se did not take this cheerful turn. They wept constantly, and as if
pining away with some unsatisfied desire, spent their days in the
greatest misery and anxiety. Others, again, in morbid fits of love, cast
their longing looks on women, and instances of death are recorded, which
are said to have occurred under a paroxysm of either laughing or weeping.

From this description, incomplete as it is, we may easily gather that
tarantism, the essential symptoms of which are mentioned in it, could not
have originated in the fifteenth century, to which Perotti's account
refers; for that author speaks of it as a well-known malady, and states
that the omission to notice it by older writers was to be ascribed solely
to the want of education in Apulia, the only province probably where the
disease at that time prevailed. A nervous disorder that had arrived at
so high a degree of development must have been long in existence, and
doubtless had required an elaborate preparation by the concurrence of
general causes.

The symptoms which followed the bite of venomous spiders were well known
to the ancients, and had excited the attention of their best observers,
who agree in their descriptions of them. It is probable that among the
numerous species of their phalangium, the Apulian tarantula is included,
but it is difficult to determine this point with certainty, more
especially because in Italy the tarantula was not the only insect which
caused this nervous affection, similar results being likewise attributed
to the bite of the scorpion. Lividity of the whole body, as well as of
the countenance, difficulty of speech, tremor of the limbs, icy coldness,
pale urine, depression of spirits, headache, a flow of tears, nausea,
vomiting, sexual excitement, flatulence, syncope, dysuria, watchfulness,
lethargy, even death itself, were cited by them as the consequences of
being bitten by venomous spiders, and they made little distinction as to
their kinds. To these symptoms we may add the strange rumour, repeated
throughout the middle ages, that persons who were bitten, ejected by the
bowels and kidneys, and even by vomiting, substances resembling a
spider's web.

Nowhere, however, do we find any mention made that those affected felt an
irresistible propensity to dancing, or that they were accidentally cured
by it. Even Constantine of Africa, who lived 500 years after Aetius,
and, as the most learned physician of the school of Salerno, would