Get Well Soon

by Jennifer Wright

  BATHING.

  Good hygiene practices greatly reduce the risk of flea infestations. Nostradamus himself bathed daily. However, that was an anomaly. Most people in medieval times took two baths a year. Bathing was thought to cause disease and death by widening the pores and allowing the plague to enter the body more easily. Nostradamus may have developed this revolutionary bathing theory from his reading of history. Galen not only encouraged bathing but was the first doctor to recommend people clean themselves with soap.32

  GETTING FRESH AIR.

  Many people shut themselves up in sick rooms. Even more so when people were afraid that the air itself was polluted with plague. Pope Clement VI famously surrounded himself with torches to try to burn away the supposedly poisonous fumes. Going outside and getting exercise, especially in the countryside, could be effective in boosting the immune system. The 10 percent of those who recovered from the plague generally had robust and healthy immune systems.33

  EATING A MAGIC PILL.

  Many people on the Internet want to credit Nostradamus’s success in combatting the plague to the fact that he had a magic wizard pill. He didn’t. But he did make a “rose pill” that was a good source of vitamin C. People were making pills with absolutely everything in them—that’s why being an apothecary wasn’t seen as a respectable practice—so it seems like kind of a fluke that this pill worked when so many others failed. But, yes, taking vitamin C every day, especially if your diet is otherwise lacking in it, generally strengthens immune systems. Would you like to know the recipe for the magic pill? I would, because I like those books where, say, Nora Ephron gives me a fun recipe halfway through a chapter. This is probably as close as I’m ever going to get to being able to do that:

  RECIPE

  Take some sawdust or shavings of cypress-wood, as green as you can find, one ounce; iris of Florence, six ounces; cloves, three ounces; sweet calamus [cane palm], three drams; aloes-wood six drams. Grind everything to powder and take care to keep it all airtight. Next, take some furled red roses, three or four hundred, clean, fresh, and culled before dewfall. Crush them to powder in a marble mortar, using a wooden pestle. Then add some half-unfurled roses to the above powder and pound. And shape into pills.34

  * * *

  I look forward to seeing some intrepid twenty-first-century florist make and market this magic pill. It has a pretty good track record! In Aix-en-Provence, according to lore, Nostradamus’s remedies spared the entire town from the plague. The town rewarded him with a lifelong stipend. He was, shortly after, summoned to treat similar outbreaks in Lyon and Salon-de-Provence, where he remained until the end of his life.

  Fairy-tale summary: everyone followed Nostradamus’s advice, and the bubonic plague went away forever.

  Unfortunately, not quite. Nostradamus himself was skeptical as to whether his advice ever proved as wondrous as the people in Aix-en-Provence thought it to be. A very good sign that someone is not a charlatan is that they are doubtful of their own skills and do not demand huge sums of money for a magical cure they say only they can provide. As to whether or not Nostradamus’s methods were utterly essential or only very mildly helpful, we can say, “Well, both.” All of his ideas were so much better than stuffing live pigeons into sores. We could view “drinking clean water” and “not sleeping in soiled linens” as some of the first building blocks in what would become modern sanitation and public health. Basic hygiene and healthy practices in an age rife with misguided “cures” was true progress.

  That said, even if you went for long walks and popped those vitamin C pills like M&M’s, it would not necessarily stop you from getting the plague in the sixteenth century. It would make dying from it a little less likely, but if you got it, you would probably still die.

  Still, by the eighteenth century, outbreaks of the bubonic plague had become much less common than during medieval times. That decrease was largely due to more societies developing basic standards of sanitation and to making improvements in personal hygiene. The streets of Germany, for instance, are no longer filled with garbage and feces, hygiene is standard, and there aren’t many dead bodies lying around being tugged upon by dogs. All of this means a less hospitable environment for plague-carrying fleas.

  But the bubonic plague never went away entirely. It still exists today. The World Health Organization reports that in 2013 there were 783 cases worldwide; 126 people died.35 About ten people contract the disease in the United States every year. If you have been out hiking in a dry area like the American Southwest and find egg-shaped growths developing under your armpit, it is exceedingly important that you go to a doctor within twenty-four hours. Maybe it’s a normal rash, but maybe you have the plague, so you should check that out really quickly, as quickly as you can. Fortunately, today the disease is generally treated with the antibiotic streptomycin and is curable so long as it is caught early.

  The solutions Nostradamus proposed seem so obvious now, in this very clean world filled with antibiotics. “Don’t sleep in filth. Bathe yourself.” Yes. Of course those ideas are right. It’s easy to scoff at anyone who thought exploding frogs like firecrackers was a good cure, especially when the cause of the disease seems so apparent now. There’s even a great satirical article from the Onion titled “Rat-Shit-Covered Physicians Baffled by Spread of Black Plague,” with excellent lines like: “surely some unknown, diseas’d element is to blame. Any fool can see that. It is as plain as the fleas in the feculent water we drink, of which there are so very, very many.”36

  But have some sympathy for the people gobbling down their emeralds. It is disheartening to think how simple and straightforward the cures for the diseases that we are desperately researching today will seem to people in the future, when it will be known that of course you eat five bananas a day to prevent Alzheimer’s.

  One of the most heartbreaking accounts of the plague is that of the Florentine historian Giovanni Villani. Described by John Kelly as a generally blunt and somewhat crusty historian, Villani wrote an account of the plague with the final line, “The plague lasted until…”37 The date was left blank because he died before the plague came to an end. He waited his whole life to fill in a date that never came.

  Regardless of the age we’re living in, many of us expect illnesses to be cured within our lifetimes. Sadly, that is not often the case.

  Nevertheless, we can take some heart. Practically no one dies of bubonic plague now. It was one of the human race’s most terrifying adversaries for many years, and we beat it, first with a bar of soap in the sixteenth century and then with antibiotics in the twentieth. Villani might hear that news and say, in a crotchety fashion, “Well, that’s no good to me, I’m dead.” Not everyone lives to see the end of a battle. I don’t know if everyone battling the worst diseases we suffer today would feel comforted to know that one day humans will emerge victorious. All the same, I like to think about the ever-so-slightly smarter, saner people of the future looking back on our diseases and regarding them as they might a bizarre bunch of exploding frogs.

  Dancing Plague

  Time rushes by

  love rushes by

  life rushes by

  but the

  Red Shoes go on.

  —“The Red Shoes,” LEONARD COHEN

  Can human kindness and the support of your community cure disease? Not … generally. You will likely have better luck with antibiotics or vaccines. However, you only need to visit your local drugstore to see greeting cards and motivational posters (emblazoned with pictures of sunny fields, kittens, rainbows, and cartoon lambs) that have capitalized upon kindly sentiments where someone is sending “tender loving care for your recovery!” and “hugs to heal.” I happened upon one that said, “I hope you get butter soon,” accented with pictures of yellow sticks of butter.

  These cards are lovely to receive, no doubt. Except for the butter one. That one is awful—unless you are giving it to someone with high cholesterol, in which case it is hilarious. However, if you suggested someo
ne heal their cancer with hugs, they would rightly stare at you as if you had joined a murder cult.

  Modern antibiotics, vaccinations, and drugs for life-threatening diseases have all of those saccharine wellness sayings at a distinct disadvantage. If you have to choose between living in an isolated, uncaring community with plentiful penicillin or a very warm and loving world without drugs, team up with the guys with penicillin. It’s a lot easier to make people nicer than it is to develop medicine.

  However, in the sixteenth century, those kindly sentiments were about all people had. And though they might not be as powerful as modern medicine, there is reason to believe that being treated with kindness and receiving the support of the community do help people recover from ailments. At least, they do if it is the sufferers’ state of mind that is affecting their health. It’s not as good as penicillin. But it’s something. At least, it was in the case of the Dancing Plague.

  * * *

  The dancing plague started innocuously enough. In Strasbourg, in July 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea began dancing in the street.

  To modern minds, the thought of anyone dancing probably conjures an image of someone who is happy or celebrating or listening to some cool music or, at the very least, drunk. That is a testament to the fact that we live in a world filled with music and causes for celebration. You could dance a jig in a supermarket if you wanted to. It would be weird, but people would just think you really, really liked Peter Gabriel and that there was a great sale on Pringles.

  Not so in the sixteenth century, an age with less omnipresent music and virtually nothing to celebrate. The years surrounding 1518 were awful. This was a century of plagues, famine, and war. But none of that stopped people from dancing! They danced a lot but not because they were happy. They did so because they were nearly mad with woe. In The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness, the historian John Waller writes: “It was a world so glutted with misery that nearly all ranks of society drank and danced whenever the opportunity, with the intensity of those in flight from an intolerable reality.”1

  It was a truly terrible time to be alive in Alsace. I know throughout this book on plagues we won’t encounter many good years, but this period was particularly dreadful. The year 1517 was so awful that it was sometimes simply called “the bad year.”2 Taxes had been at an all-time high, and crop yield was low, resulting in great famine made worse by the fact that peasants had been forbidden from fishing in streams and hunting in the local woods. Think The Hunger Games (book or movie), District 12. Smallpox ravaged Strasbourg while the bubonic plague broke out in Mulhouse. Many of the region’s young men had been killed battling the Turks. The superstitious claimed they could see the dead roaming the streets at night. Dancing was a way to escape the nightmarish world through physical exertion, the way you might decide to hit the gym hard after a bad day at work. (Not because it’s fun, just because it will take your mind off that monster, Charlie in Accounting.)

  It was in this context that Frau Troffea began her dance.

  A lone dancer in the middle of town would probably have initially been greeted with interest, if not surprise. While walking around the city, you might even respond to this nonthreatening but unexpected event with pleasure. (Full disclosure: I hate it—hate it—when the “showtime” guys dance on the Manhattan subway. But some people like that kind of thing, and I am trying to please all my readers.)

  Sadly, as far as was recorded, Frau Troffea experienced absolutely no pleasure in her dance. And if people found it vaguely amusing at first, they seemed to find it odd by the end of the day. Some onlookers suspected that Frau Troffea was only carrying on because “nothing annoyed her husband more than just dancing.”3 People thought she was dancing wildly to perhaps make some kind of elaborate point to him. The physician Paracelsus suggested in his 1532 writings (I imagine while shaking his head at women and their horrible ways) that Frau Troffea kept dancing because her husband “told her to do something that she did not care for.” He continued: “In order to make sure that her actions had their full effect and had the likeness of a disease, she hopped and jumped high, sang and lulled, and did whatever it was that her husband hated worst of all.”4 As if she were some sort of 1970s performance artist who wanted to make a point about being free to express her independent womanhood through movement.

  Whenever there is an outbreak of mass hysteria, some people always decide the victims are faking it.

  After some time, rather than going home to do sixteenth-century wifely duties, Frau Troffea passed out in the street. As Paracelsus put it: “After the completion of her dance, she collapsed in order to offend her husband. She jerked a while, and after that went to sleep. She claimed that all of this had been a disease attack, and said no more than this in order to make a fool of her husband.”5 As soon as she woke up, she started dancing again.

  The Reverend in Footloose was right: Dancing kills.

  By the third day blood was oozing out of her shoes, but still she danced. If she was merely doing this to annoy her husband, who admittedly sounds very uncool, she certainly would have stopped. By then, everyone was watching with horror rather than amusement. Soon dozens of other townspeople would mysteriously follow her lead.

  Today, some sources claim that the root of this dancing plague lay with mold. Many outbreaks of the dancing plague (there were others!) happened near rivers where stalks of rye grew. Ergot is a kind of mold that can develop on those stalks. If you eat this ergot-infected rye, you can suffer horrible symptoms. The first among them might be a feeling of burning in your limbs. That burning is sometimes called “St. Anthony’s Fire” because monks of the Antonine Order opened the Hospital of St. Anthony in 1075 to treat people suffering from ergot poisoning.

  Ingesting ergot did cause people to convulse and experience hallucinations, but convulsing is not the same thing as dancing. If someone were onstage at the Grammys, you would be able to tell whether they were dancing or having a seizure, right? (Don’t make a joke about how kids dance today; it will make you sound like Frau Troffea’s husband.) And nowadays the rules for what constitutes dance are much less restrictive than they were five hundred years ago. In the sixteenth century learning various dances was considered a part of a young person’s education. These dances were constructed with a mathematical precision that’s different from what we think of when we consider dance today. None of them looked like convulsions. People at the time certainly would have known the difference and wouldn’t say that someone spasming was dancing. And they are repeatedly clear that Frau Troffea and her followers were dancing. Besides, people were familiar with the symptoms of commonplace ergot poisoning. If Frau Troffea had it, she would have been taken to the Antonine brothers. The town dancers wouldn’t have been considered to be suffering from a “strange epidemic”; they’d be suffering from a “normal epidemic.”

  All of this is to say that I really don’t believe this plague was the work of a fungus. Nor did anyone at the time, though for less scholarly reasons.

  The sixteenth-century layman’s thinking about anyone developing a disorder was generally God hates them because they’re bad. So by the standards of the time, most people would reason that Frau Troffea was being punished by God for something sinful. Paracelsus fell into that category. After deciding that the disease was real, Paracelsus claimed that “whores and scoundrels” were afflicted because their thoughts were “free, lewd and impertinent, full of lasciviousness and without fear or respect.” He asserted that these depraved thoughts could come about by cursing too much or thinking about sex too much or the especially vague “corruption of the imagination.”6

  Those thoughts and acts could apply to many of us today. And yet most of us do not dance as though a bizarre curse has been placed upon us. However, Paracelsus wasn’t totally off base when it comes to modern-day understanding of hysterical outbreaks. The modern Dr. Scott Mendelson writes about Freud’s notion of “conversion disorder”—a condition in which yo
u experience symptoms, like an inability to stop dancing, without any physical cause. When the condition spreads to other people, it is categorized as mass hysteria, or as it’s often called today, mass psychogenic illness. “The disorder,” explains Mendelson, “is thought to be driven by a subconscious attempt to ‘convert’ a strong, unbearable emotional or sexual thought into something more socially acceptable.”7 Experiencing conversion disorder doesn’t necessarily mean that people go dancing in the streets uncontrollably. Symptoms can be much milder. For instance, when put in a stressful situation, women (or men) who have been socialized to suppress their anger might experience numbness in their hands or difficulty swallowing, or they might vomit.8 This is your body saying, “Hey, shouldn’t we be doing something now? Oh, we can’t yell or punch people even though we’re angry? We can’t even think about being angry? Okay, we will do … something else. It’s going to be weird!”

  In the modern age, having sexual thoughts is generally socially acceptable. We don’t need to suppress them so much we turn them into frantic dances. But life was different back then. Having sexual thoughts was a sure sign that not only were you going to hell, but you might deserve to be burned alive before you got there. In the fifteenth century the witch hunter’s bible, the Malleus Maleficarum, claimed:

  If the world could be rid of women, we should not be without God in our intercourse … Witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs 30: There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not “it is enough”; that is, the mouth of the womb. Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils … witchcraft is high treason against God’s Majesty. And so they are to be put to torture.9