CHOREA.
BY WHARTON SINKLER, M.D.
Chorea, or St. Vitus's dance, has been known for years, and the literature of the subject, especially among the older writers, is as extensive as that of any other disease.
It has been recognized by a variety of names, some of the most common being derived from some saint who enjoyed a popular reputation of power to cure the disease. For example, it has been called St. John's dance, St. Guy's dance, St. Modestus's dance, and St. Anthony's dance. Besides these names it has been termed ballismus, paralysis vacillans, epilepsia saltatoria, and orchestromania.
It will be observed that almost all of the names which have been applied to the disease relate to a dancing movement. This arises from the fact that the first notice of the affection dates back to the fourteenth century, when a kind of religious mania appeared in Southern Europe in the form of an epidemic. It was characterized by excessive dancing and gesticulatory movements, and affected large numbers of people at a time. In 1375 an epidemic which arose was spoken of as St. John's dance, and in 1418, in another outbreak of the disorder which occurred at Strasburg, by the order of the authorities those suffering were conducted in troops to the chapel of St. Vitus in Zabern, and there masses were said and other religious ceremonies performed for its cure.
We are informed that St. Vitus removed from Sicily when a boy, at the time of Diocletian's persecution of the Christians in the year 303, and suffered martyrdom in Florence in company with Crescentia and his tutor, Modestus.1
1 “Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages,” Sydenham Society's Transactions, contains full details of these outbreaks.
Von Ziemssen states that as a pandemic disease the dancing mania died out in the fifteenth century, but that traces have remained on the Rhine up to the present time.2