irits; 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 thus tempted to take, their
strength might be exhausted. As soon as this was the case, they fell as
it were lifeless to the ground, and, by very slow degrees, again
recovered their strength. Many there were who, even with all this
exertion, had not expended the violence of the tempest which raged within
them, but awoke with newly-revived powers, and again and again mixed with
the crowd of dancers, until at length the violent excitement of their
disordered nerves was allayed by the great involuntary exertion of their
limbs; and the mental disorder was calmed by the extreme exhaustion of
the body. Thus the attacks themselves were in these cases, as in their
nature they are in all nervous complaints, necessary crises of an inward
morbid condition which was transferred from the sensorium to the nerves
of motion, and, at an earlier period, to the abdominal plexus, where a
deep-seated derangement of the system was perceptible from the secretion
of flatus in the intestines.

The cure effected by these stormy attacks was in many cases so perfect,
that some patients returned to the factory or the plough as if nothing
had happened. Others, on the contrary, paid the penalty of their folly
by so total a loss of power, that they could not regain their former
health, even by the employment of the most strengthening remedies.
Medical men were astonished to observe that women in an advanced state of
pregnancy were capable of going through an attack of the disease without
the slightest injury to their offspring, which they protected merely by a
bandage passed round the waist. Cases of this kind were not infrequent
so late as Schenck's time. That patients should be violently affected by
music, and their paroxysms brought on and increased by it, is natural
with such nervous disorders, whe