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The Black Death - The Dancing Mania by J. F. C. (Justus Friedrich Carl) Hecker
page 85 of 152 (55%)
those possessed amounted to more than five hundred, and about the
same time at Metz, the streets of which place are said to have
been filled with eleven hundred dancers. Peasants left their
ploughs, mechanics their workshops, housewives their domestic
duties, to join the wild revels, and this rich commercial city
became the scene of the most ruinous disorder. Secret desires
were excited, and but too often found opportunities for wild
enjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by vice and misery,
availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a temporary
livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and servants
their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those
possessed, and greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection.
Above a hundred unmarried women were seen raving about in
consecrated and unconsecrated places, and the consequences were
soon perceived. Gangs of idle vagabonds, who understood how to
imitate to the life the gestures and convulsions of those really
affected, roved from place to place seeking maintenance and
adventures, and thus, wherever they went, spreading this
disgusting spasmodic disease like a plague; for in maladies of
this kind the susceptible are infected as easily by the appearance
as by the reality. At last it was found necessary to drive away
these mischievous guests, who were equally inaccessible to the
exorcisms of the priests and the remedies of the physicians. It
was not, however, until after four months that the Rhenish cities
were able to suppress these impostures, which had so alarmingly
increased the original evil. In the meantime, when once called
into existence, the plague crept on, and found abundant food in
the tone of thought which prevailed in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, and even, though in a minor degree,
throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth, causing a permanent
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