DANCING MANIA.

Mataura Ensign, 2 November 1911, Page 8

DANCING MANIA.

REVIVAL OF A WEIRD EPIDEMIC The symptoms and spread of an extraordinary form of dancing mania are related by a correspondent of 'The Times,' who visited the seat of the epidemic in the Troad (North-Western Asia Minor). The disease usually makes its appearance in the first days or May and lasts till the end of JuneFour girls were caught by the disease in a. small village, and the correspondent found them, amid a crowd of women, with their legs, arms and bodies in twitching motion, like those of marionettes. "Two of them were executing a sort of slow dance, closely resembling the dance which they who are bitten by the tarantula are under compulsion to perform. A third was taking a series of terrifying 'headers' on to the cement floor that might have been expected to break her skull, though, strange to say, when the first fit was over she appeared without a scratch or a bruise. That all were suffering great distress was evident! from their staring, anxious eyes and labored breathing." These girls were cured temporarily by "soothing suggestions followed up by doses of valerianate of Zinc." The correspondent afterwards visited the -little town of Yenishehr and saw women, girls, and men seized with the dancing mania in the church. Two girls climbed a smooth altar-screen fifteen feet high and performed terrifying antics upon the top of it, uttering piercing shrieks the while, and at the same time three girls, a man, and a; small boy performed weird contortions in the nave.

The correspondent believes that "we are here in the presence of a revival of the weird epidemic that raged in Europe from 1374 to the beginning of the sixteenth century." He then relates two cases he has watched of men bitten by tarantula spiders. Both performed a strange, galvanic dance, and both were cured by making them drunk and putting them in an oven with only their heads outside. This appears to be the traditional remedy for the disease.