312 



EPIDEMICS. (DANCING MANIA.) 



England the contagion was carried by a ship 

 to Norway, where the plague broke out in its 

 most frightful form, with vomiting of blood, 

 and in the whole country spared not one third. 

 The sailors found no refuge on their ships, and 

 vessels were often seen drifting on shore, whose 

 crews had perished to the last man. 



It is hard to measure the mortality of the 

 black-death; some numerical statements are 

 not, indeed wanting, but they are scarcely 

 credible when we consider the civilization or 

 lack of civilization of the fourteenth century. 

 Eudeness was general. Witches and heretics 

 were burned alive ; wild passions, severity, and 

 cruelty everywhere predominated. Human 

 life was but little regarded. Cairo lost daily, 

 when the plague was raging with its greatest 

 violence, from 10,000 to 15,000. In China 

 more than thirteen millions are said to have 

 died. India was almost wholly depopulated. 

 Tartary and the Tartar kingdom of Kaptschak, 

 Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia, were covered 

 with dead bodies. Cyprus lost almost all its 

 inhabitants, and ships without crews were 

 seen driving about the Mediterranean, spread- 

 ing the plague where they went ashore. It 

 was reported to Pope Clement, at Avignon, 

 that throughout the East (probably excepting 

 China) 23,840,000 people had fallen victims to 

 the plague. In Venice 100,000 died, and in 

 London at least the same number, while 124,- 

 434 Franciscan friars died in Germany. In 

 Avignon the Pope found it necessary to conse- 

 crate the Rhone, that bodies might be thrown 

 into the river without delay. In Vienna, 

 where for some time twelve hundred inhabit- 

 ants died daily, the interment of corpses in 

 the church-yards and within the churches 

 was prohibited, and the dead were arranged in 

 layers by thousands in large pits outside the 

 city, as had been already done at Cairo and 

 Paris and London. The palace and the cot 

 alike felt the fury of the plague. One king, 

 two queens (Alonso XI; Johanna, Queen of 

 Navarre, daughter of Louis X ; and Johanna 

 of Burgundy, wife of King Philip de Valois), 

 one bishop, and great numbers of other distin- 

 guished persons fell victims to it. The whole 

 period of time during which the black plague 

 raged with destructive violence in Europe 

 was (with the exception of Russia, where it 

 did not break out until 1351) from 1347 to 

 1350 ; from this latter date to 1383 there were 

 various pestilences, bad enough indeed, but 

 not so violent as the black-death. 



Ireland was much less heavily visited than 

 England, and the disease seems scarcely to 

 have reached the mountainous regions of that 

 land; and Scotland, too, would perhaps have 

 remained" free from it, had not the Scotch 

 availed themselves of the discomfiture of the 

 English to make an irruption into England, 

 which terminated in the destruction of their 

 army by the plague and the sword, and the 

 extension of the pestilence through those who 

 escaped over the whole country. 



In Sweden two princes died (Haken and 

 Knut, half-brothers of King Magnus), and in 

 Westgothland alone 466 priests. The inhab- 

 itants of Iceland and Greenland found in the 

 coldness of their inhospitable climes no protec- 

 tion against this enemy which invaded them. 

 In Denmark and Norway the people were so 

 occupied with their own misery that the ac- 

 customed voyages to Greenland ceased, and at 

 the same time great icebergs formed on the 

 coast of East Greenland, and no mortal from 

 that time, even to the present day, has seen 

 that shore or the former dwellers thereon. 



It may be assumed that Europe lost by 

 the black-death twenty-five million people, or 

 about one fourth of her inhabitants. That her 

 nations could overcome, as quickly as they did, 

 this terrible loss, without retrograding more 

 than they did, is a most convincing proof of the 

 indestructibility of human society as a whole. 



The Dancing Mania. The effects of the black- 

 death had not yet subsided, and the graves of 

 millions of its victims were scarcely green, 

 when a strange delusion arose. It was a con- 

 vulsion that in the most extraordinary man- 

 ner infuriated the human frame and excited 

 the astonishment of contemporaries for more 

 than two centuries. It was called in some por- 

 tions of Europe the Dance of St. John, or of 

 St. Vitus, on account of the strange leaps by 

 which it was characterized and which gave to 

 those affected, while 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 suffer- 

 ers over the whole of Europe. 



As early as 1374 assemblages of men and 

 women were seen at Aix-la-Chapelle who had 

 come out from Germany, and, united by one 

 common delusion, exhibited to the public, 

 both in the streets and in the churches, a 

 strange spectacle. They formed circles, hand 

 in hand, and, losing all control over their 

 senses, continued, regardless of the by-standers, 

 dancing for hours together in wild delirium, 

 until at length they fell to the ground in a 

 state of exhaustion. Then they complained of 

 extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the 

 agonies of death, until cloths were bound 

 tightly around their waists, when they recov- 

 ered and remained free from complaint until 

 the next attack. This practice of swathing 

 was resorted to on account of the tympany 

 that followed these spasmodic ravings; but 

 the by-standers frequently relieved patients in 

 a less artificial manner by thumping and 

 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 fan- 

 cies conjuring up spirits, whose names they 

 shrieked out, and some of them afterward 

 asserted they felt as if they had been immersed 

 in a stream of blood, which obliged them to 

 leap so high. Others during the paroxysm 



