, 1888-09-02
CURIOUS NERVOUS DISORDERS.
An Interesting Glass of Affections Strange
Contagious Manias.

Contagious Manias.
A curious incident is reported from
Wilkesbarre, Pa. One of the young
women employed in a silk mill at that
place was seized with an epileptic fit.
The other girls crowded round her,
alarmed and excited. Suddenly" says
the account, lone of them gave a wild
shrek and fell over in violent mysteries.
The excitement increased, and in a
minute or so another young woman was
seized with hysteria. The girls were
now almost wild with nervous excite
ment, n n after another were seized
with hysteric convulsions.'' Eighteen of
them were affected in this strange way,
and they all had to be sent home after
medical aid had been summoned. The
case belongs to a by nc means uncom-
mon but very interesting class of nervous
affections. Neuro mimesis, or nervous
mimicry, has been at the base of a great
number of puZzling outbreaks, many of
which were at the time of their occur
renee attributed to supernatural causes.
In the Fifteenth century a nun in a
German convent suddenly began to new
like a cat. In a short time the infection
had spread until all the other nuns were
mewing in rivalry with her. The new
ing epidemic was carried to other con-
vents, and for a time the religious au-
thorltles were in CONSERVATION. In the
same century a strange biting mania de-
veloped in a convent, and soon all the
nuns were biting one another and all
who approached them. This outbreak
was cured by terrorism. A regiment of
soldiers was drawn up in the court OF
the convent and the biting nuns were
informed that if they did not come TO
their lenses they would be hogged with
rods by the troops. The fear of this
punishment had the desired effect. With
other epidemics of the same general
character, however, all remedies failed.
OF these was the SO called dancing
mania, when tens of thousands of people
went leaping, dancing and singing
through the streets in procession, aban-
doning business, domestic duties, every
thing, to indulge in this singular eccen-
tricity.
The history of the Flagellants, who
walked in procession, each rank fogging
the one in front and being f1ogged by the
one behind, is of the same order. This
epidemic spread until it had covered all
Germany and Italy and had invaded
France. Both the dancing and the
~Flagellant manias affected children as
well as grown people. Numbers of the
victims persisted m~iserably, for process
sions were arranged to traverse the coun-
try, and this they did, wandering about
without any commissariat, trusting 10
charity, until the nuisance grew SO form
liable that cities closed their gates
against the pilgrims and drove them into
the waste, where thousands died of ex-
posure and privation.
Hecker, the historian of the epidemics
of the middle ages, had a curious theory
to account for them. They occurred in
the period of the Black Death, when
pestilence stalked over Europe and swept
away millions. Hecker held that the
plague was caused by certain changes in
the earth's magnetism, and to support
TINS he cited many reports of strange at
mospheric phenomena, foul odors arising
from the ocean and saturating whole
continents, and other indications of alb
normality in the telIuric conditions.
Hecker's hypothesis has not been ac-
cepted by modern science, but his facts
are trustworthy. The extensive cpl
denies of nervous mimicry which he
chronicles have certainly not been paral-
leled since the middle ages, and perhaps
VIC 5HOuiu lOOh lOE ln0 explanation OF
this to the magnitude of the advance in
the standards of living and in the aver
age of health. The most striking recent
instance of nervous mimicry is the case
of the Convulsionnaires of st. Madard,
many of whom were unquestionably
cataleptics. With the spread of educa-
ton and a better regimen of diet the
tendency to nervous epidemics has plainly
diminished. 1t is, however, by no means
outgrowing, as the Wilkesbarre episode,
cited at the beginning of this article,
shows, and as was proved by the occur
renee of a similar outbreak among the
girls in a Brooklyn factory not long ago.
Today these strange affections are recog-
nized as neurotic, but the precise mode
of their dissemination is still an unsolved
problem.-Ney York Tribune.
Advice to Mothers.