ere even
cases in which it was known to continue for sixty or seventy hours. Many
of those who happened to be seated when the attack commenced bent their
bodies rapidly backwards and forwards during its continuance, making a
corresponding motion with their arms, like persons sawing wood. Others
shouted aloud, leaped about, and threw their bodies into every possible
posture, until they had exhausted their strength. Yawning took place at
the commencement in all cases, but as the violence of the disorder
increased the circulation and respiration became accelerated, so that the
countenance assumed a swollen and puffed appearance. When exhaustion
came on patients usually fainted, and remained in a stiff and motionless
state until their recovery. The disorder completely resembled the St.
Vitus's dance, but the fits sometimes went on to an extraordinarily
violent extent, so that the author of the account once saw a woman who
was seized with these convulsions resist the endeavours of four or five
strong men to restrain her. Those patients who did not lose their
consciousness were in general made more furious by every attempt to quiet
them by force, on which account they were in general suffered to continue
unmolested until nature herself brought on exhaustion. Those affected
complained more or less of debility after the attacks, and cases
sometimes occurred in which they passed into other disorders; thus some
fell into a state of melancholy, which, however, in consequence of their
religious ecstasy, was distinguished by the absence of fear and despair;
and in one patient inflammation of the brain is said to have taken place.
No sex or age was exempt from this epidemic malady. Children five years
old and octogenarians were alike affected by it, and even men of the most
powerful frame were subject to its influence. Girls and young women,
however, were its most frequent victims.

4. For the last hundred years a nervous affection of a perfectly similar
kind has existed in the Shetland Islands, which furnishes a striking
example, perhaps the only one now existing, of the very lasting
propagation by sympathy of this species of disorders. The origin of the
malady was very insignificant. An epileptic woman had a fit in church,
and whether it was that the minds of the congregation were excited by
devotion, or that, being overcome at the sight of the strong convulsions,
their sympathy was called forth, certain it is that many