The conditions that bring about hysteria are hysteria in a parent, or insanity, alcoholism, or some similar neurotic taint in an ancestor. Immediate causes are acute depressive emotions, shocks from danger, sudden grief, severe revulsions of feeling, as from disappointment in love or abandonment by a husband; and, secondly, cumulative emotional disturbance, as from worry, poverty, ill treatment, unhappy marriage, or religious revivals. Certain diseased conditions, as anemia, chronic intoxications, pelvic trouble, start it into activity when it is latent. It is also communicated by imitation and it may become epidemic. After the great plague, the Black Death, in the fourteenth century, there were very remarkable epidemics of imitative hysteria in Germany and elsewhere. In 1374, at Aix-la-Chapelle, crowds of men and women danced together in the streets until they fell exhausted in a cataleptic state. These dances spread over Holland and Belgium and extended to Cologne and Metz. The "Dancing Plague" broke out again, in 1418, at Strasburg and in Belgium and along the lower Rhine. In 1237 there was a similar outbreak among children at Erfurt and many died from exhaustion. The tarantism in Italy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century is another example of epidemic hysteria. There were epidemics of hysteria in Tennessee, Kentucky, and a part of Virginia, which began in 1800 and recurred for a number of years. These outbreaks started in revivals and camp meetings. The majority of the cases were in youths from fifteen to twenty-five years of age, but the hysteria was observed in persons from six to sixty years old. The muscles affected were those of the neck, trunk, and arms, and the convulsions were so strong that the patients were thrown to the ground and often leaped about like a live fish tossed out of the water on a bank.