In the year of our Lord 1374, the epidemic dancing disease of St. Guy and St. John prevailed in Holland and in the Rhenish provinces, and an analogous malady, called ‘Tarantisme’ and ‘Tigretier,’ among the Abyssinians; a similar disease also prevailed in the Shetland Islands, where it had existed from time to time, as it is said, for one hundred years previously. The disease also prevailed in France, and the sufferers were called ‘Convulsionnaires;’ it was evidently the malady which we now term St. Vitus’ Dance or Chorea, but prevailing epidemically. Hecker gives the following account of this strange malady, as it occurred about this period also in Germany; it was evidently a disease similar to that which broke out, A.D. 1027, in Bernburg, prevailed A.D. 1237 at Erfurt among children, and subsequently among adults, A.D. 1278, at Utrecht. He says “that the effects of the ‘Black Death’ had not yet subsided, and the graves of millions of its victims were scarcely closed when a strange delusion arose in Germany, which took possession of the minds of men, and, in spite of the divinity of our nature, hurried away body and soul into the magic circle of hellish superstition. It was a convulsion which, in the most extraordinary manner, infuriated the human frame, and excited the astonishment of contemporaries for more than two centuries, since which time it has never re-appeared. It was called the Dance of St. John or of St. Vitus, on account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it was characterized, and which gave to those affected, whilst performing their wild dance, and screaming and foaming with fury, all the appearance of persons possessed. It did not remain confined to particular localities, but was propagated by the sight of the sufferers, like a demoniacal epidemic, over the whole of Germany and the neighbouring countries to the north-west, which were already prepared for its reception by the prevailing opinion of the times.