makes no mention of the tympanitic inflation of the bowels.
Moreover, most of those affected were only annually visited by
attacks; and the occasion of them was so manifestly referable to
the prevailing notions of that period, that if the unqualified
belief in the supernatural agency of saints could have been
abolished, they would not have had any return of the complaint.
Throughout the whole of June, prior to the festival of St. John,
patients felt a disquietude and restlessness which they were
unable to overcome. They were dejected, timid, and anxious;
wandered about in an unsettled state, being tormented with
twitching pains, which seized them suddenly in different parts,
and eagerly expected the eve of St. John's day, in the confident
hope that by dancing at the altars of this saint, or of St. Vitus
(for in the Breisgau aid was equally sought from both), they would
be freed from all their sufferings. This hope was not
disappointed; and they remained, for the rest of the year, exempt
from any further attack, after having thus, by dancing and raving
for three hours, satisfied an irresistible demand of nature.
There were at that period two chapels in the Breisgau visited by
the St. Vitus's dancers; namely, the Chapel of St. Vitus at
Biessen, near Breisach, and that of St. John, near Wasenweiler;
and it is probable that in the south-west of Germany the disease
was still in existence in the seventeenth century.

However, it grew every year more rare, so that at the beginning of
the seventeenth century it was observed only occasionally in its
ancient form. Thus in the spring of the year 1623, G. Horst saw
some women who annually performed a pilgrimage to St. Vitus's
chapel at Drefelhausen, near Weissenstein, in the territory of
Ulm, that they might wait for their dancing fit there, in the same