Vitus's dance
which still exists, and certainly has all along existed, bears, in
certain cases, to the original dancing mania of the dancers of St.
John.
To conclude. Tarantism, as a real disease, has been denied in
toto, and stigmatised as an imposition by most physicians and
naturalists, who in this controversy have shown the narrowness of
their views and their utter ignorance of history. In order to
support their opinion they have instituted some experiments
apparently favourable to it, but under circumstances altogether
inapplicable, since, for the most part, they selected as the
subjects of them none but healthy men, who were totally
uninfluenced by a belief in this once so dreaded disease. From
individual instances of fraud and dissimulation, such as are found
in connection with most nervous affections without rendering their
reality a matter of any doubt, they drew a too hasty conclusion
respecting the general phenomenon, of which they appeared not to
know that it had continued for nearly four hundred years, having
originated in the remotest periods of the Middle Ages. The most
learned and the most acute among these sceptics is Serao the
Neapolitan.
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