exempt from any further attack, after having thus, by dancing and raving for three hours, satisfied an irresistible demand of nature. There were at that period two chapels in the Breisgau, visited by the St. Vitus’s dancers; namely, the Chapel of St. Vitus at Biessen, near Breisach, and that of St. John, near Wasenweiler; and it is probable that in the south-west of Germany, the disease was still in existence in the seventeenth century. However, it grew every year more rare, so that, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was observed only occasionally in its ancient form. Thus in the spring of the year 1623, G. Horst saw some women who annually performed a pilgrimage to St. Vitus’s chapel at Drefelhausen, near Weissenstein, in the territory of Ulm, that they might wait for their dancing fit there, in the same manner as those in the Breisgau did, according to Schenck’s account. They were not satisfied, however, with a dance of three hours’ duration, but continued day and night in a state of mental aberration, like persons in an ecstacy, until they fell exhausted to the ground; and when they came to themselves again, they felt relieved from a distressing uneasiness and painful sensation of weight in their bodies, of which they had complained for several weeks prior to St. Vitus’s day[241]. After this commotion they remained well for the whole year; and such was their faith in the protecting power of the saint, that one of them had visited this shrine at Drefelhausen more than twenty times, and another had already kept the Saint’s day for the thirty-second time at this sacred station.