convulsionists, the assistants employed weapons of considerable volume,
having flat or rounded surfaces, cylindrical or blunted. But the action
of such physical agents is not to be compared, as regards its danger,
with that of thongs, switches, or other supple and flexible instruments
with distinct edges. Finally, the contact and the repeated impression of
the blows produced on the convulsionists the effect of a sort of
salutary pounding, and rendered less poignant and less sensible the
tortures of hysteria. It would have been preferable, doubtless, to make
use of less murderous succors; the rage for distinction as the possessor
of a miraculous gift, even more perhaps than the instinctive need of
immediate relief, prompting these convulsionary theomaniacs to make
choice of means calculated to act on the imagination of a populace,
whose interest could be kept awake only by a constant repetition of
wonders."[52]

Calmeil, of all the medical authors I have consulted, appears to have
the most closely studied the various phases of the St.-Medard
epidemic.[53] Yet the explanations above given seem to me quite
incommensurate with the phenomena admitted.

Some of the patients, he says, suffered from ecchymosis and contusions.
In plain, unprofessional language, they were beaten black and blue. That
is such a result as usually follows a few blows from a boxer's fist or
from an ordinary walking-stick. But when the weapon employed is a rough
iron bar weighing upwards of twenty-nine pounds, when the number of
blows dealt in succession on the pit of the stomach of a young girl
exceeds a hundred and fifty, and when these are delivered with the
utmost force of an athletic man, is it bruises and contusions we look
for as the only consequence? Or does it explain the immunity with which
this frightful infliction was received, to call it a salutary pounding?
The argument drawn from the turgescence of the viscera and other organs,
from the spasmodic contraction of the muscles and the general state of
orgasm of the system, has doubtless great weight; but does it reach far
enough to explain to us the fact, (if it be a fact, and as such Calmeil
accepts it,) that a girl, bent back so that her head and feet touched
the floor, the centre of the vertebral column being supported on a
sharp-pointed stake, received, day after day, with impunity, directly on
her stomach and bowels, one hundred times in succession, a flint stone
weighing fifty pounds