small, that throughout all Germany but few places can be mentioned where these unfortunate people were not regarded as outlaws, and martyred and burnt. Solemn summonses were issued from Berne, to the towns of Basle, Freyburg, and Strasburg, to pursue the Jews as prisoners. The burgomasters and senators, indeed, opposed this requisition; but in Basle the 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 the space of two hundred years. Upon this all the Jews in Basle, whose number could not be inconsiderable,were enclosed in a wooden building, constructed for the purpose, and burnt together with it, upon the mere outcry of the people, without sentence or trial, which indeed would have availed them nothing.Soon after the same thing took place at Freyburg.A regular diet was held at Bennefeeld, in Alsace, where the bishops, lords, and barons, as also deputies of the counties and towns, consulted how they should proceed with regard to the Jews: and when the deputies of Strasburg—not, indeed, the bishop of this town, who proved himself a violent fanatic—spoke in favour of the persecuted, as nothing criminal was substantiated against them, a great outcry was raised, and it was vehemently asked why, if so, they had covered their wells and removed their buckets?” [The wells were not used in the mere suspicion that they were poisoned, and then the covering of them up became a proof with these reasoners that theyhadbeen poisoned]. “A sanguinary decree was resolved upon, of which the populace, who obeyed here the call of the nobles and superior clergy, became but the too willing executioners. Wherever the Jews were not burnt they were at least banished, and so being compelled to wander about, they fell into the hands of the country people, who without humanity, and regardless of all laws, persecuted them with fire and sword. At Spires the Jews, driven to despair, assembled in their own habitations, which they set on fire, and thus consumed themselves with their families.”
The atrocities, in short, that were committed against this unhappy people were innumerable. At Strasburg 2000 men were burnt in their own burial-ground. At Mayence, 12,000 are said to have been put to a cruel death. At Eslingen the whole Jewish community burned themselves in their own synagogue. Those whom the Christians saved they insisted upon baptising! And, as fanaticism begets fanaticism, Jewish mothers were seen throwing their children on the pile,to prevent their being baptised, and then precipitating themselves into the flames. From many of the accused the rack extorted a confession of guilt; and as some Christians also were sentenced to death for poisoning the wells, Dr Hecker suggests that it is not improbable the very belief in the prevalence of the crime had induced some men of morbid imagination really to commit it. When a faith in witchcraft, he observes, was prevalent, many an old woman was tempted to mutter spells against her neighbour. The false accusation had ended in producing, if not the crime itself, yet the criminal intention.
When we remember what took place in England under the reign of one Titus Oates, we shall not conclude that these terrible hallucinations of the public mind are proofs of any very peculiar condition of barbarism. Then, as at the later epoch to which we have alluded, a very marvellous plot was devised and thoroughly credited. All the Jews throughout Christendom were under the control and government of certain superiors at Toledo—a secret and mysterious council of Rabbis—from whom they received their commands. These prepared the poison with their own hands, from spiders, owls, and other venomous animals, and distributed it in little bags, with injunctions where it was to be thrown. Dr Hecker gives us, in an appendix, an official account of the “Confessions made on the 15th September, in the year of our Lord 1348, in the castle of Chillon, by the Jews arrested in Neustadt on the charge of poisoning the wells, springs, and other places, also food, &c., with the design of destroying and extirpating all Christians.” These confessions were, of course, produced by the rack, or by the threat of torture, and the manifest inutility of any defence or denial. Nor must it be forgotten, that the official report was drawn upafterthe whole of the Jews at Neustadt had been burnt on this very charge. Amongst these confessions is one of Balaviginus, a Jewish physician, arrested at Chillon “in consequence of being found in the neighbourhood.” He was put for a short time upon the rack, and, after being taken down, “confessed, after much hesitation, that, about ten weeks before, the Rabbi Jacob of Toledo sent him, by a Jewish boy,some poison in the mummy of an egg: it was a powder sewed up in a thin leathern pouch, accompanied by a letter, commanding him, on penalty of excommunication, and by his required obedience to the law, to throw the poison into the larger and more frequented wells of Thonon.” Similar letters had been sent to other Jews. All Jews, indeed, were under the necessity of obeying these injunctions. He, Balaviginus, had done so; he had thrown the poison into several wells. It was a powder half red and half black. Red and black spots were produced by the plague; it was right that this poison should partake of these two colours.
Conveyed over the lake from Chillon to Clarens to point out the well into which he had thrown the powder, Balaviginus, “on being conducted to the spot, and having seen the well, acknowledged that to be the place, saying, ‘This is the well into which I put the poison.’ The well was examined in his presence, and the linen cloth in which the poison had been wrapped was found. He acknowledged this to be the linen which had contained the poison; he described it as being of two colours—red and black.” We follow in imagination this Jewish physician. Taken from the rack to his cell, he repeats whatever absurdity his unrelenting persecutors put into his mouth. Rabbi Jacob of Toledo—mummy of an egg—what you will. Conducted to the well—yes, this was the well; shown the very rag—yes, this was the rag;—and the powder? yes, it was red and black. What scorn and bitterness must have mingled with the agony of the Jewish physician!
Amidst all this we hear the scourge and miserable chant of the Flagellants, stirring up the people to fresh persecutions, and infecting their minds with a superstition as terrible as the vice it pretended to expiate. This was not, indeed, their first appearance in Europe; nor did the Flagellants do more, at the commencement, than exaggerate the sort of piety their own church had taught them. Happily, as their fanaticism rose, they put themselves in opposition to the hierarchy, and were thus the sooner dispersed. In their spiritual exultation they presumed to reform or to dispense with the priesthood. They found themselves, therefore, in their turn subjected to grave denunciations, and pronounced to be one cause of the wrath of Heaven.
All this time what were the physicians doing? In the history of the plague, written by a physician, the topic, we may be sure, is not forgotten. But the information we glean is of a very scanty, unsatisfactory character. As to the origin of the plague—“A grand conjunction of the three superior planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, in the sign of Aquarius, which took place, according to Guy de Chauliac, on the 24th March 1345, was generally received as its principal cause. In fixing the day, this physician, who was deeply versed in astrology, did not agree with others; wherefore there arose various disputations of weight in that age, but of none in ours.” The medical faculty of Paris pronounced the same opinion. Being commissioned to report on the causes and the remedies of this Great Mortality, they commence thus: “It is known that in India, and the vicinity of the Great Sea, the constellations which emulated the rays of the sun, and the warmth of the heavenly fire, exerted their power especially against that sea, and struggled violently with its waters.” Hence vapours and corrupted fogs; hence no wholesome rain, or hail, or snow, or dew, could refresh the earth. But notwithstanding this learning, quite peculiar to the age, they were not more at fault than other learned bodies have been in later times, in the practical remedies they suggested against the disease. They were not entirely occupied in fixing the day when Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, had combated the sun over the great Indian Ocean. “They did,” as Dr Hecker says, “what human intellect could do in the actual condition of the healing art; and their knowledge of the disease was by no means despicable.” When fevers have attained to that malignancy that they take the name of plagues, they have escaped, we suspect, from the control of the physician;—just as when fires take the name of conflagrations, you must devote all your efforts to the saving of what is yet unconsumed, and checking the extension of the flames.
Amongst the consequences of the plague, Dr Hecker notices that the church acquired treasures and large properties in land, even to a greater extent than after the Crusades; and that, on the subsidence of the calamity, many entered the priesthood, or flocked to the monasteries, who had no other motive than to participate in this wealth. He adds, also, that,—
“After the cessation of the Black Plague, a greater fecundity in women was everywhere remarkable—a grand phenomenon, which, from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the direction of general organic life. Marriages were, almost without exception, prolific, and double and treble births were more frequent than at other times; under which head we should remember the strange remark, that after the ‘great mortality’the children were said to have got fewer teeth than before; at which contemporaries were mightily shocked, and even later writers have felt surprise.
“If we examine the grounds of this oft-repeated assertion, we shall find that they were astonished to see children cut twenty, or at most twenty-two teeth, under the supposition that a greater number had formerly fallen to their share. Some writers of authority, as, for example, the physician Savonarola, at Ferrara, who probably looked for twenty-eight teeth in children, published their opinions on this subject. Others copied from them without seeing for themselves, as often happens in other matters which are equally evident; and thus the world believed in a miracle of an imperfection in the human body, which had been caused by the Black Plague.”
That a fresh impetus would be given to population seems to us quite sufficiently accounted for, without calling into aid any “higher power in the direction of general organic life.” Men and women would marry early; and the very fact of their having survived the plague would, in general, prove that they were healthy subjects, or had been well and temperately brought up. There would be the same impetus to population that an extensive emigration would cause, and an emigration that had carried away most of the sick and the feeble. The belief that double and treble births were more frequent than at other times, may perhaps be explained in the same manner as the belief that there were fewer teeth than before in the human head. No accurate observations had been at all made upon the subject.
We come next in order toThe Dancing Mania—an epidemic of a quite different character. Not, indeed, as the name might imply, that the convulsive dance was a very slight affliction—it was felt to be quite otherwise; but because it belongs to that class of nervous maladies in which there is great room for mental or psychical influence. Such disorders spring up in a certain condition of the body, but the form they assume will depend on social circumstances, or the ideas current at the time. And thus Dr Hecker finds no difficulty in arranging theConvulsionnairesof France, or the early Methodists of England and Wales, in the same category as the maniacal dancers of Germany. It was in all the cases a physical tendency of a similar character, brought out under the influence of different ideas.
Dr Hecker mentions a case which, from the simplicity of the facts, would form a good introduction to others of a more complicated character. In the year 1787, at a cotton-manufactory at Hodden Bridge, in Lancashire, a girl put a mouse into the bosom of another girl, who had a great dread of mice. It threw her into a fit, and the fit continued, with the most violent convulsions, for twenty-four hours. On the following day three other girls were seized in the same way; on the day after six more. A report was now spread that a strange disease had been introduced into the factory by a bag of cotton opened in the house. Others who had not even seen the infected, but only heard of their convulsions, were seized with the same fits. In three days, the number of the sufferers had reached to twenty-four. The symptoms were, a sense of great anxiety, strangulation, and very strong convulsions, which lasted from one to twenty-four hours, and of so violent a nature that it required four or five persons to prevent the patients from tearing their hair, and dashing their heads against the floor and walls. Dr St Clare was sent for from Preston. Dr St Clare deserves to have his name remembered. The ingenious man took with him a portable electrical machine. The electric shock cured all his patients without an exception. When this was known, and the belief could no longer hold its ground that the plague had been brought in by the cotton bag, no fresh person was affected.
If we substitute for the cotton bag a belief in some demoniacal influence, compelling people to dance against their will, we have the dancing mania of Germany. Unhappily there was no St Clare at hand, with his electrical machine, to give a favourable shock to body and mind at once, and thus disperse the malady before it gathered an overpowering strength by the very numbers of the infected.
“The effects of the Black Death,” writes Dr Hecker (whose account of the disorder we cannot do better than give, with some abridgments), “had not yet subsided, when a strange delusion arose in Germany. It was a convulsion which in the most extraordinary manner infuriated the human frame, and excited the astonishment of contemporaries for more than two centuries, since which time it has never reappeared. It was called the Dance of St John, or of St Vitus, on account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it was characterised, and which gave to those affected, whilst performing their wild dance, and screaming and foaming with fury, all the appearance of persons possessed. It did not remain confined to particular localities, but was propagated by the sight of the sufferers, like a demoniacal epidemic, over the whole of Germany and the neighbouring countries to the north-west, which were already prepared for its reception by the prevailing opinions of the times.
“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 common delusion, exhibited to the public, both in the streets and in the churches, the following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in hand, and, appearing to have lost 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, and remained free from complaint until the next attack. This practice of swathing was resorted to on account of the tympany which followed these spasmodic ravings; but the bystanders frequently relieved patients in a less artificial manner, by thumping or trampling upon the parts affected. While dancing, they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits, whose names they shrieked out; and some of them afterwards 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 disease spread itself in two directions. It extended from Aix-la-Chapelle through the towns of the Netherlands, and also through the Rhenish towns. In Liege, Utrecht, and many other towns of Belgium, the dancers appeared with garlands in their hair, and their waists already girt with a cloth or bandage, that they might receive immediate relief on the attack of the tympany. It seems that the crowd around were often more ready to administer relief by kicks and blows than by drawing this bandage tight. The most opposite feelings seem to have been excited in the multitude by these exhibitions. Sometimes an idle and vicious mob would take advantage of them, and they became the occasion of much riot and debauchery. More frequently, however, the demoniacal origin of the disease, of which few men doubted, led to its being regarded with astonishment and horror. Religious processions were instituted on its account, masses and hymns were sung, and the whole power of the priesthood was called in to exorcise the evil spirit. The malady rose to its greatest height in some of the towns on the Rhine. At Cologne the number of the possessed amounted to more than five hundred, whilst at Metz the streets are said to have been filled (numbering women and children together) with eleven hundred dancers. Even those idle vagabonds who, for their own purposes, imitated their convulsive movements, assisted to spread the disorder; for in these maladies the susceptible are infected quite as easily by the imitation as by the reality.
The physicians stood aloof. Acknowledged as a demoniacal possession, they left the treatment of the disease entirely to the priesthood; and their exorcisms were not without avail. But it was necessary to this species of remedy that the patients should have faith in the church and its holy ministers. Without faith there would certainly, in such a case, be no cure; and, unhappily, the report had been spread by some irreverend schismatics that the disorder itself was owing—to what will our readers suppose?—to an imperfect baptism—to the baptism of children by the hands of unchaste priests. Where this notion prevailed, the exorcism, we need not say, was unavailing.
The malady first bore the name of St John’s Dance, afterwards that of St Vitus’s. This second name it took from the mere circumstance that St Vitus was the saint appealed to for its cure. A legend had been framed with a curious disregard—even for a legend—of all history and chronology, in which St Vitus, who suffered martyrdom, as the church records, under the Emperor Domitian, is described as praying, just before he bent his neck to the sword, that he might protect from the Dancing Mania all thosewho should solemnise the day of his commemoration, and fast upon its eve. The prayer was granted; a voice from heaven was heard saying, “Vitus, thy prayer is accepted.” He became, of course, the patron saint of those afflicted with the dancing plague. But the name under which it first appeared, of St John’s Dance, receives from Dr Hecker an explanation which points out to us a probable origin of the disease itself, or of the peculiar form which it assumed.
“The connection,” he says, “which John the Baptist had with the dancing mania of the fourteenth century, was of a totally different character. He was originally far from being a protecting saint to those who were attacked, or one who would be likely to give them relief from a malady considered as the work of the devil. On the contrary, the manner in which he was worshipped afforded an important and very evident cause for its development. From the remotest period, perhaps even so far back as the fourth century, St John’s day was solemnised with all sorts of strange and rude customs, of which the original mystical meaning was variously disfigured among different nations by superadded relics of heathenism. Thus the Germans transferred to the festival of St John’s day an ancient heathen usage—the kindling of the ‘hodfyr,’ which was forbidden them by St Boniface; and the belief subsists even to the present day, that people and animals that have leaped through these flames, or their smoke, are protected for a whole year from fevers and other diseases, as if by a kind of baptism by fire. Bacchanalian dances, which have originated from similar causes among all the rude nations of the earth, and the wild extravagancies of a heated imagination, were the constant accompaniments of this half-heathen, half-christian festival.”
In a note at a subsequent page Dr Hecker cites some curious passages to show what in the middle ages took place at “St John’s fires.” Bones, horns, and other rubbish were heaped together to be consumed in smoke, while persons of all ages danced round the flames as if they had been possessed. Others seized burning flambeaus, and made a circuit of the fields, in the supposition that they thereby screened them from danger; while others again turned a cartwheel, to represent the retrograde movement of the sun. The last circumstance takes back the imagination to the old primitive worship of the sun; and perhaps the very fires of St John might date their history from those kindled in honour of Baal or Moloch. Dr Hecker suggests that mingling with these heathen traditions or customs a remembrance of the history of St John’s death—that dance which occasioned his decapitation—might also have had its share in determining the peculiar manner in which this saint’s day should be observed. However that may be, as we find that the first dancers in Aix-la-Chapelle appeared with St John’s name in their mouths, the conjecture is very probable that the wild revels of St John’s day had given rise, if not to the disease, yet to the type or form in which it appeared.
At a subsequent period, indeed, when the disorder had assumed, if we may so speak, a more settled aspect, the name of St John was no otherwise associated with it than the name of St Vitus. People danced upon his festival to obtain a cure. And these periodical dances, while they relieved the patients, assisted also to perpetuate the malady. Throughout the whole of June, we are told, prior to the festival of St John, many men felt a disquietude and restlessness which they were unable to overcome. They were dejected, timid, and anxious; wandered about in an unsettled state, being tormented with twitching pains, which seized them suddenly in different parts; they eagerly expected the eve of St John’s day, in the confident hope that, by dancing at the altars of this saint, they would be freed from all their sufferings. Nor were they disappointed. By dancing and raving for three hours to the utmost scope of their desires, they obtained peace for the rest of the year. For a long time, however, we hear of cases which assumed the most terrific form. Speaking of a period which embraced the close of the fifteenth century, Dr Hecker says:—
“The St Vitus’s dance attacked people of all stations,especially those who led a sedentary life, such as shoemakers and tailors; but even the most robust peasants abandoned their labours in the fields, as if they were possessed by evil spirits; and thus those affected were seen assembling indiscriminately, from time to time, at certain appointed places, and, unless prevented by the lookers-on, continuing to dance without intermission, until their very last breath was expended. Their fury and extravagance of demeanour 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 tempted to take, their strength might be exhausted.”
Music, however, was a still better resource. It excited, but it hastened forward the paroxysm, and doubtless reduced it to some measure and rhythm. The magistrates even hired musicians for the purpose of carrying the dancers the more rapidly through the attack, and directed that athletic men should be sent among them, in order to complete their exhaustion. A marvellous story is related on the authority of one Felix Plater: Several powerful men being commissioned to dance with a girl who had the dancing mania till she had recovered from her disorder, they successively relieved each other, and danced on for the space of four weeks! at the end of which time the patient fell down exhausted, was carried to an hospital, and there recovered. She had never once undressed, was entirely regardless of the pain of her lacerated feet, and had merely sat down occasionally to take some nourishment or to slumber, and even then “the hopping movement of her body continued.”
Happily, however, this mania grew more rare every year, so that in the beginning of the seventeenth century we may be said to be losing sight of it in Germany. Nor shall we follow out its history further in that country, because the same disorder, under a different form, made its appearance in Italy, and we must by no means neglect to notice the dancing mania which was so universally attributed to the bite of the tarantula. Whatever part the festival of St John the Baptist performed in Germany, as an exciter of the disease, that part was still more clearly performed in Italy by the popular belief in the venom of a spider.
We shall not go back with Dr Hecker into the fears or superstitions of classical times as to the bite of certain spiders or lizards; we must keep more strictly to our text; we must start from the period when men’s minds were still open to pain and alarm on account of the frequent return of the plague.
“The bite of venomous spiders, or rather the unreasonable fear of its consequences, excited at such a juncture, though it could not have done so at an earlier period, a violent nervous disorder, which, like St Vitus’s dance in Germany, spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a wider range, and still further extending its ravages from its long continuance. Thus, from the middle of the fourteenth century, the furies ofThe Dancebrandished their scourge over afflicted mortals; and music, for which the inhabitants of Italy now probably for the first time manifested susceptibility and talent, became capable of exciting ecstatic attacks in those affected, and thus furnished the magical means of exorcising their melancholy.”
Does the learned doctor insinuate that the Italians owed their natural taste for music to this invasion of Tarantism?
“At the close of the fifteenth century we find that Tarantism had spread beyond the boundaries of Apulia, and that the fear of being bitten by venomous spiders had increased. Nothing short of death itself was expected from the wound which these insects inflicted; and if those who were bitten escaped with their lives, they were said to be pining away in a desponding state of lassitude. Many became weak-sighted or hard of hearing; some lost the power of speech; and all were insensible to ordinary causes of excitement. Nothing but the flute or the cithern afforded them relief. At the sound of these instruments they awoke as if 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 generally observable that country people,who were rude and ignorant of music, evinced on these occasions an unusual degree of grace, as if they had been well practised in elegant movements of the body; for it is a peculiarity in nervous disorders of this kind that the organs of motion are in an altered condition, and are completely under the control of the overstrained spirits.”
This increased agility and grace of movement is by no means to be discredited by the reader. It is a symptom which distinguishes one class of epileptic patients. Some have attributed it to an over-excitement of the cerebellum. However that may be, there are greater wonders than this contained in our most sober and trustworthy books on the disorders of the nervous system. We continue the account:—
“Cities and villages alike resounded throughout the summer season with the notes of fifes, clarinets, and Turkish drums; and patients were everywhere to be met with who looked to dancing as their only remedy. Alexander ab Alexandro, who gives this account, saw a young man in a remote village who was seized with a violent attack of Tarantism. He listened with eagerness and a fixed stare to the sound of a drum, and his graceful movements gradually became more and more violent, until his dancing was converted into a succession of frantic leaps, which required the utmost exertion of his whole strength. In the midst of this overstrained exertionof mind and bodythe music suddenly ceased, and he immediately fell powerless to the ground, where he lay senseless and motionless until its magical effect again aroused him to a renewal of his impassioned performances.”
We have put the expression “mind and body” in italics, because we may as well take this opportunity to observe, that although convulsions of this kind are excited, and assume a certain form on account of the predominance of some idea, yet, when once called forth, they are almost entirely mechanical in their nature. Mere animal excitability—what is called the reflex action, or other automatic movements quite as little associated with the immediate operations of “mind”—carry on the rest of the process. And it is some consolation to think that the appearance of pain and distress which marks convulsive disorders of all descriptions, is, for the most part, illusory. The premonitory symptoms may be very distressing, but the condition of the patient, when the fit is on, is that of insensibility to pain.
The general conviction was, that by music and dancing the poison of the tarantula was distributed over the whole body, and expelled through the skin; but, unfortunately, it was also believed that if the slightest vestige of it remained behind the disorder would break out again. Thus there was no confidence excited in a perfect cure. Men who had danced themselves well one summer watched the next summer for the returning symptoms, and found in themselves what they looked for. Thus—
“The number of those affected by it increased beyond belief, for whoever had actually been, or even fancied that he had been once bitten by a poisonous spider or scorpion, made his appearance annually whenever the merry notes of the Tarantella resounded. Inquisitive females joined the throng and caught the disease—not indeed from the poison of the spider, but from the mental poison which they eagerly received through the eye; and thus the cure of theTarantatigradually became established as a regular festival of the populace.”
It was customary for whole bands of musicians to traverse Italy during the summer months, and the cure of the disordered was undertaken on a grand scale. This season of dancing and music was called “The women’s little carnival,” for it was women more especially who conducted the arrangements. It was they, too, it seems, who paid the musicians their fee. The music itself received its due share of study and attention. There were different kinds of the Tarantella (as the curative melody was called) suited to every variety of the ailment.
One very curious circumstance connected with this disease must not pass unnoticed—the passion excited by certain colours. Amongst the Germans, those afflicted by St Vitus’s dance were enraged by any garment of the colour of red. Amongst the Italians, on the contrary, red colours were generally liked. Some preferred one colour, some another, but the devotion to the chosen colour was one of the most extraordinary symptoms which the disease manifested in Italy. The colour that pleased the patient he was enamoured of; the colour that displeased excited his utmost fury.
“Some preferred yellow, others were enraptured with green; and eyewitnesses describe this rage for colours as so extraordinary that they can scarcely find words with which to express their astonishment. No sooner did the patients obtain a sight of their favourite colour than they rushed like infuriated animals towards the object, devoured it with their eager looks, kissed and caressed it in every possible way, and, gradually resigning themselves to softer sensations, adopted the languishing expression of enamoured lovers, and embraced the handkerchief, or whatever article it might be which was presented to them, with the most intense ardour, while the tears streamed from their eyes as if they were completely overwhelmed by the inebriating impression on their senses.
“The dancing fits of a certain Capuchin friar in Tarentum excited so much curiosity that Cardinal Cajetano proceeded to the monastery that he might see with his own eyes what was going on. As soon as the monk, who was in the midst of his dance, perceived the spiritual prince clothed in his red garments, he no longer listened to the tarantella of the musicians, but with strange gestures endeavoured to approach the cardinal, 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 the spectators, and his own respect, prevented his touching it, and thus, the irritation of his senses not being appeased, he fell into a state of such anguish and disquietude that he presently sunk down in a swoon, from which he did not recover until the cardinal compassionately gave him his cape. This he immediately seized in the greatest ecstasy, and pressed, now to his breast, now to his forehead and cheeks, and then again commenced his dance as if in the frenzy of a love fit.”
Another curious symptom, which was probably connected with this passion for colour, was an ardent longing for the sea. These over-susceptible people were attracted irresistibly to the boundless expanse of the blue ocean, and lost themselves in its contemplation. Some were carried so far by this vague passionate longing as to cast themselves into the waves.
The persuasion of the inevitable and fatal consequences of being bitten by the tarantula was so general that it exercised a dominion over the strongest minds. Men who in their sober moments considered the disorder as a species of nervous affection depending on the imagination, were themselves brought under the influence of this imagination, and suffered from the disorder at the approach of the dreaded tarantula. A very striking anecdote of this kind is told of the Bishop of Foligno. Quite sceptical as to the venom of the insect, he allowed himself to be bitten by a tarantula. But he had not measured the strength of his own imagination, however well he had estimated the real malignancy of the spider. The bishop fell ill, nor was there any cure for him but the music and the dance. Many reverend old gentlemen, it is said, to whom this remedy appeared highly derogatory, only exaggerated their symptoms by delaying to have recourse to what, after all, was found to be the true and sole specific.
But even popular errors are not eternal. This of Tarantism continued, our author tells us, throughout the whole of the seventeenth century, but gradually declined till it became limited to single cases. “It may therefore be not unreasonably maintained,” he concludes, “that the Tarantism of modern times bears nearly the same relation to the original malady as the St Vitus’s dance which still exists, and certainly has all along existed, bears, in certain cases, to the original dancing mania of the dancers of St John.”
In a subsequent chapter, our author informs us that a disease of a similar character existed in Abyssinia, or still exists, for the authority he quotes is that of an English surgeon who resided nine years in Abyssinia, from 1810 to the year 1819. We cannot pretend to say that we have ever seen the book, which the learned German has, however, not permitted to escape him—we have never seen theLife and Adventures of Nathaniel Pearce, written by himself; but, judging by the extract here given, Nathaniel Pearce must be a person worth knowing, he writes with so much candour and simplicity. The disease is called in Abyssinia the Tigretier, because it occurs most frequently in the Tigrè country. The first remedy resorted to is the introduction of a learned Dofter, “who reads the Gospel of St John, and drenches the patient with cold water daily.” If this does not answer, then the relations hire a band of trumpeters, drummers, and fifers, and buy a quantity of liquor; all the young men and women of the place assemble at the patient’s house, and she (for it is generally a woman), arrayed in all the finery and trinkets that can be borrowed from the neighbours, is excited by the music to dance, day after day if necessary, till she drops down from utter exhaustion. The disease is attended with a great emaciation; and the doctor says “he was almost alarmed to see one nearly a skeleton move with such strength.” He then proceeds to recount his own domestic calamity in a strain of the most commendable candour:—
“I could not have ventured to write this from hearsay, nor could I conceive it possible until I was obliged to put this remedy in practice upon my own wife, who was seized with the same disorder. I at first thought that a whip would be of some service, and one day attempted a few strokes when unnoticed by any person,we being by ourselves, and I having a strong suspicion that this ailment sprang from the weak minds of women, who were encouraged in it for the sake of the grandeur, rich dress, 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 she became like a corpse; and even the joints of her fingers became so stiff that I could not straighten them. Indeed, I really thought that she was dead, and immediately made it known to the people in the house that she had fainted, but did not tell them the cause; upon which they immediately brought music, which I had for many days denied them, and which soon revived her; and I then left the house to her relations, to cure her at my expense. 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. In looking steadfastly upon her, while dancing or jumping, more like a deer than a human being, I said that it certainly was not my wife; at which my companion burst into a fit of laughter, from which he could scarcely refrain all the way home.”
The capability of sustaining the most violent exercise, for a long time together, and on very little food, is not one of the least perplexities attendant upon these nervous or epileptic diseases. The partial suspension of sensation and volition, by sparing the brain, may have something to do with it. But into scientific perplexities of this kind we cannot now enter. One plain and homely caution is derivable from all these histories. Good sense is a great preservative of health. Do not voluntarily make a fool of yourself, or your folly may become in turn the master of your reason. Epilepsy has been brought on by the simulation of epilepsy. We doubt not that a man might dance to his own shadow, and talk to it, as it danced before him on the wall, till he drove himself into a complete frenzy. A sect in America thought fit to introduce certain grimaces, laughing, weeping, and the like, into their public service. It was not long before their grimaces, in some of their numbers, became involuntary; the muscles of the face had escaped the control of the will. A decidedtongue-maniawas exhibited a short time amongst the Irvingites. Happily, in the present state of society, men’s minds are called off into so many directions, that a predominant idea of this kind has little chance of establishing itself in that tyrannous manner which we have seen possible in the middle ages. But it is better not to play with edged tools. If people will stand round a table, fixing their minds on one idea—that a certain mysterious influence will pass through their fingers to move the table—they will lose, for a time, the voluntary command over their own fingers, which will exert themselves without any volition or consciousness on their part. They are entering, in fact, into that state which, in the olden time, was considered a demoniacal possession; so that, speaking from this point of view, one may truly say that “Satan does turn the table,” but it is by entering into the table-turner. When we have been asked whether there isanythingin mesmerism, we have always answered—a great deal more than you ought, without medical advice, to make trial of. Nor do we at all admire the performance of the so-called electro-biologist. Experiments in the interest of science are permissible; but is it fit that any one should practise the art of inducing a temporary state of idiocy in persons of weak or susceptible nerves, for the purpose of collecting a crowd, and passing round the hat?
The subject of the third treatise of Dr Hecker is theSweating Sickness. This third part is more miscellaneous than its predecessors, and we have no space to do justice to its varied and sometimes disputable matter. Dr Hecker describes the sweating sickness as a legacy left us by the civil wars of York and Lancaster. It first developed itself in Richmond’s army, which had been collected from abroad, over-fatigued by long marches in a very damp season, and probably ill supplied with rations. Its rapid extension through the cities he attributes to the intemperance of the English, to their overfeeding, and the want of cleanliness in their houses. Gluttony, and the filth of the rush-covered floors, he detects even amongst the wealthiest of the land. For a minute description of the disease, and the Doctor’s investigation into the nature of it, we must refer to the book itself.
On the physicians, and the manner in which they addressed themselves to the encounter of this strange calamity, there is a passage which it may be instructive to peruse:—
“The physicians could do little or nothing for the people in this extremity. They are nowhere alluded to throughout this epidemic, and even those who might have come forward to succour their fellow-citizen, had fallen into the errors of Galen, and their dialectic minds sank under this appalling phenomenon. This holds good even of the famous Thomas Linacre, subsequently physician in ordinary to two monarchs, and founder of the College of Physicians in 1518. In the prime of his youth he had been an eyewitness of the events at Oxford, and survived even the second and third eruption of the sweating sickness; but in none of his writings do we find a single word respecting this disease, which is of such permanent importance. In fact, the restorers of the medical science of ancient Greece, who were followed by all the most enlightened men in Europe, with the single exception of Linacre, occupied themselves rather with the ancient terms of art than with actual observation, and in their critical researches overlooked the important events that were passing before their eyes. This reminds us of the later Greek physicians, who for four hundred years paid no attention to the smallpox, because they could find no description of it in the immortal works of Galen!”
Who shall say, in reading such passages, that theNew Philosophyof Bacon, which reads now like old common-sense, was not sadly wanted, if the learned physician, while feeling his patient’s pulse, could see only with the eyes of Galen? In the fourteenth century we see the physician busied with his astrology, and laboriously fixing the day when Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, did battle with the sun over the great Indian Ocean; in the sixteenth we find him, with quite dialectic mind, absorbed in the study of his classical authorities; at the present time we may truly say that there are no inquiries conducted with a more philosophical spirit, or with greater zeal and energy, than those which relate to the human frame, its functions and its diseases. The extreme complexity of the subject renders our progress slow. And yet progress can hardly be said to have been slow. Let any one take up that admirable little manual onThe Nervous System, by Dr Herbert Mayo, and compare it with any work a hundred years old: it is a new science; and that not only from the new facts which a Robert Bell and a Marshall Hall, and other distinguished men in France and Germany, have added to our knowledge, but from the fine spirit of philosophical inquiry which presides over the whole. We have not only left astrology behind, we have not only left behind the undue reverence to classical authority, but we have thrown aside that dislike and depreciation of physiology which the metaphysician had done his part to encourage, and have entered, as with a fresh eye and a beating heart, upon the study of the wonders of the human frame.