During the Middle Ages a similar disease existed in many parts of Europe; men were changed into dogs or wolves, sometimes as a divine punishment for great crimes, at other times in consequence of a delusion produced by Satan. Such unfortunate men walked on all fours, attacked men and beasts, but especially children, killed and devoured them. They actually terrified many people into believing as confidently in this delusion as they believed in it themselves! For this is one of the specially fearful magic phenomena of zoanthropy that it is apt to produce in healthy persons the same delusion as in the sufferer. Many cases also are recorded of persons lying in deep sleep, produced by narcotic ointments, who, seeing visions, fancied that they were acting like wolves. In the year 1598 such a disease raged as an epidemic in the Jura mountains, till the French Parliament determined to make an end of it by treating all the afflicted either as insane or as persons possessed by the devil and therefore deserving instant death. Among Slavic nations and the Magyars lycanthropy is so closely connected with vampirism that it is not always easy to draw the line between the two diseases. There can be no doubt, however, that it is merely a variety of possession, arising from the same unhappy state in which dualism is developed in the soul, and two wills contend with each other for superiority to the grievous injury of mind and body. The only distinctive feature is this, that in lycanthropy not only the functions of the brains but also those of the skin are disordered, and hence an impression arises that the latter is hairy and shaggy after the manner of wild beasts. The German Währwolf (were-wolf or man-wolf) is the same as the lycanthropos of the Scythians and Greeks and the _versipellis_ of the Romans; he was in German mythology connected with Woden. Hence, probably, the readiness with which the disease during the Middle Ages took hold of the minds of Germans; but at that period nearly all the nations of Europe firmly believed in the reality of such changes. As late even as the beginning of the sixteenth century cases of this kind occurred in France, where the possessed were known as _loups-garoux_. A young man of Besançon was thus brought before the Councilor of State, _De l'Ancre_, at Bordeaux, and accused of roving like a wild animal through the neighboring forests. He confessed readily that he was a huntsman in the service of his invisible master, the devil, who had changed him into a wolf and forced him to range by the side of another more powerful wolf through the country. The poor fellow shared the usual fate of his fellow-sufferers, who were either subjected to a sharp treatment of exorcism or simply executed as heretical criminals.