Lore - Episode 81: On the Edge

Episode Date: March 5, 2018

Humanity seems to always be at risk of suffering through another major outbreak. History is full with dark moments of biological chaos, and despite constant advances in medical science, there seems to be no end in sight. We’re afraid of getting sick, and sometimes it feels like we’re right on the edge. And that can be a terrifying place to be. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They had an outbreak on their hands. It wasn't a new disease but that didn't make it any harder to deal with. Typhus, not to be confused with typhoid fever, is a bacterial infection that causes headaches, rash, and fever. And it thrives in cramped spaces with filthy conditions. They called it jail fever in Tudor, England. It was camp fever during the American Civil War. If you have a lot of people crammed into a small space, there's a good chance that you could have an outbreak of typhus. Places like military camps and ghettos.

Which is where this particular outbreak was happening. Poland in 1942 was a horrible place to live if you were a Jew. The Nazis were systematically rounding up anyone of Jewish descent and sending them to concentration camps. Because they had this broken idea that some people were worth less than others. But there were two doctors in Southeast Poland with an idea about how to stop them. It turns out you didn't actually have to contract the disease to test positive for it. All you really needed was a vaccine of the dead bacteria. It's also important to understand something else.

The Nazis were so afraid of getting sick that they killed any infected Jew they found. But if enough people tested positive for the disease, they would simply quarantine the entire area and just stay away. So these two doctors began to give injections to all of the non-Jewish people living in the nearby ghetto. Their goal was to frighten the Nazis away and save the lives of every Jew in the village. And it worked. When all was said and done, Eugene Lozowski and Stanislav Matolevich saved over 8,000 human lives. People have always been afraid of getting sick. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it needs to be pointed out.

Waves of illness have always rolled across communities. And when it happens, there's a lot of fear, suffering, pain, even death. All it takes is one disease. And everything we know can suddenly, irrevocably change. But not all of them have been as straightforward as typhus, or influenza, or even bubonic plague. Some epidemics have tested the limits of diagnostic science and human endurance in a way that's never been seen before. And if you're ready, I want to expose you to a few. Just be careful. You never know what you might catch.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. In July of 1518, an epidemic broke out in the French town of Strasbourg, which sits on the Rhine, directly across from Germany. The first victim was a woman named Frau Trophia. But before the week was over, she was joined by over 30 others. Within a month, that number was over 400. By the time the summer was over, many of the victims were dead. Some died as a result of heart attacks, while for others it was a stroke. Most, though, simply died of exhaustion.

And that's because the epidemic that raged across the village like a wildfire was something none of us would have expected. It was dancing. I mean it, this was a dancing plague. When Frau Trophia stepped into the street that day in July, she began to dance uncontrollably and never stopped. More and more people began to do the same. This wasn't a medieval flash mob or some promotional event for a popular composer's new symphony. This was involuntary, uninterrupted, uncontrollable dancing. And it was killing people.

The local physician decided the dancing was caused by hot blood, and as if he were some sort of time-traveling Bruno Mars, prescribed more dancing as a cure. The village even built a stage and brought in musicians to play for the afflicted so they could stay on rhythm. When people started dying, though, they decided that something otherworldly must be the root cause. In the end, they blamed it on St. Vitus. He was a Christian martyr from 3rd century Italy who had become known as the patron saint of dancers. The village believed that they had somehow upset him and the dancing was part of their punishment. So they outlawed gambling and prostitution and then sent the victims to a nearby shrine dedicated to the saint.

Within weeks, they were cured. South of Strasbourg in the homeland of St. Vitus, the combination of dancing and disease had been around for hundreds of years. The earliest mention on record dates back to the 11th century when a physician named Gary Apontus described the symptoms of an illness he called a teniasmus. Back then, though, the dancing wasn't the symptom. It was the cure. People would apparently get sick with a number of symptoms. For many, it would be depression, breathing troubles, poor circulation, fainting spells, and a weak pulse. People would feel cold, numb, and tired beyond reason.

But they would also throw themselves on the ground and writhe around in pain. These early Italians blamed the sickness on the bite of a spider known as the tarantula wolf spider, although some records also mention a scorpion as another possible source. As a result, the condition was referred to as tarantism and it came with a pretty bizarre medical treatment. Once a person began to show symptoms, there was only one cure that would work. While a musician played a very specific song, the patient was required to perform a correspondingly specific dance. Do it all correctly and for long enough that a patient could be saved. Now, before you write this off as some sort of local isolated craze, I need to point out how widespread this really was.

Over the course of centuries, at least 270 historical writers have recorded accounts of a dancing plague in their works. One of them, a composer named Stephen Storos, recorded his own experience in 1753 when he was visiting a village near Naples. It just so happened that while he was there, a man became sick with the disease. But because the town priest was away, everyone turned to him to play the tune. The moment he did, this is what happened. The man began to move accordingly, Storos wrote, and got up as quick as lightning and seemed as if he had been awakened by some frightful vision and wildly started about, still moving every joint in his body. The instant I left off playing, the man fell down and cried out very loudly and distorted his face, arms, legs, and any other part of his body

that clearly indicated him to be in miserable agonies. Storos claims he played the tune for two hours before stopping. The patient collapsed from exhaustion and was taken inside by friends where he was soaked in a tub while a surgeon bled him. A few days later, he was fully recovered. Looking back at the evidence, it's actually difficult to pin all this on a spider. Sure, most of the outbreaks of tyrantism occurred in the summer months when spiders would be most active. But patients never seemed to be able to point to a mark on their body that was distinctively a spider bite. In fact, in 1693, one physician actually allowed himself to be bitten twice, right in front of a group of witnesses and a notary, and yet nothing ever happened to him.

Whatever the cause really was, these cases were widespread. Some people would experience the same illness every summer, year after year, while others would never get sick at all. A whole network of traveling musicians existed for a very long time, wandering the Apulia region of Italy, looking for villages that needed music to trigger the dancing. That dance is still around today, by the way. It's sort of a cultural relic from another time, when only a specific song and dance routine could cure you. It's called the Tarantella, hinting at that spider bite that started everything. It even shows up a number of times in the Harry Potter novels in the form of the spell called the Tarantellegra, the dancing feet spell. And if there's one thing I've learned from history, though, it's that there's always something worse.

Plagues of dancing, however exhausting and mysterious they might have been, pale in comparison to other outbreaks. Some, in fact, have been a lot more frightening and deadly than most of us would be comfortable with. Stay with me now, because things are about to get crazy. Literally. It was not the way he had wanted to end his vacation, but here he was. Not that home was a horrible place to be, Ponceau Esprit is a picturesque village sitting on the edge of the Rhône in southern France, about 80 miles north of where the river meets the Mediterranean Sea. Dr. Gebé had returned home on August 17th of 1951, a day before he was due back to his practice, hoping to get caught up on things at home.

Almost immediately, though, he was called over to his office. There was a line, they said. When he arrived, he was shocked to see so many people in his little waiting room all at once. There were more outside too, and none of them, from the youngest to the oldest, looked even slightly well. I doubt he even thought about his vacation at that point. He just got to work. It looked like it was going to be a long day. What he discovered, though, was amazing.

He didn't have dozens of patients all seeking treatment for their own individual ailments. No, he had one large, community-wide illness. Each new patient that walked into his exam room presented the same symptoms. Intestinal discomfort, nausea, and chills. Dr. Gebé had seen food poisoning before, and this was definitely that. Just never before on this scale. It was disconcerting. Nevertheless, he prescribed each of them something for their discomfort and sent them home to rest.

Given enough time, he said, they'd all be back to normal. And that's what everyone did. They went home and climbed into bed, and as the hours went by, those symptoms faded away. A good doctor was right, after all. That's when most of the patients discovered something odd. Even though their symptoms had left them exhausted, they couldn't sleep. They would lay awake in bed all night, but oddly would get up the next morning feeling refreshed and full of energy. It was unusual, for sure, but nothing worth going back to the doctor for, as far as they were concerned.

Which was probably a good thing, because Dr. Gebé was already busy with other, more unusual problems. On the 19th, one of those original food poisoning patients, Madame Charpie, called for his help after she suffered what appeared to be epileptic convulsions. Another patient, Mr. Maison, ran screaming from his house before being dragged back inside by his wife, where he fell into a deep sleep. Naturally, Dr. Gebé sent both of them to the hospital. It would have been manageable if that's all that happened. People get sick, and doctors are good at helping them. But Charpie and Maison weren't the end.

They were just the beginning. Over the next few days, more and more of those original patients began to change. It wasn't a relapse, though, because that would insinuate that the food poisoning had somehow returned. No, this was different, as if whatever they were suffering from was somehow evolving. Each patient followed roughly the same path. Food poisoning, recovery, insomnia, and then complete and utter exhaustion. They trembled and suffered fits, claimed to be too hot and then too cold, and their skin had gone ghostly pale. But their biggest complaint of all was about their eyesight.

In some ways, it seemed to be failing. If you put a book in front of them, they'd be able to see the words but not read them, which admittedly was pretty odd. But they were also seeing things that shouldn't be there. Visions of colorful animals, raging fires, and monstrous creatures that were attacking the village. In fact, that feeling of paranoia that something dangerous was threatening their lives was the overwhelming experience for all of these patients. And with all of that came wild mood swings that alternated from fear and depression to joy and transcendence. On August 20, all hell broke loose. That morning, a doctor was called to the home of a five-year-old girl named Marie Kearl.

She was screaming about a whole assortment of impossible sightings. There were tigers in her room, attacking her. The curtains were covered in snakes. There was blood dripping from the ceiling. It was like a scene pulled straight out of the exorcist, and yet it was just there, all in her mind. Her parents were no help either. Marie's mother had tried to calm the girl down, but she was struggling with the sickness herself, and that made it a challenge. Marie's father was in bed in the other room, muttering over and over again to himself.

He was counting the windowpains, and would do so nonstop for over a week. The physician who arrived gave the entire family a sedative to help them rest, and then moved on to his next call. Local farmer Madame Moulin was having visions of a doctor who was trying to get into her house. The doctor, she said, had no flesh on his skull, just the pale white of exposed bone and a wide evil grin. She and her 25-year-old son, Joseph, who was also ill, were taken to the hospital later that day. One mother brought her 11-year-old son to the hospital after he tried attacking her. He was convinced that she was dangerous and attempted to strangle her. And a 66-year-old man was so afraid of his hallucinations that he shouted and waved a shotgun at his neighbors from the window.

When the authorities arrived to help him, they found his door blocked with a pile of furniture. However bizarre and troubling these events were, they were just a sampling of what the village had to endure. Added up across the community, there were over 300 cases of the illness reported that day to physicians and hospitals. It was frantic, stressful, and, as you might imagine, horrifying to those living through the outbreak. But it wasn't over just yet. Later that night, as if closing out the day with a toll of a deep, ominous bell, Mr. Mizon, who had been in the hospital since his seizures began the day before, suffered a massive heart attack. He was dead before help could arrive.

It was the bread. At least that was their working hypothesis. To understand why, there are a few things you need to know about how bread worked in 1951 France. At the time of the outbreak, France used a sort of distribution system for making sure that every region of the country had enough flour to make bread. They called it the Union Meniere, the Miller's Union, but it was more than that. The government controlled every aspect of the process, from the farms that grew the grain to the mills that ground it. Then it was evenly distributed around the country. So when a bakery received its daily delivery of flour, that was it.

Whether it was good or bad, you had to use it or skip making bread for the day. And that's the sort of decision that a number of bakers had to make on August 15th of 1951. The flour they all received wasn't quite right, but most used it anyway. It produced a dough that they described as gray and oily, but it still rose fine, and it tasted good. So naturally, they sold it. Our baker, the baker for the village of Ponceau Esprit, was a man named Rochebriand. He made his questionable bread like every other baker in the region on August 15th, and he sold all of it. We're told that he had about 300 customers that day, which was a testament to his reputation.

He was known for how white his bread was, and that was something that he took a lot of pride in. Remember, one of the cries of the French Revolution a century and a half before had been liberty and white bread, and that craving seemed to have stuck around. So now you know. But as the old G.I.G.O. cartoon was so good at telling us, knowing is half the battle. The village might have had ideas about where the outbreak began, but they still had a lot of work to do to manage the repercussions. I wish I could say that the death of Mr. Maison at the end of August 20th was the low point.

But that would be lying. Things got much worse, very quickly. Remember all those insomnia patients? Well, they might have started to experience other symptoms, but they still weren't sleeping. In fact, in the days following that first death, they began to gather outside at night in public spaces. They were probably bored, having to endure their days with no breaks or rest, and to be honest, I think they were also more than a little frightened. For most of the village, though, that was the extent their original food poisoning symptoms evolved into insomnia,

and that was it. People like Mr. Maison and Madame Moulin were edge cases. They represented a minority, but it was, without a doubt, a vocal minority. On Friday, August 24th, chaos erupted. Contemporary accounts spoke of it almost as if a switch had been flipped. Perhaps whatever illness they all suffered from had some sort of incubation period, or maybe it was just the building tension in the village that eventually reached a boiling point. Whatever the reason might have been, the results were horrifying.

A man had been sitting with a group of friends who were all suffering from the same insomnia. All of a sudden, he stood up, bolted toward the river, and then threw himself in. And as he did, he shouted, I am dead. My head is made of copper, and I have snakes in my stomach. Thankfully, his friends were able to pull him to safety, and then immediately took him to the hospital. Elsewhere, a grandmother slammed herself into a wall in an effort to escape an invisible enemy, and broke three ribs in the process. Another man claimed to see his own heart slipping out of his body through his feet, and begged his doctor to help.

The one man even climbed up onto the cables of the suspension bridge over the river, and it took two police officers to bring him back down to safety. Things were just as crazy at the hospital. The one patient, a former pilot, apparently decided that he was an airplane and launched himself out of a second floor window. He didn't die, though. He broke both his legs, and then, as if the pain didn't exist at all, he ran full speed away from the hospital.

Eventually, some nurses were able to catch up and bring him back. If you had been standing in the center of the village that night, you would have been overwhelmed by the sounds in the distance. Ambulance sirens, screams, loud bangs that could have been slamming doors, but also maybe gunshots, and, of course, cries for help. It was as if the very fabric of society had been torn, and madness was seeping out. Other hospitals in the region began to come and take some of the patients away to alleviate that pressure, but there were still too many sick to care for, and if you didn't show the worst of the symptoms,

the nurses might just send you home instead of helping you. It might seem cruel today, but in that moment, they were just doing the best they could. Not only had the outbreak become chaotic, but it also turned deadly. One older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Ryu, died together in their home from simultaneous heart attacks brought on by the fear and panic. Joseph Moulin, who had been in the hospital with his mother since August 20th, suffered a series of convulsions and then slipped into a coma before passing away. The fifth and final death was a 79-year-old man named Joseph Portal,

who died under care at a local psychiatric hospital. Then, the storm began to fade. It had blown in unexpectedly, destroyed dozens of families and businesses, and put an entire community on edge. All they had wanted was liberty and white bread, and what they got was so much worse. And that's the truly horrifying aspect of this event. There was no disease rolling into town on the back of a truck or the slow spread of a contagious illness that might have been stopped with proper quarantine.

No, this was a bomb detonated in the middle of a busy community without anyone noticing until it was too late. All they could do was try their best to manage the fallout. The village would never be the same. The village would never be the same. The village would never be the same. The village would never be the same. The village would never be the same.

Humanity is no stranger to outbreaks of illness. In fact, some of the biggest tragedies in history have been a product of disease. The first recorded instance of bubonic plague, which began in the spring of 542, killed an estimated 25 million people, and that was just a warm-up. About 800 years later, it returned, and it burned Europe to the ground for years. When it was done, a third of the Earth's population was dead, close to 100 million lives. It's no wonder they called it the Black Death. Sure, only five people died in Ponceau Esprit, but I still think that it was a unique outbreak.

With a plague, you could follow its path. It was like those aerial videos of wildfires, where you can see the flames advancing toward new neighborhoods. But in Ponceau Esprit, it was different. It just happened. Over 65 years later, we're still not sure how it happened. Don't worry, though, there have been plenty of theories suggested, and all of them start with that bread. It's hard to ignore the fact that Roche Brion baked bread on the 15th using questionable flour, and seeing as he served about 300 customers that day, the final count of infected patients lines up rather nicely.

Some people believe that the bread was infected with ergot, a fungus that can cause hallucinations and convulsions, as well as symptoms that could easily be confused with food poisoning. But if the batch of flour delivered to Roche Brion was contaminated, why did no other towns in the region go through the same experience? Some blamed his obsession with having the whitest bread in the village. It turns out that the town pharmacist was a good friend of his, and would have been a great source for the chemicals needed to bleach his flour. But then, why did this only ever happen once?

The craziest theory I've read goes as far as to suggest that Russia somehow secretly used the village to test a new LSD-based drug. Others think it was the CIA, but both of those ideas have been ruled out. My favorite, as you might imagine, leans a bit more toward the world of folklore. In May of that year, less than three months before the outbreak began, a storm battered the village. When it was over, locals discovered that their statue of the Virgin Mary had been vandalized. Someone had torn off one of her arms. The outbreak, they later suggested, was punishment for that crime. Today, the village of Ponso Esprit is trying their best to put those dark events of August 1951 behind them.

It's still just as beautiful and picturesque, and it has much more to offer than stories of Lupin-Modi, the cursed bread. It's doubled in size since then, and moved, reluctantly, perhaps, into the modern world. And yet, well, you can't erase everything. There are some aspects of the cursed bread that will never go away. Families lost loved ones. Dozens of people were taken to local asylums, and some never returned. Many of the infected would never hold a job ever again. The normal balance of life in the village was thrown off, and it might never find its way back.

Which is the real message here, I suppose. We like to think we're in control, that we have our lives all planned out, but you never know what lurks around the corner. It might come out of nowhere, or it might come from the very thing we trust the most. We can't plan for every outbreak. Sometimes all we can do is react. And that means we, as humans, will always be vulnerable, always at risk, always on the edge. Every day, we're one small slip away from madness. If you're quietly reassuring yourself that weird and unusual plagues no longer happen in our glorious modern world, you'd be wrong.

Stick around after the break for one more mind-boggling medical mystery. There's was a slowly moving sickness. The first cases were noted at the end of January 1962 in a girl's boarding school in Tanzania, but by the middle of March, so many of the students were sick that they had to shut the school down. At least 95 girls, ranging from 12 to 18 years old, were confirmed patients. They opened back up weeks later, but the sickness didn't stop spreading, and so they closed the school again. But by then, it was too late. Those six students had gone home, where their families contracted the same thing.

Within weeks, hundreds of people across Tanzania and Uganda had become infected, and authorities didn't know what to do. They took blood samples and examined many of the patients for clues, and yet nothing stood out. It wasn't a virus. It wasn't food poisoning, but it certainly was contagious. And at this point, you're probably wondering what the symptoms were, and I'm so glad you asked. Each of the patients, it turns out, was suffering from uncontrollable, violent, and extended fits of laughter. One minute they would be fine, and the next they would be on the floor laughing over and over again, unable to stop.

Most would laugh so violently that others would have to restrain them out of fear they might hurt themselves. And before you assume that this was some sort of prank or fad among the young students of the area, let me add in that adults were catching it as well. One older woman was said to have walked over 10 miles to check on a sick relative, and after just a couple of hours in the same room, she too began to laugh uncontrollably. And then, just as slowly as it had arrived, the sickness began to fade away. The village after village experienced its own outbreak, and then it was over. Some think it was related to Tanzania's recent independence from British rule.

Others think it was mass hysteria. Most, though, have no idea at all. It just happened. I realize the fits of laughter aren't necessarily the most terrifying thing we can dream up, but I still see a lot of fear in this story. Why? Because while we can control most equations, this outbreak took one key element out of the equation. An actual treatable disease. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marsat Crockett and Carl Nellis, and music by Chad Lawson.

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