HUMANITY AND INSANITY. 221 



made out by experiment." When illustrious savants like these were 

 firm believers in deinonism, 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 cau- 

 tion. He classes demons in sundry categories, and reckons their num- 

 ber 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 inter- 

 ference. His was the period of the invention of printing, of the dis- 

 covery of America, of the Protestant Reformation the age of Galileo 

 and of Kepler. It might have been supposed that the sixteenth cen- 

 tury 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-tell- 

 ers, etc. Three famous cases of possession marked the beginning of 

 the seventeenth century : that at Labourd in 1609 ; that of the Ursu- 

 lines 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 {ixonnain, nun). Its pathology is clear: melancholia at- 

 tended by hallucinations, illusions of the sense of touch, and an irre- 

 sistible 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 Col- 

 bert induced Louis XIY. to sign the famous ordinance forbidding the 



