As early as the year 1374 large assemblages of men and women were seen at Aix-la-Chapelle affected with a “dancing mania.” They formed circles and danced for hours in wild delirium. Attacks of insensibility, of convulsions, and of ecstasy occurred. The disease spread from Germany to the Netherlands. In a few months it broke out in Cologne, and about the same time at Metz. “Peasants,” we are told, “left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revelry, and this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous disorder.” The festival of St. John the Baptist was one celebrated in strange wild ways in these early days. Fanatical rites, often cruel and senseless, were performed on these occasions. Hecker supposes that the wild revels of St. John's Day in 1374 may have had something to do with the outbreak of the frightful dancing mania soon after this celebration. It at least brought to a crisis a malady which had been long impending. {223} The Flagellants afford another illustration of an early religio-nervous craze. Self-flagellation was indulged in for generations before the fourteenth century, but it then became epidemic. A brotherhood of Flagellants was formed; they marched in processions carrying scourges, with which they violently lashed and scourged themselves. As late as 1843, Flagellant processions, but without the whips and scourging, were continued in Lisbon on Good Friday. Strasburg was visited by the dancing plague in 1418. Those afflicted were conducted to the chapel of St. Vitus, where priests attempted to relieve them by religious ceremonies. The name St. Vitus's dance, still so common as a synonym for chorea, has come down to us because of the alleged wonderful doings of this saint in behalf of those affected during some of the dancing epidemics. Both Hecker and Madden[51] give interesting details of the personal history of St. Vitus, who was a Sicilian, born in the time of Diocletian, and even in childhood is said to have worked great miracles, and was delivered from many sufferings and torments. He died about the year 303. His body was moved to Apulia, afterward to St. Denys in France, and still later to the abbey of Corvey in Saxony. A legend was invented that St. Vitus, just before he bent his neck to the sword, prayed to God that he might protect from the dancing mania all those who should solemnize the day of his commemoration and fast upon its eve. [Footnote 51: _Phantasmata; or, Illusions and Fanaticisms, etc._, by R. R. Madden, F. R. S., London, 1857.]