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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
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