The recent history of hygiene in all countries shows a long series of

victories, and these may well be studied in Great Britain and the United

States. In the former, though there had been many warnings from eminent

physicians, and above all in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

from men like Caius, Mead, and Pringle, the result was far short of

what might have been gained; and it was only in the year 1838 that

a systematic sanitary effort was begun in England by the public

authorities. The state of things at that time, though by comparison

with the Middle Ages happy, was, by comparison with what has since been

gained, fearful: the death rate among all classes was high, but among

the poor it was ghastly. Out of seventy-seven thousand paupers in London

during the years 1837 and 1838, fourteen thousand were suffering from

fever, and of these nearly six thousand from typhus. In many other parts

of the British Islands the sanitary condition was no better. A noble

body of men grappled with the problem, and in a few years one of these

rose above his fellows--the late Edwin Chadwick. The opposition to his

work was bitter, and, though many churchmen aided him, the support given

by theologians and ecclesiastics as a whole was very far short of what

it should have been. Too many of them were occupied in that most costly

and most worthless of all processes, "the saving of souls" by the

inculcation of dogma. Yet some of the higher ecclesiastics and many of

the lesser clergy did much, sometimes risking their lives, and one of

them, Sidney Godolphin Osborne, deserves lasting memory for his struggle

to make known the sanitary wants of the peasantry.

Chadwick began to be widely known in 1848 as a member of the Board of

Health, and was driven out for a time for overzeal; but from one point

or another, during forty years, he fought the opposition, developed the

new work, and one of the best exhibits of its results is shown in his

address before the Sanitary Conference at Brighton in 1888. From this

and other perfectly trustworthy sources some idea may be gained of the

triumph of the scientific over the theological method of dealing with

disease, whether epidemic or sporadic.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century the annual mortality of

London is estimated at not less than eighty in a thousand; about the

middle of this century it stood at twenty-four in a thousand; in 1889

it stood at less than eighteen in a thousand; and in many parts the

most recent statistics show that it has been brought down to fourteen

or fifteen in a thousand. A quarter of a century ago the death rate from

disease in the Royal Guards at London was twenty in a thousand; in 1888

it had been reduced to six in a thousand. In the army generally it

had been seventeen in a thousand, but it has been reduced until it now

stands at eight. In the old Indian army it had been sixty-nine in a

thousand, but of late it has been brought down first to twenty, and

finally to fourteen. Mr. Chadwick in his speech proved that much more

might be done, for he called attention to the German army, where the

death rate from disease has been reduced to between five and six in a

thousand. The Public Health Act having been passed in 1875, the death

rate in England among men fell, between 1871 and 1880, more than four in

a thousand, and among women more than six in a thousand. In the decade

between 1851 and 1860 there died of diseases attributable to defective

drainage and impure water over four thousand persons in every million

throughout England: these numbers have declined until in 1888 there died

less than two thousand in every million. The most striking diminution

of the deaths from such causes was found in 1891, in the case of typhoid

fever, that diminution being fifty per cent. As to the scourge

which, next to plagues like the Black Death, was formerly the most

dreaded--smallpox--there died of it in London during the year 1890 just

one person. Drainage in Bristol reduced the death rate by consumption

from 4.4 to 2.3; at Cardiff, from 3.47 to 2.31; and in all England and

Wales, from 2.68 in 1851 to 1.55 in 1888.

What can be accomplished by better sanitation is also seen to-day by a

comparison between the death rate among the children outside and inside

the charity schools. The death rate among those outside in 1881 was

twelve in a thousand; while inside, where the children were under

sanitary regulations maintained by competent authorities, it has been

brought down first to eight, then to four, and finally to less than

three in a thousand.

In view of statistics like these, it becomes clear that Edwin Chadwick

and his compeers among the sanitary authorities have in half a century

done far more to reduce the rate of disease and death than has been done

in fifteen hundred years by all the fetiches which theological reasoning

could devise or ecclesiastical power enforce.

Not less striking has been the history of hygiene in France: thanks

to the decline of theological control over the universities, to the

abolition of monasteries, and to such labours in hygienic research and

improvement as those of Tardieu, Levy, and Bouchardat, a wondrous change

has been wrought in public health. Statistics carefully kept show that

the mean length of human life has been remarkably increased. In the

eighteenth century it was but twenty-three years; from 1825 to 1830

it was thirty-two years and eight months; and since 1864, thirty-seven

years and six months.

IV. THE RELATION OF SANITARY SCIENCE TO RELIGION.

The question may now arise whether this progress in sanitary science has

been purchased at any real sacrifice of religion in its highest sense.

One piece of recent history indicates an answer to this question.

The Second Empire in France had its head in Napoleon III, a noted

Voltairean. At the climax of his power he determined to erect an Academy

of Music which should be the noblest building of its kind. It was

projected on a scale never before known, at least in modern times, and

carried on for years, millions being lavished upon it. At the same

time the emperor determined to rebuild the Hotel-Dieu, the great Paris

hospital; this, too, was projected on a greater scale than anything

of the kind ever before known, and also required millions. But in

the erection of these two buildings the emperor's determination was

distinctly made known, that with the highest provision for aesthetic

enjoyment there should be a similar provision, moving on parallel lines,

for the relief of human suffering. This plan was carried out to the

letter: the Palace of the Opera and the Hotel-Dieu went on with equal

steps, and the former was not allowed to be finished before the latter.

Among all the "most Christian kings" of the house of Bourbon who had

preceded him for five hundred years, history shows no such obedience to

the religious and moral sense of the nation. Catharine de' Medici and

her sons, plunging the nation into the great wars of religion, never

showed any such feeling; Louis XIV, revoking the Edict of Nantes for the

glory of God, and bringing the nation to sorrow during many generations,

never dreamed of making the construction of his palaces and public

buildings wait upon the demands of charity. Louis XV, so subservient

to the Church in all things, never betrayed the slightest consciousness

that, while making enormous expenditures to gratify his own and the

national vanity, he ought to carry on works, pari passu, for charity.

Nor did the French nation, at those periods when it was most largely

under the control of theological considerations, seem to have any

inkling of the idea that nation or monarch should make provision for

relief from human suffering, to justify provision for the sumptuous

enjoyment of art: it was reserved for the second half of the nineteenth

century to develop this feeling so strongly, though quietly, that

Napoleon III, notoriously an unbeliever in all orthodoxy, was obliged to

recognise it and to set this great example.

Nor has the recent history of the United States been less fruitful in

lessons. Yellow fever, which formerly swept not only Southern cities but

even New York and Philadelphia, has now been almost entirely warded off.

Such epidemics as that in Memphis a few years since, and the immunity of

the city from such visitations since its sanitary condition was changed

by Mr. Waring, are a most striking object lesson to the whole country.

Cholera, which again and again swept the country, has ceased to be

feared by the public at large. Typhus fever, once so deadly, is now

rarely heard of. Curious is it to find that some of the diseases which

in the olden time swept off myriads on myriads in every country, now

cause fewer deaths than some diseases thought of little account, and

for the cure of which people therefore rely, to their cost, on quackery

instead of medical science.

This development of sanitary science and hygiene in the United States

has also been coincident with a marked change in the attitude of the

American pulpit as regards the theory of disease. In this country, as

in others, down to a period within living memory, deaths due to want of

sanitary precautions were constantly dwelt upon in funeral sermons as

"results of national sin," or as "inscrutable Providences." That view

has mainly passed away among the clergy of the more enlightened parts of

the country, and we now find them, as a rule, active in spreading useful

ideas as to the prevention of disease. The religious press has been

especially faithful in this respect, carrying to every household more

just ideas of sanitary precautions and hygienic living.

The attitude even of many among the most orthodox rulers in church and

state has been changed by facts like these. Lord Palmerston refusing the

request of the Scotch clergy that a fast day be appointed to ward off

cholera, and advising them to go home and clean their streets,--the

devout Emperor William II forbidding prayer-meetings in a similar

emergency, on the ground that they led to neglect of practical human

means of help,--all this is in striking contrast to the older methods.

Well worthy of note is the ground taken in 1893, at Philadelphia, by

an eminent divine of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The Bishop of

Pennsylvania having issued a special call to prayer in order to ward off

the cholera, this clergyman refused to respond to the call, declaring

that to do so, in the filthy condition of the streets then prevailing in

Philadelphia, would be blasphemous.

In summing up the whole subject, we see that in this field, as in so

many others, the triumph of scientific thought has gradually done much

to evolve in the world not only a theology but also a religious spirit

more and more worthy of the goodness of God and of the destiny of

man.(340)

(340) On the improvement in sanitation in London and elsewhere in the

north of Europe, see the editorial and Report of the Conference on

Sanitation at Brighton, given in the London Times of August 27, 1888.

For the best authorities on the general subject in England, see Sir John

Simon on English Sanitary Institutions, 1890; also his published Health

Reports for 1887, cited in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1891. See

also Parkes's Hygiene, passim. For the great increase in the mean length

of life in France under better hygienic conditions, see Rambaud, La

Civilisation contemporaine en France, p. 682. For the approach to

depopulation at Memphis, under the cesspool system in 1878, see Parkes,

Hygiene, American appendix, p. 397. For the facts brought out in the

investigation of the department of the city of New York by the Committee

of the State Senate, of which the present writer was a member, see New

York Senate Documents for 1865. For decrease of death rate in New York

city under the new Board of Health, beginning in 1866, and especially

among children, see Buck, Hygiene and Popular Health, New York, 1879,

vol. ii, p. 573; and for wise remarks on religious duties during

pestilence, see ibid., vol. ii, p. 579. For a contrast between the old

and new ideas regarding pestilences, see Charles Kingsley in Fraser's

Magazine, vol. lviii, p. 134; also the sermon of Dr. Burns, in 1875,

at the Cathedral of Glasgow before the Social Science Congress. For a

particularly bright and valuable statement of the triumphs of modern

sanitation, see Mrs. Plunkett's article in The Popular Science Monthly

for June, 1891. For the reply of Lord Palmerston to the Scotch clergy,

see the well-known passage in Buckle. For the order of the Emperor

William, see various newspapers for September, 1892, and especially

Public Opinion for September 24th.

CHAPTER XV. FROM "DEMONIACAL POSSESSION" TO INSANITY.

I. THEOLOGICAL IDEAS OF LUNACY AND ITS TREATMENT.

Of all the triumphs won by science for humanity, few have been

farther-reaching in good effects than the modern treatment of the

insane. But this is the result of a struggle long and severe between

two great forces. On one side have stood the survivals of various

superstitions, the metaphysics of various philosophies, the dogmatism of

various theologies, the literal interpretation of various sacred books,

and especially of our own--all compacted into a creed that insanity is

mainly or largely demoniacal possession; on the other side has stood

science, gradually accumulating proofs that insanity is always the

result of physical disease.

I purpose in this chapter to sketch, as briefly as I may, the history of

this warfare, or rather of this evolution of truth out of error.

Nothing is more simple and natural, in the early stages of civilization,

than belief in occult, self-conscious powers of evil. Troubles and

calamities come upon man; his ignorance of physical laws forbids him

to attribute them to physical causes; he therefore attributes them

sometimes to the wrath of a good being, but more frequently to the

malice of an evil being.

Especially is this the case with diseases. The real causes of disease

are so intricate that they are reached only after ages of scientific

labour; hence they, above all, have been attributed to the influence of

evil spirits.(341)

(341) On the general attribution of disease to demoniacal influence, see

Sprenger, History of Medicine, passim (note, for a later attitude, vol.

ii, pp. 150-170, 178); Calmeil, De la Folie, Paris, 1845, vol. i, pp.

104, 105; Esquirol, Des Maladies Mentales, Paris, 1838, vol. i, p. 482;

also Tylor, Primitive Culture. For a very plain and honest statement of

this view in our own sacred books, see Oort, Hooykaas, and Kuenen,

The Bible for Young People, English translation, chap. v, p. 167 and

following; also Farrar's Life of Christ, chap. xvii. For this idea

in Greece and elsewhere, see Maury, La Magie, etc., vol. iii, p. 276,

giving, among other citations, one from book v of the Odyssey. On the

influence of Platonism, see Esquirol and others, as above--the main

passage cited is from the Phaedo. For the devotion of the early fathers

and doctors to this idea, see citations from Eusebius, Lactantius, St.

Jerome, St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory Nazianzen,

in Tissot, L'Imagination, p. 369; also Jacob (i.e., Paul Lecroix),

Croyances Populaires, p. 183. For St. Augustine, see also his De

Civitate Dei, lib. xxii, chap. vii, and his Enarration in Psal., cxxxv,

1. For the breaking away of the religious orders in Italy from the

entire supremacy of this idea, see Becavin, L'Ecole de Salerne, Paris,

1888; also Daremberg, Histoire de la Medecine. Even so late as the

Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther maintained (Table Talk, Hazlitt's

translation, London, 1872, pp. 250, 256) that "Satan produces all the

maladies which afflict mankind."

But, if ordinary diseases were likely to be attributed to diabolical

agency, how much more diseases of the brain, and especially the more

obscure of these! These, indeed, seemed to the vast majority of mankind

possible only on the theory of Satanic intervention: any approach to a

true theory of the connection between physical causes and mental results

is one of the highest acquisitions of science.

Here and there, during the whole historic period, keen men had obtained

an inkling of the truth; but to the vast multitude, down to the end of

the seventeenth century, nothing was more clear than that insanity is,

in many if not in most cases, demoniacal possession.

Yet at a very early date, in Greece and Rome, science had asserted

itself, and a beginning had been made which seemed destined to bring

a large fruitage of blessings.(342) In the fifth century before the

Christian era, Hippocrates of Cos asserted the great truth that all

madness is simply disease of the brain, thereby beginning a development

of truth and mercy which lasted nearly a thousand years. In the first

century after Christ, Aretaeus carried these ideas yet further, observed

the phenomena of insanity with great acuteness, and reached yet more

valuable results. Near the beginning of the following century, Soranus

went still further in the same path, giving new results of research, and

strengthening scientific truth. Toward the end of the same century a new

epoch was ushered in by Galen, under whom the same truth was developed

yet further, and the path toward merciful treatment of the insane made

yet more clear. In the third century Celius Aurelianus received this

deposit of precious truth, elaborated it, and brought forth the great

idea which, had theology, citing biblical texts, not banished it, would

have saved fifteen centuries of cruelty--an idea not fully recognised

again till near the beginning of the present century--the idea that

insanity is brain disease, and that the treatment of it must be gentle

and kind. In the sixth century Alexander of Tralles presented still more

fruitful researches, and taught the world how to deal with melancholia;

and, finally, in the seventh century, this great line of scientific men,

working mainly under pagan auspices, was closed by Paul of Aegina, who

under the protection of Caliph Omar made still further observations,

but, above all, laid stress on the cure of madness as a disease, and on

the absolute necessity of mild treatment.

(342) It is significant of this scientific attitude that the Greek word

for superstition means, literally, fear of gods or demons.

Such was this great succession in the apostolate of science: evidently

no other has ever shown itself more directly under Divine grace,

illumination, and guidance. It had given to the world what might have

been one of its greatest blessings.(343)

(343) For authorities regarding this development of scientific truth

and mercy in antiquity, see especially Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch des

Psychiatrie, Stuttgart, 1888, p. 40 and the pages following; Trelat,

Recherches Historiques sur la Folie, Paris, 1839; Semelaigne,

L'Alienation mentale dans l'Antiquitie, Paris, 1869; Dagron, Des

Alienes, Paris, 1875; also Calmeil, De la Folie, Sprenger, and

especially Isensee, Geschichte der Medicin, Berlin, 1840.

This evolution of divine truth was interrupted by theology. There set

into the early Church a current of belief which was destined to bring

all these noble acquisitions of science and religion to naught, and,

during centuries, to inflict tortures, physical and mental, upon

hundreds of thousands of innocent men and women--a belief which held

its cruel sway for nearly eighteen centuries; and this belief was that

madness was mainly or largely possession by the devil.

This idea of diabolic agency in mental disease had grown luxuriantly

in all the Oriental sacred literatures. In the series of Assyrian

mythological tablets in which we find those legends of the Creation, the

Fall, the Flood, and other early conceptions from which the Hebrews so

largely drew the accounts wrought into the book of Genesis, have been

discovered the formulas for driving out the evil spirits which cause

disease. In the Persian theology regarding the struggle of the great

powers of good and evil this idea was developed to its highest point.

From these and other ancient sources the Jews naturally received this

addition to their earlier view: the Mocker of the Garden of Eden became

Satan, with legions of evil angels at his command; and the theory of

diabolic causes of mental disease took a firm place in our sacred books.

Such cases in the Old Testament as the evil spirit in Saul, which we

now see to have been simply melancholy--and, in the New Testament,

the various accounts of the casting out of devils, through which is

refracted the beautiful and simple story of that power by which Jesus of

Nazareth soothed perturbed minds by his presence or quelled outbursts

of madness by his words, give examples of this. In Greece, too, an

idea akin to this found lodgment both in the popular belief and in the

philosophy of Plato and Socrates; and though, as we have seen, the great

leaders in medical science had taught with more or less distinctness

that insanity is the result of physical disease, there was a strong

popular tendency to attribute the more troublesome cases of it to

hostile spiritual influence.(344)

(344) For the exorcism against disease found at Ninevah, see G. Smith,

Delitzsch's German translation, p. 34. For a very interesting passage

regarding the representaion of a diabolic personage on a Babylonian

bronze, and for a very frank statement regarding the transmission of

ideas regarding Satanic power to our sacred books, see Sayce, Herodotus,

appendix ii, p. 393. It is, indeed, extremely doubtful whether Plato

himself or his contemporaries knew anything of evil demons, this

conception probably coming into the Greek world, as into the Latin,

with the Oriental influences that began to prevail about the time of the

birth of Christ; but to the early Christians, a demon was a demon, and

Plato's, good or bad, were pagan, and therefore devils. The Greek word

"epilepsy" is itself a survival of the old belief, fossilized in a word,

since its literal meaning refers to the SEIZURE of the patient by evil

spirits.

From all these sources, but especially from our sacred books and the

writings of Plato, this theory that mental disease is caused largely

or mainly by Satanic influence passed on into the early Church. In the

apostolic times no belief seems to have been more firmly settled. The

early fathers and doctors in the following age universally accepted it,

and the apologists generally spoke of the power of casting out devils as

a leading proof of the divine origin of the Christian religion.

This belief took firm hold upon the strongest men. The case of St.

Gregory the Great is typical. He was a pope of exceedingly broad mind

for his time, and no one will think him unjustly reckoned one of the

four Doctors of the Western Church. Yet he solemnly relates that a

nun, having eaten some lettuce without making the sign of the cross,

swallowed a devil, and that, when commanded by a holy man to come forth,

the devil replied: "How am I to blame? I was sitting on the lettuce,

and this woman, not having made the sign of the cross, ate me along with

it."(345)

(345) For a striking statement of the Jewish belief in diabolical

interference, see Josephus, De Bello Judaico, vii, 6, iii; also his

Antiquities, vol. viii, Whiston's translation. On the "devil cast out,"

in Mark ix, 17-29, as undoubtedly a case of epilepsy, see Cherullier,

Essai sur l'Epilepsie; also Maury, art. Demonique in the Encyclopedie

Moderne. In one text, at least, the popular belief is perfectly shown as

confounding madness and possession: "He hath a devil, and is mad," John

x, 20. Among the multitude of texts, those most relied upon were Matthew

viii, 28, and Luke x, 17; and for the use of fetiches in driving out

evil spirits, the account of the cures wrought by touching the garments

of St. Paul in Acts xix, 12. On the general subject, see authorities

already given, and as a typical passage, Tertullian, Ad. Scap., ii.

For the very gross view taken by St. Basil, see Cudworth, Intellectual

System, vol. ii, p. 648; also Archdeacon Farrar's Life of Christ. For

the case related by St. Gregory the Great with comical details, see the

Exempla of Archbishop Jacques de Vitrie, edited by Prof. T. F. Crane,

of Cornell University, p. 59, art. cxxx. For a curious presentation

of Greek views, see Lelut, Le demon Socrate, Paris, 1856; and for

the transmission of these to Christianity, see the same, p. 201 and

following.

As a result of this idea, the Christian Church at an early period in

its existence virtually gave up the noble conquests of Greek and Roman

science in this field, and originated, for persons supposed to be

possessed, a regular discipline, developed out of dogmatic theology.

But during the centuries before theology and ecclesiasticism had become

fully dominant this discipline was, as a rule, gentle and useful.

The afflicted, when not too violent, were generally admitted to the

exercises of public worship, and a kindly system of cure was attempted,

in which prominence was given to holy water, sanctified ointments, the

breath or spittle of the priest, the touching of relics, visits to holy

places, and submission to mild forms of exorcism. There can be no doubt

that many of these things, when judiciously used in that spirit of love

and gentleness and devotion inherited by the earlier disciples from "the

Master," produced good effects in soothing disturbed minds and in aiding

their cure.

Among the thousands of fetiches of various sorts then resorted to may

be named, as typical, the Holy Handkerchief of Besancon. During many

centuries multitudes came from far and near to touch it; for, it was

argued, if touching the garments of St. Paul at Ephesus had cured the

diseased, how much more might be expected of a handkerchief of the Lord

himself!

With ideas of this sort was mingled a vague belief in medical treatment,

and out of this mixture were evolved such prescriptions as the

following:

"If an elf or a goblin come, smear his forehead with this salve, put it

on his eyes, cense him with incense, and sign him frequently with the

sign of the cross."

"For a fiend-sick man: When a devil possesses a man, or controls him

from within with disease, a spew-drink of lupin, bishopswort, henbane,

garlic. Pound these together, add ale and holy water."

And again: "A drink for a fiend-sick man, to be drunk out of a church

bell: Githrife, cynoglossum, yarrow, lupin, flower-de-luce, fennel,

lichen, lovage. Work up to a drink with clear ale, sing seven masses

over it, add garlic and holy water, and let the possessed sing the Beati

Immaculati; then let him drink the dose out of a church bell, and let

the priest sing over him the Domine Sancte Pater Omnipotens."(346)

(346) See Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wort-cunning, and Star-Craft of Early

England in the Rolls Series, vol. ii, p. 177; also pp. 355, 356. For the

great value of priestly saliva, see W. W. Story's essays.

Had this been the worst treatment of lunatics developed in the

theological atmosphere of the Middle Ages, the world would have

been spared some of the most terrible chapters in its history; but,

unfortunately, the idea of the Satanic possession of lunatics led to

attempts to punish the indwelling demon. As this theological theory and

practice became more fully developed, and ecclesiasticism more powerful

to enforce it, all mildness began to disappear; the admonitions

to gentle treatment by the great pagan and Moslem physicians were

forgotten, and the treatment of lunatics tended more and more toward

severity: more and more generally it was felt that cruelty to madmen was

punishment of the devil residing within or acting upon them.

A few strong churchmen and laymen made efforts to resist this tendency.

As far back as the fourth century, Nemesius, Bishop of Emesa,

accepted the truth as developed by pagan physicians, and aided them

in strengthening it. In the seventh century, a Lombard code embodied a

similar effort. In the eighth century, one of Charlemagne's capitularies

seems to have had a like purpose. In the ninth century, that great

churchman and statesman, Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, superior to his

time in this as in so many other things, tried to make right reason

prevail in this field; and, near the beginning of the tenth century,

Regino, Abbot of Prum, in the diocese of Treves, insisted on treating

possession as disease. But all in vain; the current streaming most

directly from sundry texts in the Christian sacred books, and swollen by

theology, had become overwhelming.(347)

(347) For a very thorough and interesting statement on the general

subject, see Kirchhoff, Beziehungen des Damonen- und Hexenwesens zur

deutschen Irrenpflege in the Allgemeine Zeitschrift fur Psychiatrie,

Berlin, 1888, Bd. xliv, Heft 25. For Roman Catholic authority, see Addis

and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, article Energumens. For a brief and

eloquent summary, see Krefft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, as above;

and for a clear view of the transition from pagan mildness in the care

of the insane to severity and cruelty under the Christian Church, see

Maudsley, The Pathology of the Mind, London, 1879, p. 523. See also

Buchmann, Die undfreie und die freie Kirche, Bresleau, 1873, p. 251.

For other citations, see Kirchoff, as above, pp. 334-346. For Bishop

Nemesius, see Trelat, p. 48. For an account of Agobard's general

position in regard to this and allied superstitions, see Reginald Lane

Poole's Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought, London, 1884.

The first great tributary poured into this stream, as we approach the

bloom of the Middle Ages, appears to have come from the brain of Michael

Psellus. Mingling scriptural texts, Platonic philosophy, and theological

statements by great doctors of the Church, with wild utterances obtained

from lunatics, he gave forth, about the beginning of the twelfth

century, a treatise on The Work of Demons. Sacred science was vastly

enriched thereby in various ways; but two of his conclusions, the

results of his most profound thought, enforced by theologians and

popularized by preachers, soon took special hold upon the thinking

portion of the people at large. The first of these, which he easily

based upon Scripture and St. Basil, was that, since all demons suffer by

material fire and brimstone, they must have material bodies; the second

was that, since all demons are by nature cold, they gladly seek a genial

warmth by entering the bodies of men and beasts.(348)

(348) See Baas and Werner, cited by Kirchhoff, as above; also Lecky,

Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, p. 68, and note, New York, 1884. As to

Basil's belief in the corporeality of devils, see his Commentary on

Isaiah, cap. i.

Fed by this stream of thought, and developed in the warm atmosphere of

medieval devotion, the idea of demoniacal possession as the main source

of lunacy grew and blossomed and bore fruit in noxious luxuriance.

There had, indeed, come into the Middle Ages an inheritance of

scientific thought. The ideas of Hippocrates, Celius Aurelianus,

Galen, and their followers, were from time to time revived; the Arabian

physicians, the School of Salerno, such writers as Salicetus and Guy de

Chauliac, and even some of the religious orders, did something to keep

scientific doctrines alive; but the tide of theological thought was

too strong; it became dangerous even to seem to name possible limits to

diabolical power. To deny Satan was atheism; and perhaps nothing did so

much to fasten the epithet "atheist" upon the medical profession as the

suspicion that it did not fully acknowledge diabolical interference

in mental disease. Following in the lines of the earlier fathers, St.

Anselm, Abelard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, all the great

doctors in the medieval Church, some of them in spite of occasional

misgivings, upheld the idea that insanity is largely or mainly

demoniacal possession, basing their belief steadily on the sacred

Scriptures; and this belief was followed up in every quarter by more

and more constant citation of the text "Thou shalt not suffer a witch

to live." No other text of Scripture--save perhaps one--has caused the

shedding of so much innocent blood.

As we look over the history of the Middle Ages, we do, indeed, see

another growth from which one might hope much; for there were two great

streams of influence in the Church, and never were two powers more

unlike each other.

On one side was the spirit of Christianity, as it proceeded from the

heart and mind of its blessed Founder, immensely powerful in aiding the

evolution of religious thought and effort, and especially of provision

for the relief of suffering by religious asylums and tender care.

Nothing better expresses this than the touching words inscribed upon a

great medieval hospital, "Christo in pauperibus suis." But on the other

side was the theological theory--proceeding, as we have seen, from the

survival of ancient superstitions, and sustained by constant reference

to the texts in our sacred books--that many, and probably most, of the

insane were possessed by the devil or in league with him, and that the

cruel treatment of lunatics was simply punishment of the devil and his

minions. By this current of thought was gradually developed one of

the greatest masses of superstitious cruelty that has ever afflicted

humanity. At the same time the stream of Christian endeavour, so far

as the insane were concerned, was almost entirely cut off. In all the

beautiful provision during the Middle Ages for the alleviation of human

suffering, there was for the insane almost no care. Some monasteries,

indeed, gave them refuge. We hear of a charitable work done for them at

the London Bethlehem Hospital in the thirteenth century, at Geneva in

the fifteenth, at Marseilles in the sixteenth, by the Black Penitents in

the south of France, by certain Franciscans in northern France, by the

Alexian Brothers on the Rhine, and by various agencies in other parts of

Europe; but, curiously enough, the only really important effort in the

Christian Church was stimulated by the Mohammedans. Certain monks, who

had much to do with them in redeeming Christian slaves, found in the

fifteenth century what John Howard found in the eighteenth, that the

Arabs and Turks made a large and merciful provision for lunatics, such

as was not seen in Christian lands; and this example led to better

establishments in Spain and Italy.

All honour to this work and to the men who engaged in it; but, as a

rule, these establishments were few and poor, compared with those for

other diseases, and they usually degenerated into "mad-houses," where

devils were cast out mainly by cruelty.(349)

(349) For a very full and learned, if somewhat one-sided, account of the

earlier effects of this stream of charitable thought, see Tollemer, Des

Origines de la Charite Catholique, Paris, 1858. It is instructive to

note that, while this book is very full in regard to the action of the

Church on slavery and on provision for the widows and orphans, the sick,

infirm, captives, and lepers, there is hardly a trace of any care for

the insane. This same want is incidentally shown by a typical example

in Kriegk, Aerzte, Heilanstalten und Geisteskranke im mittelalterlichen

Frankfurt, Frankfurt a. M., 1863, pp. 16, 17; also Kirschhof, pp. 396,

397. On the general subject, see Semelaigne, as above, p. 214; also

Calmeil, vol. i, pp. 116, 117. For the effect of Muslem example in Spain

and Italy, see Krafft-Ebing, as above, p. 45, note.

The first main weapon against the indwelling Satan continued to be the

exorcism; but under the influence of inferences from Scripture farther

and farther fetched, and of theological reasoning more and more subtle,

it became something very different from the gentle procedure of earlier

times, and some description of this great weapon at the time of its

highest development will throw light on the laws which govern the growth

of theological reasoning, as well as upon the main subject in hand.

A fundamental premise in the fully developed exorcism was that,

according to sacred Scripture, a main characteristic of Satan is pride.

Pride led him to rebel; for pride he was cast down; therefore the first

thing to do, in driving him out of a lunatic, was to strike a fatal blow

at his pride,--to disgust him.

This theory was carried out logically, to the letter. The treatises

on the subject simply astound one by their wealth of blasphemous and

obscene epithets which it was allowable for the exorcist to use in

casting out devils. The Treasury of Exorcisms contains hundreds of pages

packed with the vilest epithets which the worst imagination could invent

for the purpose of overwhelming the indwelling Satan.(350)

(350) Thesaurus Exorcismorum atque Conjurationum terribilium,

potentissimorum, efficacissimorum, cum PRACTICA probatissima: quibus

spiritus maligni, Daemones Maleficiaque omnia de Corporibus humanis

obsessis, tanquam Flagellis Fustibusque fugantur, expelluntur,...

Cologne, 1626. Many of the books of the exorcists were put upon the

various indexes of the Church, but this, the richest collection of all,

and including nearly all those condemned, was not prohibited until

1709. Scarcely less startling manuals continued even later in use; and

exorcisms adapted to every emergency may of course still be found in all

the Benedictionals of the Church, even the latest. As an example, see

the Manuale Benedictionum, published by the Bishop of Passau in 1849, or

the Exorcismus in Satanam, etc., issued in 1890 by the present Pope, and

now on sale at the shop of the Propoganda in Rome.

Some of those decent enough to be printed in these degenerate days ran

as follows:

"Thou lustful and stupid one,... thou lean sow, famine-stricken and

most impure,... thou wrinkled beast, thou mangy beast, thou beast of all

beasts the most beastly,... thou mad spirit,... thou bestial and foolish

drunkard,... most greedy wolf,... most abominable whisperer,... thou sooty

spirit from Tartarus!... I cast thee down, O Tartarean boor, into the

infernal kitchen!... Loathsome cobbler,... dingy collier,... filthy

sow (scrofa stercorata),... perfidious boar,... envious crocodile,...

malodorous drudge,... wounded basilisk,... rust-coloured asp,...

swollen toad,... entangled spider,... lousy swine-herd (porcarie

pedicose),... lowest of the low,... cudgelled ass," etc.

But, in addition to this attempt to disgust Satan's pride with

blackguardism, there was another to scare him with tremendous words. For

this purpose, thunderous names, from Hebrew and Greek, were imported,

such as Acharon, Eheye, Schemhamphora, Tetragrammaton, Homoousion,

Athanatos, Ischiros, Aecodes, and the like.(351)

(351) See the Conjuratio on p. 300 of the Thesaurus, and the general

directions given on pp. 251, 251.

Efforts were also made to drive him out with filthy and rank-smelling

drugs; and, among those which can be mentioned in a printed article,

we may name asafoetida, sulphur, squills, etc., which were to be burned

under his nose.

Still further to plague him, pictures of the devil were to be spat upon,

trampled under foot by people of low condition, and sprinkled with foul

compounds.

But these were merely preliminaries to the exorcism proper. In this

the most profound theological thought and sacred science of the period

culminated.

Most of its forms were childish, but some rise to almost Miltonic

grandeur. As an example of the latter, we may take the following:

"By the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, which God hath given to make

known unto his servants those things which are shortly to be; and hath

signified, sending by his angel,... I exorcise you, ye angels of untold

perversity!

"By the seven golden candlesticks,... and by one like unto the Son of

man, standing in the midst of the candlesticks; by his voice, as the

voice of many waters;... by his words, 'I am living, who was dead; and

behold, I live forever and ever; and I have the keys of death and of

hell,' I say unto you, Depart, O angels that show the way to eternal

perdition!"

Besides these, were long litanies of billingsgate, cursing, and

threatening. One of these "scourging" exorcisms runs partly as follows:

"May Agyos strike thee, as he did Egypt, with frogs!... May all the

devils that are thy foes rush forth upon thee, and drag thee down to

hell!... May... Tetragrammaton... drive thee forth and stone thee, as

Israel did to Achan!... May the Holy One trample on thee and hang thee

up in an infernal fork, as was done to the five kings of the

Amorites!... May God set a nail to your skull, and pound it in with a

hammer, as Jael did unto Sisera!... May... Sother... break thy head and

cut off thy hands, as was done to the cursed Dagon!... May God hang thee

in a hellish yoke, as seven men were hanged by the sons of Saul!" And so

on, through five pages of close-printed Latin curses.(352)

(352) Thesaurus Exorcismorum, pp. 812-817.

Occasionally the demon is reasoned with, as follows: "O obstinate,

accursed, fly!... why do you stop and hold back, when you know that your

strength is lost on Christ? For it is hard for thee to kick against the

pricks; and, verily, the longer it takes you to go, the worse it will

go with you. Begone, then: take flight, thou venomous hisser, thou lying

worm, thou begetter of vipers!"(353)

(353) Ibid., p. 859.

This procedure and its results were recognised as among the glories of

the Church. As typical, we may mention an exorcism directed by a certain

Bishop of Beauvais, which was so effective that five devils gave up

possession of a sufferer and signed their names, each for himself and

his subordinate imps, to an agreement that the possessed should be

molested no more. So, too, the Jesuit fathers at Vienna, in 1583,

gloried in the fact that in such a contest they had cast out twelve

thousand six hundred and fifty-two living devils. The ecclesiastical

annals of the Middle Ages, and, indeed, of a later period, abound in

boasts of such "mighty works."(354)

(354) In my previous chapters, especially that on meteorology, I have

quoted extensively from the original treatises, of which a very large

collection is in my posession; but in this chapter I have mainly availed

myself of the copious translations given by M. H. Dziewicki, in his

excellent article in The Nineteenth Century for October, 1888, entitled

Exorcizo Te. For valuable citations on the origin and spread of

exorcism, see Lecky's European Morals (third English edition), vol. i,

pp. 379-385.

Such was the result of a thousand years of theological reasoning, by

the strongest minds in Europe, upon data partly given in Scripture and

partly inherited from paganism, regarding Satan and his work among men.

Under the guidance of theology, always so severe against "science

falsely so called," the world had come a long way indeed from the

soothing treatment of the possessed by him who bore among the noblest

of his titles that of "The Great Physician." The result was natural: the

treatment of the insane fell more and more into the hands of the jailer,

the torturer, and the executioner.

To go back for a moment to the beginnings of this unfortunate

development. In spite of the earlier and more kindly tendency in

the Church, the Synod of Ancyra, as early as 314 A.D., commanded

the expulsion of possessed persons from the Church; the Visigothic

Christians whipped them; and Charlemagne, in spite of some good

enactments, imprisoned them. Men and women, whose distempered minds

might have been restored to health by gentleness and skill, were driven

into hopeless madness by noxious medicines and brutality. Some few were

saved as mere lunatics--they were surrendered to general carelessness,

and became simply a prey to ridicule and aimless brutality; but vast

numbers were punished as tabernacles of Satan.

One of the least terrible of these punishments, and perhaps the most

common of all, was that of scourging demons out of the body of a

lunatic. This method commended itself even to the judgment of so

thoughtful and kindly a personage as Sir Thomas More, and as late as the

sixteenth century. But if the disease continued, as it naturally would

after such treatment, the authorities frequently felt justified in

driving out the demons by torture.(355)

(355) For prescription of the whipping-post by Sir Thomas More, see D.

H. Tuke's History of Insanity in the British Isles, London, 1882, p. 41.

Interesting monuments of this idea, so fruitful in evil, still exist.

In the great cities of central Europe, "witch towers," where witches

and demoniacs were tortured, and "fool towers," where the more gentle

lunatics were imprisoned, may still be seen.

In the cathedrals we still see this idea fossilized. Devils and imps,

struck into stone, clamber upon towers, prowl under cornices, peer out

from bosses of foliage, perch upon capitals, nestle under benches,

flame in windows. Above the great main entrance, the most common of

all representations still shows Satan and his imps scowling, jeering,

grinning, while taking possession of the souls of men and scourging

them with serpents, or driving them with tridents, or dragging them

with chains into the flaming mouth of hell. Even in the most hidden and

sacred places of the medieval cathedral we still find representations

of Satanic power in which profanity and obscenity run riot. In these

representations the painter and the glass-stainer vied with the

sculptor. Among the early paintings on canvas a well-known example

represents the devil in the shape of a dragon, perched near the head of

a dying man, eager to seize his soul as it issues from his mouth, and

only kept off by the efforts of the attendant priest. Typical are the

colossal portrait of Satan, and the vivid picture of the devils cast

out of the possessed and entering into the swine, as shown in the

cathedral-windows of Strasburg. So, too, in the windows of Chartres

Cathedral we see a saint healing a lunatic: the saint, with a long

devil-scaring formula in Latin issuing from his mouth; and the lunatic,

with a little detestable hobgoblin, horned, hoofed, and tailed, issuing

from HIS mouth. These examples are but typical of myriads in cathedrals

and abbeys and parish churches throughout Europe; and all served to

impress upon the popular mind a horror of everything called diabolic,

and a hatred of those charged with it. These sermons in stones preceded

the printed book; they were a sculptured Bible, which preceded Luther's

pictorial Bible.(356)

(356) I cite these instances out of a vast number which I have

personally noted in visits to various cathedrals. For striking examples

of mediaeval grotesques, see Wright's History of Caricature and the

Grotesque, London, 1875; Langlois's Stalles de la Cathedrale de Rouen,

1838; Adeline's Les Sculptures Grotesques et Symboliques, Rouen,

1878; Viollet le Duc, Dictionnaire de l'Architecture; Gailhabaud, Sur

l'Architecture, etc. For a reproduction of an illuminated manuscript in

which devils fly out of the mouths of the possessed under the influence

of exorcisms, see Cahier and Martin, Nouveaux Melanges d' Archeologie

for 1874, p. 136; and for a demon emerging from a victim's mouth in a

puff of smoke at the command of St. Francis Xavier, see La Devotion de

Dix Vendredis, etc., Plate xxxii.

Satan and his imps were among the principal personages in every popular

drama, and "Hell's Mouth" was a piece of stage scenery constantly

brought into requisition. A miracle-play without a full display of the

diabolic element in it would have stood a fair chance of being pelted

from the stage.(357)

(357) See Wright, History of Caricature and the Grotesque; F. J.

Mone, Schauspiele des Mittelalters, Carlsruhe, 1846; Dr. Karl Hase,

Miracle-Plays and Sacred Dramas, Boston,1880 (translation from the

German). Examples of the miracle-plays may be found in Marriott's

Collection of English Miracle-Plays, 1838; in Hone's Ancient Mysteries;

in T. Sharpe's Dissertaion on the Pageants.. . anciently performed at

Coventry, Coventry, 1828; in the publications of the Shakespearean and

other societies. See especially The Harrowing of Hell, a miracle-play,

edited from the original now in the British Museum, by T. O. Halliwell,

London, 1840. One of the items still preserved is a sum of money paid

for keeping a fire burning in hell's mouth. Says Hase (as above, p. 42):

"In wonderful satyrlike masquerade, in which neither horns, tails,

nor hoofs were ever... wanting, the devil prosecuted on the stage his

business of fetching souls," which left the mouths of the dying "in the

form of small images."

Not only the popular art but the popular legends embodied these ideas.

The chroniclers delighted in them; the Lives of the Saints abounded in

them; sermons enforced them from every pulpit. What wonder, then, that

men and women had vivid dreams of Satanic influence, that dread of it

was like dread of the plague, and that this terror spread the disease

enormously, until we hear of convents, villages, and even large

districts, ravaged by epidemics of diabolical possession!(358)

(358) I shall discuss these epidemics of possession, which form a

somewhat distinct class of phenomena, in the next chapter.

And this terror naturally bred not only active cruelty toward those

supposed to be possessed, but indifference to the sufferings of those

acknowledged to be lunatics. As we have already seen, while ample and

beautiful provision was made for every other form of human suffering,

for this there was comparatively little; and, indeed, even this little

was generally worse than none. Of this indifference and cruelty we

have a striking monument in a single English word--a word originally

significant of gentleness and mercy, but which became significant of

wild riot, brutality, and confusion--Bethlehem Hospital became "Bedlam."

Modern art has also dwelt upon this theme, and perhaps the most

touching of all its exhibitions is the picture by a great French master,

representing a tender woman bound to a column and exposed to the jeers,

insults, and missiles of street ruffians.(359)

(359) The typical picture representing a priest's struggle with the

devil is in the city gallery of Rouen. The modern picture is Robert

Fleury's painting in the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris.

Here and there, even in the worst of times, men arose who attempted to

promote a more humane view, but with little effect. One expositor of St.

Matthew, having ventured to recall the fact that some of the insane were

spoken of in the New Testament as lunatics and to suggest that their

madness might be caused by the moon, was answered that their madness

was not caused by the moon, but by the devil, who avails himself of the

moonlight for his work.(360)

(360) See Geraldus Cambrensis, cited by Tuke, as above, pp. 8, 9.

One result of this idea was a mode of cure which especially aggravated

and spread mental disease: the promotion of great religious processions.

Troops of men and women, crying, howling, imploring saints, and beating

themselves with whips, visited various sacred shrines, images, and

places in the hope of driving off the powers of evil. The only result

was an increase in the numbers of the diseased.

For hundreds of years this idea of diabolic possession was steadily

developed. It was believed that devils entered into animals, and animals

were accordingly exorcised, tried, tortured, convicted, and executed.

The great St. Ambrose tells us that a priest, while saying mass, was

troubled by the croaking of frogs in a neighbouring marsh; that he

exorcised them, and so stopped their noise. St. Bernard, as the monkish

chroniclers tell us, mounting the pulpit to preach in his abbey, was

interrupted by a cloud of flies; straightway the saint uttered the

sacred formula of excommunication, when the flies fell dead upon the

pavement in heaps, and were cast out with shovels! A formula of exorcism

attributed to a saint of the ninth century, which remained in use down

to a recent period, especially declares insects injurious to crops to

be possessed of evil spirits, and names, among the animals to be

excommunicated or exorcised, mice, moles, and serpents. The use of

exorcism against caterpillars and grasshoppers was also common. In the

thirteenth century a Bishop of Lausanne, finding that the eels in Lake

Leman troubled the fishermen, attempted to remove the difficulty by

exorcism, and two centuries later one of his successors excommunicated

all the May-bugs in the diocese. As late as 1731 there appears an entry

on the Municipal Register of Thonon as follows: "RESOLVED, That this

town join with other parishes of this province in obtaining from Rome

an excommunication against the insects, and that it will contribute pro

rata to the expenses of the same."

Did any one venture to deny that animals could be possessed by Satan,

he was at once silenced by reference to the entrance of Satan into the

serpent in the Garden of Eden, and to the casting of devils into swine

by the Founder of Christianity himself.(361)

(361) See Menabrea, Proces au Moyen Age contre les Animaux, Chambery,

1846, pp. 31 and following; also Desmazes, Supplices, Prisons et Grace

en France, pp. 89, 90, and 385-395. For a formula and ceremonies used in

excommunicating insects, see Rydberg, pp. 75 and following.

One part of this superstition most tenaciously held was the belief that

a human being could be transformed into one of the lower animals. This

became a fundamental point. The most dreaded of predatory animals in the

Middle Ages were the wolves. Driven from the hills and forests in the

winter by hunger, they not only devoured the flocks, but sometimes came

into the villages and seized children. From time to time men and women

whose brains were disordered dreamed that they had been changed into

various animals, and especially into wolves. On their confessing this,

and often implicating others, many executions of lunatics resulted;

moreover, countless sane victims, suspected of the same impossible

crime, were forced by torture to confess it, and sent unpitied to the

stake. The belief in such a transformation pervaded all Europe, and

lasted long even in Protestant countries. Probably no article in

the witch creed had more adherents in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and

seventeenth centuries than this. Nearly every parish in Europe had its

resultant horrors.

The reformed Church in all its branches fully accepted the doctrines of

witchcraft and diabolic possession, and developed them still further.

No one urged their fundamental ideas more fully than Luther. He did,

indeed, reject portions of the witchcraft folly; but to the influence of

devils he not only attributed his maladies, but his dreams, and nearly

everything that thwarted or disturbed him. The flies which lighted upon

his book, the rats which kept him awake at night, he believed to be

devils; the resistance of the Archbishop of Mayence to his ideas, he

attributed to Satan literally working in that prelate's heart; to his

disciples he told stories of men who had been killed by rashly resisting

the devil. Insanity, he was quite sure, was caused by Satan, and he

exorcised sufferers. Against some he appears to have advised stronger

remedies; and his horror of idiocy, as resulting from Satanic influence,

was so great, that on one occasion he appears to have advised the

killing of an idiot child, as being the direct offspring of Satan. Yet

Luther was one of the most tender and loving of men; in the whole range

of literature there is hardly anything more touching than his words and

tributes to children. In enforcing his ideas regarding insanity, he laid

stress especially upon the question of St. Paul as to the bewitching of

the Galatians, and, regarding idiocy, on the account in Genesis of the

birth of children whose fathers were "sons of God" and whose mothers

were "daughters of men." One idea of his was especially characteristic.

The descent of Christ into hell was a frequent topic of discussion in

the Reformed Church. Melanchthon, with his love of Greek studies, held

that the purpose of the Saviour in making such a descent was to make

himself known to the great and noble men of antiquity--Plato, Socrates,

and the rest; but Luther insisted that his purpose was to conquer Satan

in a hand-to-hand struggle.

This idea of diabolic influence pervaded his conversation, his

preaching, his writings, and spread thence to the Lutheran Church in

general. Calvin also held to the same theory, and, having more power

with less kindness of heart than Luther, carried it out with yet

greater harshness. Beza was especially severe against those who believed

insanity to be a natural malady, and declared, "Such persons are refuted

both by sacred and profane history."

Under the influence, then, of such infallible teachings, in the older

Church and in the new, this superstition was developed more and more

into cruelty; and as the biblical texts, popularized in the sculptures

and windows and mural decorations of the great medieval cathedrals, had

done much to develop it among the people, so Luther's translation of

the Bible, especially in the numerous editions of it illustrated with

engravings, wrought with enormous power to spread and deepen it. In

every peasant's cottage some one could spell out the story of the devil

bearing Christ through the air and placing him upon the pinnacle of

the Temple--of the woman with seven devils--of the devils cast into

the swine. Every peasant's child could be made to understand the quaint

pictures in the family Bible or the catechism which illustrated vividly

all those texts. In the ideas thus deeply implanted, the men who in

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries struggled against this mass of

folly and cruelty found the worst barrier to right reason.(362)

(362) For Luther, see, among the vast number of similar passages in his

works, the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, pp. 251, 252. As to

the grotesques in mediaeval churches, the writer of this article, in

visiting the town church of Wittenberg, noticed, just opposite the

pulpit where Luther so often preached, a very spirited figure of an

imp peering out upon the congregation. One can but suspect that this

mediaeval survival frequently suggested Luther's favourite topic during

his sermons. For Beza, see his Notes on the New Testament, Matthew iv,

24.

Such was the treatment of demoniacs developed by theology, and such the

practice enforced by ecclesiasticism for more than a thousand years.

How an atmosphere was spread in which this belief began to dissolve

away, how its main foundations were undermined by science, and how there

came in gradually a reign of humanity, will now be related.

II. BEGINNINGS OF A HEALTHFUL SCEPTICISM.

We have now seen the culmination of the old procedure regarding

insanity, as it was developed under theology and enforced by

ecclesiasticism; and we have noted how, under the influence of Luther

and Calvin, the Reformation rather deepened than weakened the faith in

the malice and power of a personal devil. Nor was this, in the Reformed

churches any more than in the old, mere matter of theory. As in the

early ages of Christianity, its priests especially appealed, in proof

of the divine mission, to their power over the enemy of mankind in the

bodies of men, so now the clergy of the rival creeds eagerly sought

opportunities to establish the truth of their own and the falsehood of

their opponents' doctrines by the visible casting out of devils. True,

their methods differed somewhat: where the Catholic used holy water and

consecrated wax, the Protestant was content with texts of Scripture

and importunate prayer; but the supplementary physical annoyance of the

indwelling demon did not greatly vary. Sharp was the competition for the

unhappy objects of treatment. Each side, of course, stoutly denied all

efficacy to its adversaries' efforts, urging that any seeming victory

over Satan was due not to the defeat but to the collusion of the fiend.

As, according to the Master himself, "no man can by Beelzebub cast out

devils," the patient was now in greater need of relief than before; and

more than one poor victim had to bear alternately Lutheran, Roman, and

perhaps Calvinistic exorcism.(363)

(363) For instances of this competition, see Freytag, Aus dem Jahrh. d.

Reformation, pp. 359-375. The Jesuit Stengel, in his De judiciis divinis

(Ingolstadt, 1651), devotes a whole chapter to an exorcism, by the great

Canisius, of a spirit that had baffled Protestant conjuration. Among

the most jubilant Catholic satires of the time are those exulting in

Luther's alleged failure as an exorcist.

But far more serious in its consequences was another rivalry to which in

the sixteenth century the clergy of all creeds found themselves subject.

The revival of the science of medicine, under the impulse of the new

study of antiquity, suddenly bade fair to take out of the hands of the

Church the profession of which she had enjoyed so long and so profitable

a monopoly. Only one class of diseases remained unquestionably

hers--those which were still admitted to be due to the direct personal

interference of Satan--and foremost among these was insanity.(364) It

was surely no wonder that an age of religious controversy and excitement

should be exceptionally prolific in ailments of the mind; and, to men

who mutually taught the utter futility of that baptismal exorcism by

which the babes of their misguided neighbours were made to renounce

the devil and his works, it ought not to have seemed strange that his

victims now became more numerous.(365) But so simple an explanation did

not satisfy these physicians of souls; they therefore devised a simpler

one: their patients, they alleged, were bewitched, and their increase

was due to the growing numbers of those human allies of Satan known as

witches.

(364) For the attitude of the Catholic clergy, the best sources are the

confidential Jesuit Litterae Annuae. To this day the numerous treatises

on "pastoral medicine" in use in the older Church devote themselves

mainly to this sort of warfare with the devil.

(365) Baptismal exorcism continued in use among the Lutherans till the

eighteenth century, though the struggle over its abandonment had been

long and sharp. See Krafft, Histories vom Exorcismo, Hamburg, 1750.

Already, before the close of the fifteenth century, Pope Innocent VIII

had issued the startling bull by which he called on the archbishops,

bishops, and other clergy of Germany to join hands with his inquisitors

in rooting out these willing bond-servants of Satan, who were said to

swarm throughout all that country and to revel in the blackest crimes.

Other popes had since reiterated the appeal; and, though none of these

documents touched on the blame of witchcraft for diabolic possession,

the inquisitors charged with their execution pointed it out most clearly

in their fearful handbook, the Witch-Hammer, and prescribed the special

means by which possession thus caused should be met. These teachings

took firm root in religious minds everywhere; and during the great age

of witch-burning that followed the Reformation it may well be doubted

whether any single cause so often gave rise to an outbreak of the

persecution as the alleged bewitchment of some poor mad or foolish or

hysterical creature. The persecution, thus once under way, fed itself;

for, under the terrible doctrine of "excepted cases," by which in the

religious crimes of heresy and witchcraft there was no limit to the use

of torture, the witch was forced to confess to accomplices, who in turn

accused others, and so on to the end of the chapter.(366)

(366) The Jesuit Stengel, professor at Ingolstadt, who (in his great

work, De judiciis divinis) urges, as reasons why a merciful God permits

illness, his wish to glorify himself through the miracles wrought by his

Church, and his desire to test the faith of men by letting them choose

between the holy aid of the Church and the illicit resort to medicine,

declares that there is a difference between simple possession and

that brought by bewitchment, and insists that the latter is the more

difficult to treat.

The horrors of such a persecution, with the consciousness of an

ever-present devil it breathed and the panic terror of him it

inspired, could not but aggravate the insanity it claimed to cure.

Well-authenticated, though rarer than is often believed, were the cases

where crazed women voluntarily accused themselves of this impossible

crime. One of the most eminent authorities on diseases of the mind

declares that among the unfortunate beings who were put to death for

witchcraft he recognises well-marked victims of cerebral disorders;

while an equally eminent authority in Germany tells us that, in a most

careful study of the original records of their trials by torture, he has

often found their answers and recorded conversations exactly like those

familiar to him in our modern lunatic asylums, and names some forms

of insanity which constantly and un mistakably appear among those who

suffered for criminal dealings with the devil.(367) The result of this

widespread terror was naturally, therefore, a steady increase in mental

disorders. A great modern authority tells us that, although modern

civilization tends to increase insanity, the number of lunatics at

present is far less than in the ages of faith and in the Reformation

period. The treatment of the "possessed," as we find it laid down

in standard treatises, sanctioned by orthodox churchmen and jurists,

accounts for this abundantly. One sort of treatment used for those

accused of witchcraft will also serve to show this--the "tortura

insomniae." Of all things in brain-disease, calm and regular sleep is

most certainly beneficial; yet, under this practice, these half-crazed

creatures were prevented, night after night and day after day, from

sleeping or even resting. In this way temporary delusion became chronic

insanity, mild cases became violent, torture and death ensued, and the

"ways of God to man" were justified.(368) But the most contemptible

creatures in all those centuries were the physicians who took sides

with religious orthodoxy. While we have, on the side of truth, Flade

sacrificing his life, Cornelius Agrippa his liberty, Wier and Loos

their hopes of preferment, Bekker his position, and Thomasius his ease,

reputation, and friends, we find, as allies of the other side, a troop

of eminently respectable doctors mixing Scripture, metaphysics, and

pretended observations to support the "safe side" and to deprecate

interference with the existing superstition, which seemed to them "a

very safe belief to be held by the common people."(369)

(367) See D. H. Tuke, Chapters in the History of the Insane in the

British Isles, London, 1822, p. 36; also Kirchhoff, p. 340. The forms

of insanity especially mentioned are "dementia senilis" and epilepsy. A

striking case of voluntary confession of witchcraft by a woman who lived

to recover from the delusion is narrated in great detail by Reginald

Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft, London, 1584. It is, alas, only

too likely that the "strangeness" caused by slight and unrecognised

mania led often to the accusation of witchcraft instead of to the

suspicion of possession.

(368) See Kirchhoff, as above.

(369) For the arguments used by creatures of this sort, see Diefenbach,

Der Hexenwahn vor und nach der Glaubensspaltung in Deutschland, pp.

342-346. A long list of their infamous names is given on p. 345.

Against one form of insanity both Catholics and Protestants were

especially cruel. Nothing is more common in all times of religious

excitement than strange personal hallucinations, involving the belief,

by the insane patient, that he is a divine person. In the most striking

representation of insanity that has ever been made, Kaulbach shows,

at the centre of his wonderful group, a patient drawing attention to

himself as the Saviour of the world.

Sometimes, when this form of disease took a milder hysterical character,

the subject of it was treated with reverence, and even elevated to

sainthood: such examples as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of

Siena in Italy, St. Bridget in Sweden, St. Theresa in Spain, St. Mary

Alacoque in France, and Louise Lateau in Belgium, are typical. But more

frequently such cases shocked public feeling, and were treated with

especial rigour: typical of this is the case of Simon Marin, who in his

insanity believed himself to be the Son of God, and was on that account

burned alive at Paris and his ashes scattered to the winds.(370)

(370) As to the frequency among the insane of this form of belief, see

Calmeil, vol. ii, p. 257; also Maudsley, Pathology of Mind, pp. 201,

202, and 418-424; also Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation en France,

vol. ii, p. 110. For the peculiar abberations of the saints above named

and other ecstatics, see Maudsley, as above, pp. 71, 72, and 149, 150.

Maudsley's chapters on this and cognate subjects are certainly among the

most valuable contributions to modern thought. For a discussion of the

most recent case, see Warlomont, Louise Lateau, Paris, 1875.

The profundity of theologians and jurists constantly developed new

theories as to the modes of diabolic entrance into the "possessed."

One such theory was that Satan could be taken into the mouth with one's

food--perhaps in the form of an insect swallowed on a leaf of salad, and

this was sanctioned, as we have seen, by no less infallible an authority

than Gregory the Great, Pope and Saint--Another theory was that Satan

entered the body when the mouth was opened to breathe, and there are

well-authenticated cases of doctors and divines who, when casting out

evil spirits, took especial care lest the imp might jump into their own

mouths from the mouth of the patient. Another theory was that the devil

entered human beings during sleep; and at a comparatively recent period

a King of Spain was wont to sleep between two monks, to keep off the

devil.(371)

(371) As to the devil's entering into the mouth while eating, see

Calmeil, as above, vol. ii, pp. 105, 106. As to the dread of Dr. Borde

lest the evil spirit, when exorcised, might enter his own body, see

Tuke, as above, p. 28. As to the King of Spain, see the noted chapter in

Buckle's History of Civilization in England.

The monasteries were frequent sources of that form of mental disease

which was supposed to be caused by bewitchment. From the earliest period

it is evident that monastic life tended to develop insanity. Such cases

as that of St. Anthony are typical of its effects upon the strongest

minds; but it was especially the convents for women that became the

great breeding-beds of this disease. Among the large numbers of women

and girls thus assembled--many of them forced into monastic seclusion

against their will, for the reason that their families could give them

no dower--subjected to the unsatisfied longings, suspicions, bickerings,

petty jealousies, envies, and hatreds, so inevitable in convent

life--mental disease was not unlikely to be developed at any moment.

Hysterical excitement in nunneries took shapes sometimes comical, but

more generally tragical. Noteworthy is it that the last places where

executions for witchcraft took place were mainly in the neighbourhood of

great nunneries; and the last famous victim, of the myriads executed

in Germany for this imaginary crime, was Sister Anna Renata Singer,

sub-prioress of a nunnery near Wurzburg.(372)

(372) Among the multitude of authorities on this point, see Kirchhoff,

as above, p. 337; and for a most striking picture of this dark side of

convent life, drawn, indeed, by a devoted Roman Catholic, see Manzoni's

Promessi Sposi. On Anna Renata there is a striking essay by the late

Johannes Scherr, in his Hammerschlage und Historien. On the general

subject of hysteria thus developed, see the writings of Carpenter and

Tuke; and as to its natural development in nunneries, see Maudsley,

Responsibility in Mental Disease, p. 9. Especial attention will be paid

to this in the chapter on Diabolism and Hysteria.

The same thing was seen among young women exposed to sundry fanatical

Protestant preachers. Insanity, both temporary and permanent, was thus

frequently developed among the Huguenots of France, and has been thus

produced in America, from the days of the Salem persecution down to the

"camp meetings" of the present time.(373)

(373) This branch of the subject will be discussed more at length in a

future chapter.

At various times, from the days of St. Agobard of Lyons in the ninth

century to Pomponatius in the sixteenth, protests or suggestions, more

or less timid, had been made by thoughtful men against this system.

Medicine had made some advance toward a better view, but the theological

torrent had generally overwhelmed all who supported a scientific

treatment. At last, toward the end of the sixteenth century, two men

made a beginning of a much more serious attack upon this venerable

superstition. The revival of learning, and the impulse to thought

on material matters given during the "age of discovery," undoubtedly

produced an atmosphere which made the work of these men possible. In the

year 1563, in the midst of demonstrations of demoniacal possession by

the most eminent theologians and judges, who sat in their robes and

looked wise, while women, shrieking, praying, and blaspheming, were put

to the torture, a man arose who dared to protest effectively that some

of the persons thus charged might be simply insane; and this man was

John Wier, of Cleves.

His protest does not at this day strike us as particularly bold. In his

books, De Praestigiis Daemonum and De Lamiis, he did his best not to

offend religious or theological susceptibilities; but he felt obliged to

call attention to the mingled fraud and delusion of those who claimed to

be bewitched, and to point out that it was often not their accusers, but

the alleged witches themselves, who were really ailing, and to urge that

these be brought first of all to a physician.

His book was at once attacked by the most eminent theologians. One of

the greatest laymen of his time, Jean Bodin, also wrote with especial

power against it, and by a plentiful use of scriptural texts gained

to all appearance a complete victory: this superstition seemed thus

fastened upon Europe for a thousand years more. But doubt was in the

air, and, about a quarter of a century after the publication of Wier's

book there were published in France the essays of a man by no means

so noble, but of far greater genius--Michel de Montaigne. The general

scepticism which his work promoted among the French people did much to

produce an atmosphere in which the belief in witchcraft and demoniacal

possession must inevitably wither. But this process, though real, was

hidden, and the victory still seemed on the theological side.

The development of the new truth and its struggle against the old error

still went on. In Holland, Balthazar Bekker wrote his book against the

worst forms of the superstition, and attempted to help the scientific

side by a text from the Second Epistle of St. Peter, showing that the

devils had been confined by the Almighty, and therefore could not

be doing on earth the work which was imputed to them. But Bekker's

Protestant brethren drove him from his pulpit, and he narrowly escaped

with his life.

The last struggles of a great superstition are very frequently the

worst. So it proved in this case. In the first half of the seventeenth

century the cruelties arising from the old doctrine were more numerous

and severe than ever before. In Spain, Sweden, Italy, and, above all,

in Germany, we see constant efforts to suppress the evolution of the new

truth.

But in the midst of all this reactionary rage glimpses of right reason

began to appear. It is significant that at this very time, when the old

superstition was apparently everywhere triumphant, the declaration

by Poulet that he and his brother and his cousin had, by smearing

themselves with ointment, changed themselves into wolves and devoured

children, brought no severe punishment upon them. The judges sent him to

a mad-house. More and more, in spite of frantic efforts from the pulpit

to save the superstition, great writers and jurists, especially in

France, began to have glimpses of the truth and courage to uphold it.

Malebranche spoke against the delusion; Seguier led the French courts

to annul several decrees condemning sorcerers; the great chancellor,

D'Aguesseau, declared to the Parliament of Paris that, if they wished to

stop sorcery, they must stop talking about it--that sorcerers are more

to be pitied than blamed.(374)

(374) See Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales, vol. i, pp. 488, 489; vol.

ii, p. 529.

But just at this time, as the eighteenth century was approaching,

the theological current was strengthened by a great ecclesiastic--the

greatest theologian that France has produced, whose influence upon

religion and upon the mind of Louis XIV was enormous--Bossuet, Bishop

of Meaux. There had been reason to expect that Bossuet would at least do

something to mitigate the superstition; for his writings show that, in

much which before his day had been ascribed to diabolic possession,

he saw simple lunacy. Unfortunately, the same adherence to the literal

interpretation of Scripture which led him to oppose every other

scientific truth developed in his time, led him also to attack this:

he delivered and published two great sermons, which, while showing

some progress in the form of his belief, showed none the less that the

fundamental idea of diabolic possession was still to be tenaciously

held. What this idea was may be seen in one typical statement: he

declared that "a single devil could turn the earth round as easily as we

turn a marble."(375)

(375) See the two sermons, Sur les Demons (which are virtually but two

versions of the same sermon), in Bousset's works, edition of 1845,

vol. iii, p. 236 et seq.; also Dziewicki, in The Nineteenth Century, as

above. On Bousset's resistance to other scientific truths, especially

in astronomy, geology, and political economy, see other chapters in this

work.

III. THE FINAL STRUGGLE AND VICTORY OF SCIENCE.--PINEL AND TUKE.

The theological current, thus re-enforced, seemed to become again

irresistible; but it was only so in appearance. In spite of it, French

scepticism continued to develop; signs of quiet change among the mass of

thinking men were appearing more and more; and in 1672 came one of

great significance, for, the Parliament of Rouen having doomed fourteen

sorcerers to be burned, their execution was delayed for two years,

evidently on account of scepticism among officials; and at length the

great minister of Louis XIV, Colbert, issued an edict checking such

trials, and ordering the convicted to be treated for madness.

Victory seemed now to incline to the standard of science, and in 1725 no

less a personage than St. Andre, a court physician, dared to publish a

work virtually showing "demoniacal possession" to be lunacy.

The French philosophy, from the time of its early development in

the eighteenth century under Montesquieu and Voltaire, naturally

strengthened the movement; the results of post-mortem examinations of

the brains of the "possessed" confirmed it; and in 1768 we see it take

form in a declaration by the Parliament of Paris, that possessed persons

were to be considered as simply diseased. Still, the old belief lingered

on, its life flickering up from time to time in those parts of France

most under ecclesiastical control, until in these last years of the

nineteenth century a blow has been given it by the researches of Charcot

and his compeers which will probably soon extinguish it. One evidence

of Satanic intercourse with mankind especially, on which for many

generations theologians had laid peculiar stress, and for which they

had condemned scores of little girls and hundreds of old women to a most

cruel death, was found to be nothing more than one of the many results

of hysteria.(376)

(376) For Colbert's influence, see Dagron, p. 8; also Rambaud, as above,

vol. ii, p. 155. For St. Andre, see Lacroix, as above, pp. 189, 190.

For Charcot's researches into the disease now known as Meteorismus

hystericus, but which was formerly regarded in the ecclesiastical courts

as an evidence of pregnancy through relations with Satan, see Snell,

Hexenprocesse un Geistesstorung, Munchen, 1891, chaps. xii and xiii.

In England the same warfare went on. John Locke had asserted the truth,

but the theological view continued to control public opinion. Most

prominent among those who exercised great power in its behalf was John

Wesley, and the strength and beauty of his character made his influence

in this respect all the more unfortunate. The same servitude to the mere

letter of Scripture which led him to declare that "to give up witchcraft

is to give up the Bible," controlled him in regard to insanity. He

insisted, on the authority of the Old Testament, that bodily diseases

are sometimes caused by devils, and, upon the authority of the New

Testament, that the gods of the heathen are demons; he believed that

dreams, while in some cases caused by bodily conditions and passions,

are shown by Scripture to be also caused by occult powers of evil; he

cites a physician to prove that "most lunatics are really demoniacs." In

his great sermon on Evil Angels, he dwells upon this point especially;

resists the idea that "possession" may be epilepsy, even though ordinary

symptoms of epilepsy be present; protests against "giving up to infidels

such proofs of an invisible world as are to be found in diabolic

possession"; and evidently believes that some who have been made

hysterical by his own preaching are "possessed of Satan." On all this,

and much more to the same effect, he insisted with all the power given

to him by his deep religious nature, his wonderful familiarity with the

Scriptures, his natural acumen, and his eloquence.

But here, too, science continued its work. The old belief was steadily

undermined, an atmosphere favourable to the truth was more and more

developed, and the act of Parliament, in 1735, which banished the crime

of witchcraft from the statute book, was the beginning of the end.

In Germany we see the beginnings of a similar triumph for science. In

Prussia, that sturdy old monarch, Frederick William I, nullified the

efforts of the more zealous clergy and orthodox jurists to keep up the

old doctrine in his dominions; throughout Protestant Germany, where

it had raged most severely, it was, as a rule, cast out of the Church

formulas, catechisms, and hymns, and became more and more a subject for

jocose allusion. From force of habit, and for the sake of consistency,

some of the more conservative theologians continued to repeat the

old arguments, and there were many who insisted upon the belief as

absolutely necessary to ordinary orthodoxy; but it is evident that it

had become a mere conventionality, that men only believed that they

believed it, and now a reform seemed possible in the treatment of the

insane.(377)

(377) For John Locke, see King's Life of Locke, pp. 326, 327. For

Wesley, out of his almost innumerable writings bearing on the subject,

I may select the sermon on Evil Angels, and his Letter to Dr. Middleton;

and in his collected works, there are many striking statements and

arguments, especially in vols. iii, vi, and ix. See also Tyerman's Life

of Wesley, vol. ii, pp. 260 et seq. Luther's great hymn, Ein' feste

Burg, remained, of course, a prominent exception to the rule; but a

popular proverb came to express the general feeling: "Auf Teufel reimt

sich Zweifel." See Langin, as above, pp. 545, 546.

In Austria, the government set Dr. Antonio Haen at making careful

researches into the causes of diabolic possession. He did not think it

best, in view of the power of the Church, to dispute the possibility

or probability of such cases, but simply decided, after thorough

investigation, that out of the many cases which had been brought to him,

not one supported the belief in demoniacal influence. An attempt was

made to follow up this examination, and much was done by men like

Francke and Van Swieten, and especially by the reforming emperor, Joseph

II, to rescue men and women who would otherwise have fallen victims to

the prevalent superstition. Unfortunately, Joseph had arrayed against

himself the whole power of the Church, and most of his good efforts

seemed brought to naught. But what the noblest of the old race of German

emperors could not do suddenly, the German men of science did gradually.

Quietly and thoroughly, by proofs that could not be gainsaid, they

recovered the old scientific fact established in pagan Greece and Rome,

that madness is simply physical disease. But they now established it on

a basis that can never again be shaken; for, in post-mortem examinations

of large numbers of "possessed" persons, they found evidence of

brain-disease. Typical is a case at Hamburg in 1729. An afflicted woman

showed in a high degree all the recognised characteristics of diabolic

possession: exorcisms, preachings, and sanctified remedies of every sort

were tried in vain; milder medical means were then tried, and she so far

recovered that she was allowed to take the communion before she died:

the autopsy, held in the presence of fifteen physicians and a public

notary, showed it to be simply a case of chronic meningitis. The work of

German men of science in this field is noble indeed; a great succession,

from Wier to Virchow, have erected a barrier against which all the

efforts of reactionists beat in vain.(378)

(378) See Kirchhoff, pp. 181-187; also Langin, Religion und

Hexenprozess, as above cited.

In America, the belief in diabolic influence had, in the early colonial

period, full control. The Mathers, so superior to their time in many

things, were children of their time in this: they supported the belief

fully, and the Salem witchcraft horrors were among its results; but the

discussion of that folly by Calef struck it a severe blow, and a better

influence spread rapidly throughout the colonies.

By the middle of the eighteenth century belief in diabolic possession

had practically disappeared from all enlightened countries, and during

the nineteenth century it has lost its hold even in regions where the

medieval spirit continues strongest. Throughout the Middle Ages, as we

have seen, Satan was a leading personage in the miracle-plays, but

in 1810 the Bavarian Government refused to allow the Passion Play at

Ober-Ammergau if Satan was permitted to take any part in it; in spite of

heroic efforts to maintain the old belief, even the childlike faith of

the Tyrolese had arrived at a point which made a representation of Satan

simply a thing to provoke laughter.

Very significant also was the trial which took place at Wemding, in

southern Germany, in 1892. A boy had become hysterical, and the Capuchin

Father Aurelian tried to exorcise him, and charged a peasant's wife,

Frau Herz, with bewitching him, on evidence that would have cost the

woman her life at any time during the seventeenth century. Thereupon the

woman's husband brought suit against Father Aurelian for slander.

The latter urged in his defence that the boy was possessed of an evil

spirit, if anybody ever was; that what had been said and done was in

accordance with the rules and regulations of the Church, as laid down

in decrees, formulas, and rituals sanctioned by popes, councils, and

innumerable bishops during ages. All in vain. The court condemned the

good father to fine and imprisonment. As in a famous English case,

"hell was dismissed, with costs." Even more significant is the fact that

recently a boy declared by two Bavarian priests to be possessed by

the devil, was taken, after all Church exorcisms had failed, to Father

Kneipp's hydropathic establishment and was there speedily cured.(379)

(379) For remarkably interesting articles showing the recent efforts

of sundry priests in Italy and South Germany to revive the belief

in diabolic possession--efforts in which the Bishop of Augsburg took

part--see Prof. E. P. Evans, on Modern Instances of Diabolic Possession,

and on Recent Recrudescence of Superstition in The Popular Science

Monthly for Dec. 1892, and for Oct., Nov., 1895.

Speaking of the part played by Satan at Ober-Ammergau, Hase says:

"Formerly, seated on his infernal throne, surrounded by his hosts with

Sin and Death, he opened the play,... and... retained throughout a

considerable part; but he has been surrendered to the progress of that

enlightenment which even the Bavarian highlands have not been able to

escape" (p. 80).

The especial point to be noted is, that from the miracle-play of the

present day Satan and his works have disappeared. The present writer

was unable to detect, in a representation of the Passion Play at

Ober-Ammergau, in 1881, the slightest reference to diabolic interference

with the course of events as represented from the Old Testament, or from

the New, in a series of tableaux lasting, with a slight intermission,

from nine in the morning to after four in the afternoon. With the most

thorough exhibition of minute events in the life of Christ, and at times

with hundreds of figures on the stage, there was not a person or a word

which recalled that main feature in the mediaeval Church plays. The

present writer also made a full collection of the photographs of

tableaux, of engravings of music, and of works bearing upon these

representations for twenty years before, and in none of these was there

an apparent survival of the old belief.

But, although the old superstition had been discarded, the inevitable

conservatism in theology and medicine caused many old abuses to be

continued for years after the theological basis for them had really

disappeared. There still lingered also a feeling of dislike toward

madmen, engendered by the early feeling of hostility toward them, which

sufficed to prevent for many years any practical reforms.

What that old theory had been, even under the most favourable

circumstances and among the best of men, we have seen in the fact that

Sir Thomas More ordered acknowledged lunatics to be publicly flogged;

and it will be remembered that Shakespeare makes one of his characters

refer to madmen as deserving "a dark house and a whip." What the old

practice was and continued to be we know but too well. Taking Protestant

England as an example--and it was probably the most humane--we have a

chain of testimony. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Bethlehem

Hospital was reported too loathsome for any man to enter; in the

seventeenth century, John Evelyn found it no better; in the eighteenth,

Hogarth's pictures and contemporary reports show it to be essentially

what it had been in those previous centuries.(380)

(380) On Sir Thomas More and the condition of Bedlam, see Tuke, History

of the Insane in the British Isles, pp. 63-73. One of the passages of

Shakespeare is in As You Like It, Act iii, scene 2. As to the survival

of indifference to the sufferings of the insane so long after the belief

which caused it had generally disappeared, see some excellent remarks in

Maudsley's Responsibility in Mental Disease, London, 1885, pp. 10-12.

The older English practice is thus quaintly described by Richard Carew

(in his Survey of Cornwall, London, 1602, 1769): "In our forefathers'

daies, when devotion as much exceeded knowledge, as knowledge now

commeth short of devotion, there were many bowssening places, for curing

of mad men, and amongst the rest, one at Alternunne in this Hundred,

called S. Nunnespoole, which Saints Altar (it may be)... gave name to

the church... The watter running from S. Nunnes well, fell into a square

and close walled plot, which might bee filled at what depth they listed.

Vpon this wall was the franticke person set to stand, his backe towards

the poole, and from thence with a sudden blow in the brest, tumbled

headlong into the pond; where a strong fellowe, provided for the nonce,

tooke him, and tossed him vp and downe, alongst and athwart the water,

vntill the patient, by forgoing strength, had somewhat forgot his fury.

Then there was hee conveyed to the Church, and certain Masses sung over

him; vpon which handling, if his right wits returned, S. Nunne had

the thanks; but if there appeared any small amendment, he was bowsened

againe, and againe, while there remayned in him any hope of life, for

recovery."

The first humane impulse of any considerable importance in this field

seems to have been aroused in America. In the year 1751 certain members

of the Society of Friends founded a small hospital for the insane, on

better principles, in Pennsylvania. To use the language of its founders,

it was intended "as a good work, acceptable to God." Twenty years later

Virginia established a similar asylum, and gradually others appeared in

other colonies.

But it was in France that mercy was to be put upon a scientific basis,

and was to lead to practical results which were to convert the world to

humanity. In this case, as in so many others, from France was spread

and popularized not only the scepticism which destroyed the theological

theory, but also the devotion which built up the new scientific theory

and endowed the world with a new treasure of civilization.

In 1756 some physicians of the great hospital at Paris known as the

Hotel-Dieu protested that the cruelties prevailing in the treatment of

the insane were aggravating the disease; and some protests followed from

other quarters. Little effect was produced at first; but just before the

French Revolution, Tenon, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and others took

up the subject, and in 1791 a commission was appointed to undertake a

reform.

By great good fortune, the man selected to lead in the movement was one

who had already thrown his heart into it--Jean Baptiste Pinel. In 1792

Pinel was made physician at Bicetre, one of the most extensive lunatic

asylums in France, and to the work there imposed upon him he gave all

his powers. Little was heard of him at first. The most terrible scenes

of the French Revolution were drawing nigh; but he laboured on, modestly

and devotedly--apparently without a thought of the great political storm

raging about him.

His first step was to discard utterly the whole theological doctrine of

"possession," and especially the idea that insanity is the result of any

subtle spiritual influence. He simply put in practice the theory that

lunacy is the result of bodily disease.

It is a curious matter for reflection, that but for this sway of the

destructive philosophy of the eighteenth century, and of the Terrorists

during the French Revolution, Pinel's blessed work would in all

probability have been thwarted, and he himself excommunicated for heresy

and driven from his position. Doubtless the same efforts would have been

put forth against him which the Church, a little earlier, had put forth

against inoculation as a remedy for smallpox; but just at that time

the great churchmen had other things to think of besides crushing this

particular heretic: they were too much occupied in keeping their own

heads from the guillotine to give attention to what was passing in the

head of Pinel. He was allowed to work in peace, and in a short time the

reign of diabolism at Bicetre was ended. What the exorcisms and fetiches

and prayers and processions, and drinking of holy water, and ringing of

bells, had been unable to accomplish during eighteen hundred years, he

achieved in a few months. His method was simple: for the brutality and

cruelty which had prevailed up to that time, he substituted kindness and

gentleness. The possessed were taken out of their dungeons, given sunny

rooms, and allowed the liberty of pleasant ground for exercise; chains

were thrown aside. At the same time, the mental power of each patient

was developed by its fitting exercise, and disease was met with remedies

sanctioned by experiment, observation, and reason. Thus was gained

one of the greatest, though one of the least known, triumphs of modern

science and humanity.

The results obtained by Pinel had an instant effect, not only in France

but throughout Europe: the news spread from hospital to hospital. At his

death, Esquirol took up his work; and, in the place of the old training

of judges, torturers, and executioners by theology to carry out its

ideas in cruelty, there was now trained a school of physicians to

develop science in this field and carry out its decrees in mercy.(381)

(381) For the services of Tenon and his associates, and also for the

work of Pinel, see especially Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales, Paris,

1838, vol. i, p. 35; and for the general subject, and the condition of

the hospitals at this period, see Dagron, as above.

A similar evolution of better science and practice took place in

England. In spite of the coldness, and even hostility, of the greater

men in the Established Church, and notwithstanding the scriptural

demonstrations of Wesley that the majority of the insane were possessed

of devils, the scientific method steadily gathered strength. In 1750

the condition of the insane began to attract especial attention; it was

found that mad-houses were swayed by ideas utterly indefensible, and

that the practices engendered by these ideas were monstrous. As a rule,

the patients were immured in cells, and in many cases were chained to

the walls; in others, flogging and starvation played leading parts, and

in some cases the patients were killed. Naturally enough, John Howard

declared, in 1789, that he found in Constantinople a better insane

asylum than the great St. Luke's Hospital in London. Well might he

do so; for, ever since Caliph Omar had protected and encouraged the

scientific investigation of insanity by Paul of Aegina, the Moslem

treatment of the insane had been far more merciful than the system

prevailing throughout Christendom.(382)

(382) See D. H. Tuke, as above, p. 110; also Trelat, as already cited.

In 1792--the same year in which Pinel began his great work in

France--William Tuke began a similar work in England. There seems

to have been no connection between these two reformers; each wrought

independently of the other, but the results arrived at were the same.

So, too, in the main, were their methods; and in the little house of

William Tuke, at York, began a better era for England.

The name which this little asylum received is a monument both of the old

reign of cruelty and of the new reign of humanity. Every old name for

such an asylum had been made odious and repulsive by ages of misery; in

a happy moment of inspiration Tuke's gentle Quaker wife suggested a new

name; and, in accordance with this suggestion, the place became known as

a "Retreat."

From the great body of influential classes in church and state Tuke

received little aid. The influence of the theological spirit was shown

when, in that same year, Dr. Pangster published his Observations on

Mental Disorders, and, after displaying much ignorance as to the

causes and nature of insanity, summed up by saying piously, "Here our

researches must stop, and we must declare that 'wonderful are the works

of the Lord, and his ways past finding out.'" Such seemed to be the view

of the Church at large: though the new "Retreat" was at one of the

two great ecclesiastical centres of England, we hear of no aid or

encouragement from the Archbishop of York or from his clergy. Nor was

this the worst: the indirect influence of the theological habit of

thought and ecclesiastical prestige was displayed in the Edinburgh

Review. That great organ of opinion, not content with attacking Tuke,

poured contempt upon his work, as well as on that of Pinel. A few of

Tuke's brother and sister Quakers seem to have been his only reliance;

and in a letter regarding his efforts at that time he says, "All men

seem to desert me."(383)

(383) See D. H. Tuke, as above, p. 116-142, and 512; also the Edinburgh

Review for April, 1803.

In this atmosphere of English conservative opposition or indifference

the work could not grow rapidly. As late as 1815, a member of Parliament

stigmatized the insane asylums of England as the shame of the nation;

and even as late as 1827, and in a few cases as late as 1850, there were

revivals of the old absurdity and brutality. Down to a late period,

in the hospitals of St. Luke and Bedlam, long rows of the insane were

chained to the walls of the corridors. But Gardner at Lincoln, Donnelly

at Hanwell, and a new school of practitioners in mental disease, took up

the work of Tuke, and the victory in England was gained in practice as

it had been previously gained in theory.

There need be no controversy regarding the comparative merits of these

two benefactors of our race, Pinel and Tuke. They clearly did their

thinking and their work independently of each other, and thereby each

strengthened the other and benefited mankind. All that remains to be

said is, that while France has paid high honours to Pinel, as to one who

did much to free the world from one of its most cruel superstitions and

to bring in a reign of humanity over a wide empire, England has as yet

made no fitting commemoration of her great benefactor in this field.

York Minster holds many tombs of men, of whom some were blessings

to their fellow-beings, while some were but "solemnly constituted

impostors" and parasites upon the body politic; yet, to this hour, that

great temple has received no consecration by a monument to the man who

did more to alleviate human misery than any other who has ever entered

it.

But the place of these two men in history is secure. They stand with

Grotius, Thomasius, and Beccaria--the men who in modern times have

done most to prevent unmerited sorrow. They were not, indeed, called

to suffer like their great compeers; they were not obliged to see their

writings--among the most blessed gifts of God to man--condemned, as

were those of Grotius and Beccaria by the Catholic Church, and those

of Thomasius by a large section of the Protestant Church; they were

not obliged to flee for their lives, as were Grotius and Thomasius; but

their effort is none the less worthy. The French Revolution, indeed,

saved Pinel, and the decay of English ecclesiasticism gave Tuke his

opportunity; but their triumphs are none the less among the glories of

our race; for they were the first acknowledged victors in a struggle of

science for humanity which had lasted nearly two thousand years.

CHAPTER XVI. FROM DIABOLISM TO HYSTERIA.

I. THE EPIDEMICS OF "POSSESSION."

In the foregoing chapter I have sketched the triumph of science in

destroying the idea that individual lunatics are "possessed by devils,"

in establishing the truth that insanity is physical disease, and in

substituting for superstitious cruelties toward the insane a treatment

mild, kindly, and based upon ascertained facts.

The Satan who had so long troubled individual men and women thus became

extinct; henceforth his fossil remains only were preserved: they

may still be found in the sculptures and storied windows of medieval

churches, in sundry liturgies, and in popular forms of speech.

But another Satan still lived--a Satan who wrought on a larger

scale--who took possession of multitudes. For, after this triumph of

the scientific method, there still remained a class of mental disorders

which could not be treated in asylums, which were not yet fully

explained by science, and which therefore gave arguments of much

apparent strength to the supporters of the old theological view: these

were the epidemics of "diabolic possession" which for so many centuries

afflicted various parts of the world.

When obliged, then, to retreat from their old position in regard to

individual cases of insanity, the more conservative theologians promptly

referred to these epidemics as beyond the domain of science--as clear

evidences of the power of Satan; and, as the basis of this view, they

cited from the Old Testament frequent references to witchcraft,

and, from the New Testament, St. Paul's question as to the possible

bewitching of the Galatians, and the bewitching of the people of Samaria

by Simon the Magician.

Naturally, such leaders had very many adherents in that class, so large

in all times, who find that

"To follow foolish precedents and wink With both our eyes, is easier

than to think."(384)

(384) As to eminent physicians' finding a stumbling-block in hysterical

mania, see Kirchhoff's article, p. 351, cited in previous chapter.

It must be owned that their case seemed strong. Though in all human

history, so far as it is closely known, these phenomena had appeared,

and though every classical scholar could recall the wild orgies of

the priests, priestesses, and devotees of Dionysus and Cybele, and the

epidemic of wild rage which took its name from some of these, the great

fathers and doctors of the Church had left a complete answer to any

scepticism based on these facts; they simply pointed to St. Paul's

declaration that the gods of the heathen were devils: these examples,

then, could be transformed into a powerful argument for diabolic

possession.(385)

(385) As to the Maenads, Corybantes, and the disease "Corybantism,"

see, for accessible and adequate statements, Smith's Dictionary of

Antiquities and Lewis and Short's Lexicon; also reference in Hecker's

Essays upon the Black Death and the Dancing Mania. For more complete

discussion, see Semelaigne, L'Alienation mentale dans l'Antiquite,

Paris, 1869.

But it was more especially the epidemics of diabolism in medieval and

modern times which gave strength to the theological view, and from these

I shall present a chain of typical examples.

As early as the eleventh century we find clear accounts of diabolical

possession taking the form of epidemics of raving, jumping, dancing,

and convulsions, the greater number of the sufferers being women and

children. In a time so rude, accounts of these manifestations would

rarely receive permanent record; but it is very significant that even at

the beginning of the eleventh century we hear of them at the extremes

of Europe--in northern Germany and in southern Italy. At various times

during that century we get additional glimpses of these exhibitions, but

it is not until the beginning of the thirteenth century that we have a

renewal of them on a large scale. In 1237, at Erfurt, a jumping disease

and dancing mania afflicted a hundred children, many of whom died in

consequence; it spread through the whole region, and fifty years later

we hear of it in Holland.

But it was the last quarter of the fourteenth century that saw its

greatest manifestations. There was abundant cause for them. It was a

time of oppression, famine, and pestilence: the crusading spirit, having

run its course, had been succeeded by a wild, mystical fanaticism;

the most frightful plague in human history--the Black Death--was

depopulating whole regions--reducing cities to villages, and filling

Europe with that strange mixture of devotion and dissipation which we

always note during the prevalence of deadly epidemics on a large scale.

It was in this ferment of religious, moral, and social disease that

there broke out in 1374, in the lower Rhine region, the greatest,

perhaps, of all manifestations of "possession"--an epidemic of dancing,

jumping, and wild raving. The cures resorted to seemed on the whole to

intensify the disease: the afflicted continued dancing for hours, until

they fell in utter exhaustion. Some declared that they felt as if bathed

in blood, some saw visions, some prophesied.

Into this mass of "possession" there was also clearly poured a current

of scoundrelism which increased the disorder.

The immediate source of these manifestations seems to have been the wild

revels of St. John's Day. In those revels sundry old heathen ceremonies

had been perpetuated, but under a nominally Christian form: wild

Bacchanalian dances had thus become a semi-religious ceremonial. The

religious and social atmosphere was propitious to the development of

the germs of diabolic influence vitalized in these orgies, and they

were scattered far and wide through large tracts of the Netherlands

and Germany, and especially through the whole region of the Rhine. At

Cologne we hear of five hundred afflicted at once; at Metz of eleven

hundred dancers in the streets; at Strasburg of yet more painful

manifestations; and from these and other cities they spread through the

villages and rural districts.

The great majority of the sufferers were women, but there were many men,

and especially men whose occupations were sedentary. Remedies were tried

upon a large scale-exorcisms first, but especially pilgrimages to the

shrine of St. Vitus. The exorcisms accomplished so little that popular

faith in them grew small, and the main effect of the pilgrimages

seemed to be to increase the disorder by subjecting great crowds to

the diabolic contagion. Yet another curative means was seen in the

flagellant processions--vast crowds of men, women, and children who

wandered through the country, screaming, praying, beating themselves

with whips, imploring the Divine mercy and the intervention of

St. Vitus. Most fearful of all the main attempts at cure were the

persecutions of the Jews. A feeling had evidently spread among

the people at large that the Almighty was filled with wrath at

the toleration of his enemies, and might be propitiated by their

destruction: in the principal cities and villages of Germany, then, the

Jews were plundered, tortured, and murdered by tens of thousands. No

doubt that, in all this, greed was united with fanaticism; but the

argument of fanaticism was simple and cogent; the dart which pierced the

breast of Israel at that time was winged and pointed from its own

sacred books: the biblical argument was the same used in various ages

to promote persecution; and this was, that the wrath of the Almighty

was stirred against those who tolerated his enemies, and that because

of this toleration the same curse had now come upon Europe which the

prophet Samuel had denounced against Saul for showing mercy to the

enemies of Jehovah.

It is but just to say that various popes and kings exerted themselves to

check these cruelties. Although the argument of Samuel to Saul was used

with frightful effect two hundred years later by a most conscientious

pope in spurring on the rulers of France to extirpate the Huguenots, the

papacy in the fourteenth century stood for mercy to the Jews. But

even this intervention was long without effect; the tide of popular

superstition had become too strong to be curbed even by the spiritual

and temporal powers.(386)

(386) See Wellhausen, article Israel, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,

ninth edition; also the reprint of it in his History of Israel, London,

1885, p. 546. On the general subject of the demoniacal epidemics, see

Isensee, Geschichte der Medicin, vol. i, pp. 260 et seq.; also Hecker's

essay. As to the history of Saul, as a curious landmark in the general

development of the subject, see The Case of Saul, showing that his

Disorder was a Real Spiritual Possession, by Granville Sharp, London,

1807, passim. As to the citation of Saul's case by the reigning Pope to

spur on the French kings against the Huguenots, I hope to give a list of

authorities in a future chapter on The Church and International Law. For

the general subject, with interesting details, see Laurent, Etudes sur

l'Histoire de l'Humanities. See also Maury, La Magie et l'Astrologie

dans l'Antiquite et au Moyen Age.

Against this overwhelming current science for many generations could

do nothing. Throughout the whole of the fifteenth century physicians

appeared to shun the whole matter. Occasionally some more thoughtful

man ventured to ascribe some phase of the disease to natural causes;

but this was an unpopular doctrine, and evidently dangerous to those who

developed it.

Yet, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, cases of "possession" on

a large scale began to be brought within the scope of medical research,

and the man who led in this evolution of medical science was Paracelsus.

He it was who first bade modern Europe think for a moment upon the idea

that these diseases are inflicted neither by saints nor demons, and that

the "dancing possession" is simply a form of disease, of which the cure

may be effected by proper remedies and regimen.

Paracelsus appears to have escaped any serious interference: it took

some time, perhaps, for the theological leaders to understand that he

had "let a new idea loose upon the planet," but they soon understood it,

and their course was simple. For about fifty years the new idea was well

kept under; but in 1563 another physician, John Wier, of Cleves, revived

it at much risk to his position and reputation.(387)

(387) For Paracelsus, see Isensee, vol. i, chap. xi; also Pettigrew,

Superstitions connected with the History and Practice of Medicine and

Surgery, London, 1844, introductory chapter. For Wier, see authorities

given in my previous chapter.

Although the new idea was thus resisted, it must have taken some hold

upon thoughtful men, for we find that in the second half of the same

century the St. Vitus's dance and forms of demoniacal possession akin

to it gradually diminished in frequency and were sometimes treated as

diseases. In the seventeenth century, so far as the north of Europe is

concerned, these displays of "possession" on a great scale had almost

entirely ceased; here and there cases appeared, but there was no longer

the wild rage extending over great districts and afflicting thousands of

people. Yet it was, as we shall see, in this same seventeenth century,

in the last expiring throes of this superstition, that it led to the

worst acts of cruelty.(388)

(388) As to this diminution of widespread epidemic at the end of the

sixteenth century, see citations from Schenck von Grafenberg in Hecker,

as above; also Horst.

While this Satanic influence had been exerted on so great a scale

throughout northern Europe, a display strangely like it, yet strangely

unlike it, had been going on in Italy. There, too, epidemics of dancing

and jumping seized groups and communities; but they were attributed to

a physical cause--the theory being that the bite of a tarantula in

some way provoked a supernatural intervention, of which dancing was the

accompaniment and cure.

In the middle of the sixteenth century Fracastoro made an evident

impression on the leaders of Italian opinion by using medical means in

the cure of the possessed; though it is worthy of note that the medicine

which he applied successfully was such as we now know could not by

any direct effects of its own accomplish any cure: whatever effect it

exerted was wrought upon the imagination of the sufferer. This form of

"possession," then, passed out of the supernatural domain, and

became known as "tarantism." Though it continued much longer than the

corresponding manifestations in northern Europe, by the beginning of

the eighteenth century it had nearly disappeared; and, though special

manifestations of it on a small scale still break out occasionally, its

main survival is the "tarantella," which the traveller sees danced at

Naples as a catchpenny assault upon his purse.(389)

(389) See Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp. 87-104; also

extracts and observations in Carpenter's Mental Physiology, London,

1888, pp. 321-315; also Maudsley, Pathology of Mind, pp. 73 and

following.