ar and precise. It is not so much of cures that there is
question in this case, as of apparent and external facts, in regard to
which there can be no misconception."

Dr. Calmeil, in his well-known work on Insanity, while regarding this
epidemic as one of the most striking examples of religious mania,
accepts the relation of Montgeron as in the main true. "From various
motives," says he, "these theomaniacs sought out the most frightful
bodily tortures. Would it be credible, if it were not that the entire
population of Paris concurred in testifying to the fact, that more than
five hundred women pushed the rage of fanaticism or the perversion of
sensibility to such a point, that they exposed themselves to burning
fires, that they had their heads compressed between boards, that they
caused to be administered on the abdomen, on the breast, on the stomach,
on every part of the body, blows of clubs, stampings of the feet, blows
with weapons of stone, with bars of iron? Yet the theomaniacs of St.
Medard braved all these tests, sometimes as proofs that God had rendered
them invulnerable, sometimes to demonstrate that God could cure them by
means calculated to kill them, had they not been the objects of His
special protection, sometimes to show that blows usually painful only
caused to them pleasant relief. The picture of the punishments to which
the convulsionists submitted, as if by inspiration, so that no one might
doubt, as Montgeron has it, that it was easy for the Almighty to render
invulnerable and insensible bodies the most frail and delicate, would
induce us to believe, if the contrary were not so conclusively
established, that a rage for homicide and suicide had taken possession
of the greater part of the sect of the Appellants."[47]

Though I am acquainted with no class of phenomena occurring elsewhere
that will match the "Great Succors" of St. Medard, yet we find
occasional glimpses of instincts somewhat analogous to those claimed for
the convulsionists, in other examples.

In Hecker's "Epidemics of the Middle Ages" there is a chapter devoted to
what he calls the "Dancing Mania," the account of which he thus
introduces:--"So early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women
were seen at Aix-la-Chapelle, who had come out of Germany, and who,
united by one common delusion, exhibited to the public, both in the
streets and in the churches, the following strange spectacle. They
formed circles hand in hand, and, appea