(403) See Adam's Dictionary of All Religions, article on Jumpers; also
Hecker.
In 1780 came another outbreak in France; but this time it was not the Jansenists who were affected, but the strictly orthodox. A large number of young girls between twelve and nineteen years of age, having been brought together at the church of St. Roch, in Paris, with preaching and ceremonies calculated to arouse hysterics, one of them fell into convulsions. Immediately other children were similarly taken, until some fifty or sixty were engaged in the same antics. This mania spread to other churches and gatherings, proved very troublesome, and in some cases led to results especially painful.
About the same period came a similar outbreak among the Protestants of the Shetland Isles. A woman having been seized with convulsions at church, the disease spread to others, mainly women, who fell into the usual contortions and wild shriekings. A very effective cure proved to be a threat to plunge the diseased into a neighbouring pond.
II. BEGINNINGS OF HELPFUL SCEPTICISM.
But near the end of the eighteenth century a fact very important for science was established. It was found that these manifestations do not arise in all cases from supernatural sources. In 1787 came the noted case at Hodden Bridge, in Lancashire. A girl working in a cotton manufactory there put a mouse into the bosom of another girl who had a great dread of mice. The girl thus treated immediately went into convulsions, which lasted twenty-four hours. Shortly afterward three other girls were seized with like convulsions, a little later six more, and then others, until, in all, twenty-four were attacked. Then came a fact throwing a flood of light upon earlier occurrences. This epidemic, being noised abroad, soon spread to another factory five miles distant. The patients there suffered from strangulation, danced, tore their hair, and dashed their heads against the walls. There was a strong belief that it was a disease introduced in cotton, but a resident physician amused the patients with electric shocks, and the disease died out.
In 1801 came a case of like import in the Charite Hospital in Berlin. A girl fell into strong convulsions. The disease proved contagious, several others becoming afflicted in a similar way; but nearly all were finally cured, principally by the administration of opium, which appears at that time to have been a fashionable remedy.
Of the same sort was a case at Lyons in 1851. Sixty women were working together in a shop, when one of them, after a bitter quarrel with her husband, fell into a violent nervous paroxysm. The other women, sympathizing with her, gathered about to assist her, but one after another fell into a similar condition, until twenty were thus prostrated, and a more general spread of the epidemic was only prevented by clearing the premises.(404)
(404) For these examples and others, see Tuke, Influence of the Mind
upon the Body, vol. i, pp. 100, 277; also Hecker's essay.
But while these cases seemed, in the eye of Science, fatal to the old conception of diabolic influence, the great majority of such epidemics, when unexplained, continued to give strength to the older view.