The Black Death and The Dancing Mania




INTRODUCTION



Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker was one of three generations of
distinguished professors of medicine. His father, August
Friedrich Hecker, a most industrious writer, first practised as a
physician in Frankenhausen, and in 1790 was appointed Professor of
Medicine at the University of Erfurt. In 1805 he was called to
the like professorship at the University of Berlin. He died at
Berlin in 1811.

Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker was born at Erfurt in January, 1795.
He went, of course--being then ten years old--with his father to
Berlin in 1805, studied at Berlin in the Gymnasium and University,
but interrupted his studies at the age of eighteen to fight as a
volunteer in the war for a renunciation of Napoleon and all his
works. After Waterloo he went back to his studies, took his
doctor's degree in 1817 with a treatise on the "Antiquities of
Hydrocephalus," and became privat-docent in the Medical Faculty of
the Berlin University. His inclination was strong from the first
towards the historical side of inquiries into Medicine. This
caused him to undertake a "History of Medicine," of which the
first volume appeared in 1822. It obtained rank for him at Berlin
as Extraordinary Professor of the History of Medicine. This