"Viel hundert fingen zu Strassburg an Zu tanzen und springen Frau und Mann, Am offnen Markt, Gassen und Strassen; Tag und Nacht ihrer viel nicht assen, Bis ihn das Wüthen wieder gelag. St. Vits Tanz ward genannt die Plag." Beckmann (_Historia des Fürstenthums Anhalt_. Zerbst. 1710) tells of a similar outbreak in 1237, wherein nearly a hundred children were seized by the disease at Erfurt, and they went along the road to Arnstadt, dancing and jumping hysterically. A number of these children died of exhaustion. The same infection is often at work in the fury of a mob, the panic of a beaten army, and it probably was an element in the Children's Crusade. The Tarantism so common in Italy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century is another example of epidemic hysteria. The Bubonic Plague ravaged Italy sixteen times between 1119 and 1340, and smallpox was at work when the black death could find no fresh victims. As a consequence of economic disturbance and fear the people were generally neurasthenic, and a slight shock was enough at times to set whole villages into hysterical convulsions. {237} In 1787, at Hodden Bridge in Lancashire, England, a girl in a cotton mill threw a mouse upon another girl that had a great dread of this animal. The frightened girl was thrown into a hysterical convulsion which lasted for hours. The next day three girls that had watched her were in convulsions, the following day six more, and two days later fourteen more girls and a man were in fits. American white and negro camp-meetings result in similar outbreaks, and the French _Convulsionnaires_, who did outrageous things from 1731 to 1790, were also afflicted with imitative hysteria. The Cornish Jumpers, founded in 1760 by Harris Rowland and William Williams, and the American Barkers were also hysterical. The Barkers in the meetings would run about on all fours growling, "to show the degeneration of their human nature," and they would end in almost general fits of imitative hysteria. There was an epidemic of hysteria in Tennessee, Kentucky, and a part of Virginia, which began in 1800 and lasted for a number of years. It started at revivals. The majority of the cases were in persons from 15 to 25 years of age, although it was observed in every age from 6 years to 60. The muscles affected were those of the neck, trunk, and arms. The contractions were so violent that the patients were thrown to the ground, and their motions there exactly resembled those of a live fish thrown out of the water upon the land.