“Upon the crisis or turn of the fever, he was seized with an aphonia, and was speechless six weeks [? days], with the following convulsions: the distemper infested the nerves of both arms and legs which produced the Chorea Sancti Viti, or St Vitus’s dance; and the legs sometimes were both so contracted that no person could reduce them to their natural position. Besides these, he had most terrible symptoms, which began in the following manner: [description of convulsions follows] ... and then he barked in all the usual notes of a dog, sometimes snarling, barking, and at the last howling like an hound. After this the nerves of the mandibles were convulsed, and then the jaws clashed together with that violence that several of his teeth were beaten out, and then at several times there came a great foam from his mouth.... These symptoms were so amazing that several persons about him believed he was possessed. I told them there was no ground for such suppositions, but that the distemper was natural, and a species of an epilepsy, and by the effects I convinced them of the truth of it; for in a week’s time I recovered the boy his speech, his senses returned, his convulsions vanished, and the boy is now very cheerful. There have been other persons in this country much after the same manner.” This epidemic of 1702 in Lancashire and Cheshire was recorded as something unusual. It had certain intestinal symptoms such as colic, which may well have followed the use of poisoned food and are indeed described among the symptoms of ergotism; there were also convulsions, large purple spots with blisters coming and going on the skin near them, and, in the single case that is given with details, there were contractures of the legs “so that no person could reduce them to their natural position,” and a continuance for several days of painful epileptiform fits attended with noises like the barking of a dog, or the hissing of a goose, “all which different sounds (I take it) proceed from the different contractions of the lungs variously forcing out the air.” The remarkable case of the boy, certified by several witnesses, is expressly given as one belonging to the general epidemic of the locality, others having been affected “much after the same manner.” Whatever suggestion there may be of ergotism in these particulars, nothing is said of gangrene of the limbs, although the livid spots and blisters are part of the symptoms of gangrenous ergotism, just as the convulsions and contractures are of convulsive ergotism. In the Suffolk cases of 1762 there were both contractures of the limbs and gangrene.