Rheumatic fever can also cause a temporary nervous system disorder called Sydenham's chorea, previously known as St. Vitus' dance. This disorder causes rapid, jerky movements of the body, usually on one side. It can make it hard to focus or write for people with mild cases, while more sev...
Signs of St. Anthony’s fire were easy to see: seizures, hallucinations, and blackened limbs. Medieval Europeans believed its cause to be spiritual, but the true cause was far more earthly.
That at any rate is what he was. He was the victim from childhood of a disease that resembled St. Vitus’s dance. He never knew the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs; when he walked it was like the struggling walk of one in irons. All accounts agree that his ...
Vitus, a Catholic saint who pious 16th-century Europeans believed had the power to curse people with a dancing plague. When combined with the horrors of disease and famine, both of which were tearing through Strasbourg in 1518, the St. Vitus superstition may have triggered a stress-induced ...
Mine, though I tend to swap and change. Right now I am consciously not twitching but have an urge to do one of them. It gives me a relief feeling. When I don't do it I have an urge but over time it dissipates. I am nearly 40 years old and sick of it. What is wrong with ...
The order allegedly given to Bevans was pretty drastic, and Boston Harbor was not a battlefield; per haps it was not too much to expect the marine to realize that literal compliance might lead to bad trouble. But it is only too easy to conceive of circumstances where the matter might not...