Hey!
Hiya! How’s it going? We’re back. We’re back. Back with some changes.
Season four has got a new face to it.
A little facelift, a little update, a little change. What’s the change?
A lot of people really enjoy our conspiracy episodes, mystery episodes where we got into like the medical side of things. And so we made the decision to kind of barrow in. We’re gonna just do medical mysteries, medical phenomena, something that has a medical side to it, so that it can kind of cater to our expertise.
And then once a month we are going to be looking at different types of medical drama, TV shows, movies. Yep. And kind of give our perspective on like what we agreed with, what we didn’t agree with, what was done well, what wasn’t done well, how it actually looks in real life.
So, spoiler alerts, we’ll talk a lot about like shows like House, Grey’s Anatomy, The Pit. We’re gonna we’re gonna discuss a lot that was done wrong.
But there’s gonna be a couple rights. I’m really excited about our consult queen segment. Because I think it’s gonna be really fun to also maybe bring in some of our we have a lot of friends with a with a lot of varied medical backgrounds.
That’s some expertise.
Exactly. So yeah, we’re really gonna narrow in on this and hopefully we keep the listeners we have and we gain some new ones. Or as I’m going through a lot of our old episodes, as you mentioned, sort of like had this medical focus. So we’re gonna be doing some re-releases uh on Thursdays as well of some of our kind of medical focused episodes. So don’t judge those two hard.
And a lot of those are some of our like most liked episodes because we all have a background in medicine and all these episodes dabbled into that. So we were very active in the discussion because we all had a different perspective to bring. And we didn’t have to question a lot and fact-check a lot because we already know these things.
I think this is gonna be more fun for us. It’s reinvigorating me, and I hope it’s fun for the listeners. Yeah. So on Thursdays, we’re gonna re-release old episodes that had medical focuses, medical discussions. So you guys may have checked us out last week when we released a very early episode, Plum Island, which is one of my favorites. And also one of our listener of the pod, Judy’s favorites, who just bought us a cup of coffee. Judy! She bought us three cups of coffee. Thank you so much, Judy, for supporting the pod. We love Judy and her husband Chris, too. They’re both um big fans of the pod. Love that. Thanks, guys. Was Plum Island the tick one? That is a good one. Speaking of cups of coffee, is it time for our Drink Chad? Drink chat. Since this feels like a fresh start, the start of a a new era. Yeah, if you will.
In our medical era.
I thought we should go back to our favorite.
Dot Coke.
Yep. Roger, get some crispy DCs.
Which we know is healthy for you.
Uh I would separate healthy health from not from not bad portion.
Which we know does not cause cancer. There we go.
So stay tuned. That’s that’s not a future re-release. If you guys could have seen Megan in our faith, my faith, let’s do let’s do some PI recovery.
Diet Coke, if you’re listening to this, we drink you on the reg. We were so happy to hear you’re non-cancerous.
It’s my primary source of hydration.
There is hydration in there. Yeah you cannot discredit that. We love you, Diet Coke.
I I like it for a little burst of caffeine when I need it.
Mm-hmm. Just a little one of my go-to headache recoveries. Black coffee, Diet Coke, and a glass of wine if I’m not doing anything important.
Glass of wine is your headache recovery sometimes. Or beer. Uh glass of wine sometimes for me too, which I know can cause it, but I think it’s more the headache. Attention headache.
Let’s get into it.
Disclaimer. All of the thoughts and opinions shared in this podcast are a reflection of our own thoughts and beliefs and not a reflection of our employers who shall remain unnamed. Yeah. Okay, friends. I’m locked in. We have a weird one today. Ooh. And when we say weird, we mean people in the 1500s literally could not stop dancing. I I I relate already. Yeah. Colleen, this one’s for you. Picture this. Yes. You’re in Strasbourg in 1518. You’ve got no electricity.
Okay.
No TikTok.
Boring.
No Spotify.
Oh my God.
And frankly, your options for entertainment are pretty limited. And then one day a woman walks out into the street and just starts dancing. Oh. And she just keeps dancing. She got ants in her pants.
It was a woman who started it. I’m immediately thinking they’re gonna call call like she’s a witch.
Well. A witch. Okay. Like you’re probably thinking, Barbara’s having a moment. We’ll just let her work it out, right? No. Except that Barbara does not work it out. She dances it out. And then somebody else. And suddenly you have dozens, nay, hundreds, of people dancing uncontrollably through the streets.
Well.
Some accounts say people dance for days, collapsing from exhaustion. There are even reports of deaths. So today we’re going to put on our extremely questionable medieval detective hats and try to figure out what the hell happened during the dancing plague of 1518. So, guys, I’m gonna kind of tell you the story here, and then we’re gonna get into a medical discussion at the end, okay? Yeah, okay. According to the legend, uh in Strasbourg in July 1518, which is now part of France, but at the time was part of the Holy Roman Empire, according to the legend, a woman named Frau Trofea stepped into the cobblestone streets on July 14th and just started to dance without any musical accompaniment. Her husband begged her to come in for hours, but she refused. She danced and danced until she collapsed with exhaustion, then she would rest before resuming the frenzied activity. This continued for nearly a week. Authorities sent her thirty miles by wagon to Severn to be cured at the shrine of Saint Vitus, a saint they believed had cursed her. Let me pause for a moment and tell you about Saint Vitus. He was supposedly a young Christian martyr from Sicily, believed to have died around 303 AD during the persecution of Christians. According to a traditional story, he was only about twelve years old, and he was subjected to various tortures and was eventually thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil, yet miraculously he survived that particular torture. What the hell? He became known for the way that he bopped around while being boiled alive.
God, he probably lost all his skin.
He became associated with involuntary movements and dancing, which eventually gave us the term Saint Vitus’ Dance.
Oh my god, because they burned him.
He’s traditionally associated with protection against epilepsy, Korea, animal attacks, snake bites, lightning, oversleeping, dancers, actors, and comedians, and even dogs. So St. Vitus’s dance is a term they use for two different phenomena. The one is this epidemic I’m talking to you about, the best known, most famous dancing epidemic, not the only one though. And the second is Didn’t Ham Korea. So this is a neurologic complication of group A Streptococcus, usually occurring several weeks after strep throat and characterized by sudden involuntary jerky movements, often affecting the face, hands, and limbs. It is considered a manifestation of acute rheumatic fever caused by an autoimmer spots in which the antibodies mistakenly target parts of the brain involved in movement, and then most people recover completely, but these symptoms may persist for months.
St. Vitus dance has been confirmed as a strep reaction to some type of strep infection.
Okay. But sometimes that does not but people also talk about St. Vitus’s dance when they talk about this dance plague.
Okay.
And while theories might be they were one and the same, we don’t know that for sure.
It kind of sounds like it.
Back to our story. They whisk our dancer off to the shrine of Saint Vitus in an attempt to break his curse on them because again, they’re like, I think St. Vitus has cursed you. Before she could return a cured woman, dozens had begun to replicate her movements. Whoa. Physicians blamed hot blood and said they needed to dance it out. So the community arranged for like dance halls to be built. Oh my god. Brought in musicians to accompany the dancing and professional dancers to help the afflicted continue dancing.
Hot blood makes me think were they feverish?
There was no evidence of that. This is a quote from somebody’s record of this. Carpenters and tanners were ordered to transform their guild halls into temporary dance floors and set up platforms in the horse market and in the grain market in full view of the public. So to keep these patients, these dancers in motion and to exploit their recovery, dozens of musicians were paid to play drums, fiddles, pipes, and horns, with healthy dancers brought in for further encouragement. The authorities hope to create optimal conditions for the dance to exhaust itself. The problem with this is it actually led to an increase. Yeah, it’s in the world. That was one big party, right? This is the opposite of COVID era. Let’s all just get together and have a dance.
I’m thinking respiratory infection spread through air. But how vastly did it spread?
We went from one to dozens and then dozens to four hundred within one month.
Okay.
And these dancers were collapsing from sheer exhaustion, with some even dying from strokes and heart attacks. Then the council, who had come up with this whole plan, was like, bad idea. Dance at home. No, we are now going to ban dancing. Oh god. Which feels very footloose. I feel like I saw this in a movie. They said, quote, if honorable persons wish to dance at weddings or celebrations of first mass in their house, they may do so using stringed instruments, but they’re on their conscience not to use tambourines and drums. So obviously they thought the drums were like setting off the dancing plague. The beat. What I want to know is like, what was the personality during the dancing? Were they joyful? Were they like, I’m so exhausted, but I can’t stop. I’m were they flipping. Yeah, were they miserable? Yeah, like what is the what was their countenance? They were talking, screaming, and praying. In the meantime, Frau Trophea. Let’s just call her trofe. Okay. She comes back and she is cured.
From the she went to the shrine of St.
Vitus. And so now that they’re like, well, dancing it out didn’t cure them of the hot blood. So maybe we need maybe they really are all cursed, and we need to send all these sufferers to the shrine to be cured. So they would send them on again on this 30-mile trek. They gave them small crosses, they gave them red shoes to wear. Um, eventually this worked, and the people were cured. This plague lasted nearly two months and at its peak was killing 15 people per day. Whoa. And this is not the only place this happened. Smaller scale episodes took place in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, but this episode was the deadliest and the most well documented. And like I said, we have like notes from it. So someone recorded many hundreds in Strasbourg began to dance and hop women and men in the public market in alleys and streets, day and night, and many of them ate nothing until at last the sickness left them. This affliction was called St. Vitus’s Dance. Another recording from not long after this happened said that there occurred among men a remarkable and terrible disease called St. Vitus’ Dance, in which men and their madness began to dance day and night until they finally fell down unconscious and succumbed to death.
So I want to hear about the people who lived. I want to know how long were they dancing for for the ones that did live? Like when did they start showing signs of relief? I want to know And what was related to that?
I want to know was there any relapse at any point? Did and come back, and was it like an environmental thing where they left and because they weren’t exposed to that environmental trigger?
Yeah. Like could it be like a chemical, like mercury poisoning or something like that in the environment?
Right, like in like some sort of mineral in the water. Or like an aerotoxin and the dirt, the soil. I don’t know. You bring up an interesting point, both of you. Kids and adults. Because if we think about, if we think about, I told you this is not this was the largest and most famous outbreak, but not the only one. Right. And so if we look at where, if we map them, where did they occur? They all occurred somewhere along the Rhine and Moselle rivers, areas linked by water, but they had different climates and different crops that they ate, like that they grew. So trying to figure out like what is the connection, all they could really find is that they’re they are on this. But what was there a trade route through this?
Good question. Good question. That they were I’m sure there was.
That yeah, that they were like, I don’t know, some sort of good was being passed.
But also, were they drinking that water? Is that their source of drinking water, that river?
We don’t know. Yeah, these are good ones. I just again want to go back to what did they what did they look like? Was it like they were dancing and like it was like a a complete personality change? Yeah. Like they’re dancing and they’re like, I don’t know why my legs won’t stop.
Like And were there any other symptoms building up before the dancing?
It does not sound as though there were any preceding symptoms because the story is that they just walked out and started dancing, like walked out, and her husband was like, Enough, come on in. And she was like, I’m dancing. I’m with you though, Kate, because I was like, are they like having like spastic movements that were like, oh, it’s dancing, or are they boogieing? I have like I would like more specifics as well. And I want to know, like, were the dancing movements similar at all to anyone else’s movement? Yeah. They present the same way, I guess.
That’s a good point.
So you really want your you want your old carts. You want to know about what it came on, what the procedure associated symptoms were. When did it like nothing relieved or exacerbated it that we know of?
What did the people who survived do differently?
And what’s our demographic? Is there a certain age? Okay, well let me ask you this before I give you the theories.
Mm-hmm.
What are your what are your differentials here?
Um, I think we said like neurotoxin, something in the drinking water or in their food or in the minerals. Could be respiratory spread. It could be respiratory spread.
Yeah, I’m thinking either neurotoxin or some sort of infectious like a neurotoxin from contaminated water, food, something they’re ingesting in their environment some sort of infectious cause that’s attacking spinal cord where your risk stems from.
Yeah, is this a type of meningitis situation?
But again, we the only symptom that we have that we know of is quote dancing. We have no idea what the symptom looks like. Again, I I just wish we had more understanding of the symptomology. So this happened today. 600 years later. Uh huh. Other than doing a much better old parts review of system and physical exam, is there any kind of diagnostics we we would be getting? We can’t I think immediately you’re getting a CBC BMP. Let’s look at these electrolytes. Are are lights off?
Or are they having like a white count? Are they showing blood work reflective of infection?
But I tell you that they they’ve gotta have if they’re all dying, they’ve gotta be dying of like rhabdo, dehydration, kidney injuries. Yes. So you know they’re electrolytes. Blood sugar whack. Blood sugar. Everyone knows the first thing you do is check a blood sugar. Yeah. I think you do an LP, see if there’s anything in the CSF.
Would we even be able to if they’re non-stop flexing and moving?
Or you can sedate them.
Well, yeah. Well, but do their twitching stop completely if they’re sedated? You would paralyze it. Yeah, okay. So paralytic.
Or you but also if it is some sort of like like seizures like propofol, we’re gonna get we’re gonna check our blood count to look for kind of any kind of infection, and then check our electrolytes and our kidney function, and we’re gonna get a lumbar puncture to look if there’s any infection in our spinal fluid.
Yeah, can you jump straight to an LP or do you have to do imaging at all first?
I would get an MRI. Is that an MRI here? I I think an MRI is good, but I think you gotta paralyze them to do an MRI.
Yeah, yeah.
I don’t think that the dancing patient is gonna get an MRI. Yeah, they’re not going into the tube. Yeah. Uh I guess you could get a CT, but what’s that really gonna show? Well, it may it tells you that they’re not gonna hurt the NLP. Yeah, and then you can get an MRI. I think we need an EEG, and we definitely need like a toxicology screen. Oh yeah, tox screen for sure. So maybe in 2026 we could solve this mystery. But oh, you think they were all gonna next? These 1500s, like the they’re all on Molly.
Oh.
But I mean, I’m talking about toxicology, like I’m looking like chemical exposure. I know, but like what if what if they was maybe maybe they all grew some shrooms in general? Maybe we could have had some success diagnosing this. Still would have been a diagnostic challenge, but maybe we could have figured it out. Unfortunately, we have none of that information that we just sell it remains a mystery. So they prayed the gay away, you know. Let me tell you about the leading theories. Okay. The first one, like a mass hysteria or a mass psychogenic illness. Do we have actual documented mass psych illnesses like this? Yes. Okay. So mass psychogenic illness or mass hysteria is not not in the DSM 5, but in general, the medical literature describes it as the rapid spread of similar physical symptoms through a cohesive group in the absence of an identifiable infectious, toxic, or other organic cause, often in association with shared beliefs, anxiety, or a triggering event. So again, this is a constellation of symptoms that suggest an organic illness, but lack any kind of identifiable cause. So, yes, it’s a diagnosis of exclusion. You have to rule everything else out. Right. And well, they weren’t really able to rule anything out here in the 1500s. The World Health Organization similar describes it as a rapid spread of medically unexplained signs and symptoms within a group or setting, with affected people interpreting these symptoms as evidence of a serious physical illness. So again, this these symptoms are not fake. The patients are not making them up. They are truly experiencing these symptoms, but they are a physical manifestation of something psychological.
Do you have to have a triggering event to make that diagnosis? To call it her hysteria. Okay. Is there any historical event in that era?
That is such a good question. There was a lot of stressors happening. Again, this is the most accepted theory. This is what most people believe. But in order to say there was not an organic cause identified and that this is maybe a psychogenic illness, we really would have to rule out an infectious cause, toxic exposures, environmental causes, metabolic abnormalities, neurologic disease, medication effects, and other medical explanations. All the things you pointed out, which unfortunately we can’t do.
But most people believe that this is a hysteria.
Yes.
Okay.
But I part of that though is because they were like, like one person was like, she went out and danced, and her husband was like, come inside and she didn’t come inside. And she just wanted to embarrass him. Like, really? I think because it was a lot of female, they were just like these crazy women.
Oh man, that’s awesome.
They all need to go be put in a tent, right, Kate? Oh, I really wish there was still period tents. That sounds lovely. This is so the no one got this thing for three days. So the basic idea is that extreme psychological and social stress produced genuine involuntary symptoms in susceptible people, and then those symptoms spread through the community. And at this time, Strasbourg had been dealing with famine, disease, disease, specifically smallpox and syphilis are what. were rampant at the time of this hey I wonder if there’s a syphilis uh component specifically in females but they better make sense they didn’t get and it was very rapid like syphilis usually takes takes a while yeah famine disease there was a lot of poverty there’s a lot of social upheaval and there was intense religious anxiety and then they said on top of that historians feel like there people already had this cultural framework for what was happening because there was already this widespread belief that Saint Vitus could curse people with uncontrollable dancing. So in theory the stress created the vulnerability and then this cultural belief provided the form the illness took and then as you see other people affected it kind of perpetuates the outbreak. Oh okay so it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Exactly.
Yeah okay well that’s one theory I just wish we we had more to prove the other things weren’t possible. This is a cliffhanger because we’re never going to be able to say no to those.
If you believe this theory this kind of gets into our third our throwback Thursday episode that’s coming up this week which is about fully ado.
Oh yeah.
Remember we talked about the Eric subtraction and they had this shared psychosis and this idea is that two people who are really close can end up sharing the same delusional beliefs. One person may essentially reinforce what the other person is thinking until they’re both operating that same reality. The difference is that that fully ado is like two people right a very small group and this mass hysteria mass psychogenic illness like hundreds is in a much larger group. So that’s the that’s the most believed theory okay what do you guys think about that? It’s again it feels like they’re working with what they got. What we know based on like the evidence or what was documented sure that checks every box but we also can’t uh we can’t check off infections yeah the second is ergot poisoning so ergot is a fungus that can grow on grain such as rye and produces compounds similar to LSD oh capable of causing hallucinations spasms and other neurological symptoms hold on and this is also a theory that the Salem witch trials yeah had I was like ring a ding ding this sound is a cause hold on who said neurotoxin along a trade route you think they’re trading bread yes grain yes a hundred percent especially you said they they live in different yeah environments one of these environments 100% yeah so the exposure to ergot is called say Anthony’s fire it involves twitching jerking and hallucinations and it’s also causes burning pain spasms hallucinations seizures here’s the problem with this the other thing it causes is gangrene from severe blood vessel constriction these people just dropped there wasn’t any these people were not like usually right if all of a sudden your blood vessels constrict you don’t get blood flow to your hands and your feet right your hands and feet are gonna fall but these people were like not losing hands and feet. They were but they were dying fast. They had all these symptoms except the gangrene and constriction.
Well with ergot poisoning how quickly does the gangrene occur? Like what’s the timeline? Because these people have just been so poisoned that they died too quickly for the ischemic changes.
That’s true yeah you’re right yeah you’re right never mind and does it is it seen in every case of ergot poisoning is it related to how much you’re exposed to we ask great questions it doesn’t look like there’s really good rates of how many people but it sounds like that’s sort of like the textbook symptom gangrene like this vasoconstriction. So I think if not for that this would be a very if they’re dancing so much that they’re not eating and they’re dying of like dehydration starvation exhaustion they’re pumping their blood then I feel like it should wear off right like those should shift and then they should be over it.
I’m also thinking like are they producing urine and poop? Because what if they’re burning it but not actually producing waste well that goes into like were they in renal failure.
Yeah I was like were their kidneys dead yeah I mean I’m thinking about an LSD trip it’s is like twelve hours maybe right I guess if if they’re like LSD’d out they dance for 12 hours they get exhausted they sit down they have a piece of bread and then they trip again maybe but it just seems like you would have it wouldn’t be like six weeks straight of dancing dancing. You would dance and eat at the same time as someone who’s done it.
Oh trust me I have pocket bread and I dance finger foods this is also people who are in like manic episodes like how do you help people who are manic who can’t sit still you have to feed them finger foods right because we’re not gonna just sit down and eat a full meal with a fork or knife but give them a chicken finger they can eat that and dance.
You know what I mean? Yeah it’s like a thing okay another possibility is that at least some of the dancing was connected to religious belief or ritual. Oh like may have believed they were cursed possessed or required to dance as part of a religious experience or attempt at healing. So if people again if these people thought that they had to dance to like heal it doesn’t necessarily mean they were pretending the behavior again could have been like embedded in the cultural religious expectations and so maybe it was a mix of like that psychogenic illness and this culturally scripted behavior where they believed they had to dance to my only argument for that is like these people were dancing till they died.
I don’t think anybody has like the the will to dance like I think they would just faint. I don’t think they would I’m gonna say I don’t think they would dance themselves into rhabdo.
I think in the 1500s people were a little tougher than our generations. I mean now people can’t tolerate any discomfort.
No but what I’m saying is like I think they would just end up fainting. I don’t think they would die.
I think that there would be periods of rest as well. Yeah I feel like it would be like let’s dance and pray periods of rest will be progen. And then finally it could have been a neurologic or infectious disease. Yeah. So this could be something like epilepsy or chorea encephalitis uh which is like an inflammation of the brain but the problem is I would say that none of these really explain the phenomenon like so what everyone just had epilepsy right? Yeah it makes no sense that those are not generally like transmissible.
That’s I think Kate’s theory with something being transported down the river goods through trait.
I think too with these neurologic conditions like again epilepsy doesn’t really just like come and then go without any real like treatment right encephalitis doesn’t usually there’s preemptive get better without you know immunosuppression or antibiotic also none of them go like from like nothing to dancing. Again or as I mentioned this could have been a combination of factors. So it could have been kind of an interaction of the challenges they face this like mass psychogenic illness the kind of accepted cultural behavior and kind of religious you know views at that time and they all just kind of came together into this perfect storm at the exact wrong time and and that’s what happened. I want to know more yeah I have questions and I want to go back to the the ergot you said it it was was it all peripheral vasculatus or was it like major blood vessels? I don’t know. I guess it would be worse if it was major blood vessels. Well well some of them did yeah you said like had heart attacks and strip maybe there’s other funguses that cause these things though. Do you think that like the neurosymptoms of like spasic movements and like quote dancing that sort of like offset like a vasculitis type like to because you your body is like put trying to give blood to your muscles.
And flowing from that could they have been twitching and dancing because they were in pain you know what I mean like trying to shake it into their footers. They were shaking their hand out for you have no idea what they were doing Megan okay I’m just trying to picture their hand hurt so bad I’m just thinking ooh my finger my toes hurt my toe or like my toes feel numb. Let me shake it shake that thing.
I just I just wish what was beside I yes I know I keep coming back to like there has to be more than just dancing and there was a lot of talk about their feet being shredded and bleeding and they were screaming about the pain in their feet.
Okay so gangrenous but I don’t think it’s gangrenous as much as like blistering because you’ve been dancing for or they have such arterial pain that they’re trying to shake the blood back into it. Yeah you know when people are in that much pain they don’t sit still that’s true. Like I’m thinking sickle cell they’re twitchy because they’re every part of them hurts.
Arterial plane they’re moving because it hurts but I guess I’m constantly rubbing this person in a bed and I don’t but I feel like I’ve I’ve seen that but I don’t know if that equates to dancing but also you don’t know that they were for sure dancing. They were also reciting Christian deities praying frantically and speaking in tongues and they were unable to hold a normal sane conversation. They were crying out like help me to stop because that was the only way they knew how to get help that could be a reason. I don’t think it necessarily points to you know mania.
I think it’s ergant yeah I don’t I don’t discredit I I’m definitely still leaning more towards infectious or neurotoxic along a trade route.
You’re welcome I’m just thinking okay infection it would have to be what viral yeah they didn’t get treated with any antibiotic or antifungal or just infectious it would have to be people with strong immune systems survived.
That’s true. It’s funny that they called it the hot blood always the hot blood.
I guess I just think about we always treat neuroinfections like encephalitis. It’s always either like turn down the immune system right like immunosuppressants or it’s like there’s an infection you got to treat the infection a cycloder antiviral uh you know antibiotics for for bacterial antifungal if we think it’s a fungal but they didn’t have those things I I just don’t think of any patient yeah but they got better is what I’m saying. Because though it’s Darwinism those that could survive survived you could have bacteria in your brain and you don’t need antibiotics and you could like beat it on your own that feels inaccurate.
How do you think we still have people after the plague they weren’t giving medicine to the people in the plague but they were giving antibiotics then and people still survived smallpox people still survived I’m just saying we have evidence of people surviving without modern day treatment so yeah I agree with Colleen how else do you think the human race survived we would not be here today if people weren’t Darwinism with stronger immune systems. Also we don’t but they could have been eaten moldy bread they could have been self-medicating with without knowing you know what I mean they could have had natural penicillin without even knowing that’s right too and I guess the bugs have all gotten stronger right because they didn’t have and they didn’t have penicillin so we didn’t have resistant organisms. And there’s probably people who might have gotten infected but not to that severity so before dancing and beat the lesser infection so then didn’t get re-exposed. You know what I mean?
Like you don’t know you haven’t given your opinion well because I don’t know I guess I really was on the ergot and then I was like that there’s no vasoconstriction and everyone is like that is like the textbook symptom and there’s no story like these people were dancing and then they and then their legs fell off right yeah it doesn’t talk about but we can that also doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I feel like that would make the story though I think if they were writing a story if people are recording like I saw these people dancing what are the they also would have written fingers and toes were falling are the sources religious people though because if they wanted you to believe it was religious causing this they’re not gonna write everything down.
Can you trust your narrator?
Oh that’s a good point. And I also think there’s something to be said about like the only people that were probably writing anything down were men.
Yeah. So I don’t think you can trust everything when we’re talking about historical events like this.
No I I agree but I I guess I’m just thinking that like a first hand account.
Well they’re gonna think that’s gross to talk about so I’m not gonna write that down. There’s an argument for that there is no I I I agree. I think it’s very not likely. I think you we’re I’m sure they probably weren’t losing fingers and toes but there’s an argument we can’t completely say no to that.
I mean bleeding feet Megan I mean they did write about the bleeding feet yeah that’s but bleeding feet is not the same as vasoconstriction with black toes.
You don’t go from zero to black toes there’s an im there’s a middle ground there.
Yeah I I guess I’m just what you’re thinking like early when it’s just looking like bruised or you develop an ulcer before it dies off. I’m really just trying to think about all the vasopressor injuries I’ve seen and I feel like they start purpling like like a bruise. So maybe maybe it was a mass psychogenic illness I guess I maybe mint I it sounds like Megan is not on board with ergot but Colleen and I are on board with ergot yeah I think fungal I think fungal had a part to play.
Okay. Or something that was passed down the trade route.
Yeah neurotoxin down the trade route that’s my final answer. Okay yeah and Megan doesn’t like to theorize about anything so no Megan can’t handle no hard well if I had a if I had a strong feeling then this wouldn’t be a mystery would it? No well yeah but that’s what we’re doing we’re trying to solve mysteries and that’s solved in my brain erg okay all right well I might go so I might go psychogenic illness. Okay all right she sounds uncon she just like I have to choose an answer.