“The imaginations of women are always more excitable than those of men, and they are therefore susceptible of every folly when they lead a life of strict seclusion, and their thoughts are constantly turned inwards upon themselves. Hence in orphan asylums, hospitals, and convents, the nervous disorder of one female so easily and quickly becomes the disorder of all. I have read in a good medical work that a nun, in a very large convent in France, began to mew like a cat; shortly afterwards other nuns also mewed. At last all the nuns mewed together every day at a certain time for several hours together. The whole surrounding Christian neighbourhood heard, with equal chagrin and astonishment, this daily cat-concert, which did not cease until all the nuns were informed that a company of soldiers were placed by the police before the entrance of the convent, and that they were provided with rods, and would continue whipping them until they promised not to mew any more.
“But of all the epidemics of females which I myself have seen in Germany, or of which the history is known to me, the most remarkable is the celebrated Convent-epidemic of the fifteenth century, which Cardan describes, and which peculiarly proves what I would here enforce. A nun in a German nunnery fell to biting all her companions. In the course of a short time all the nuns of this convent began biting each other. The news of this infatuation among the nuns soon spread, and it now passed from convent to convent, throughout a great part of Germany, principally Saxony and Brandenburg. It afterwards visited the nunneries of Holland, and at last the nuns had the biting mania even as far as Rome.”—Zimmermann on Solitude, Vol. II. Leipsig. 1784.—Transl. note.
[103] Georg. Baglivi, Diss. de Anatome, morsu et effectibus Tarantulæ. pp. 616, 617. Opp. Lugdun. 1710. 4to.
[104] Ferdinando, p. 257.
[105] Idem, pp. 256, 257, 258.
[106] Ferdinando, p. 258.
[107] Adam Olearius. Vermehrte Moscowitische und Persianische Reisebeschreibung. Travels in Muscovy and Persia. Schleswig, 1663. fol. Book IV. p. 496.
[108] Geor. Baglivi, Dissertatio VI. de Anatome, morsu et effectibus Tarantulæ. (written in 1595.) Opera omnia, Lugdun. 1710. 4to. p. 599.
[109] This physician once saw three patients, who were evidently suffering from a malignant fever, and whose illness was attributed by the bystanders to the bite of the tarantula, forced to dance by having music played to them. One of them died on the spot, and the two others very shortly after. Ch. 7. p. 616.