MANIA***




Transcribed from the 1888 Cassell & Company edition by Jane Duff, proofed
by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org.





The Black Death
and
The Dancing Mania.


FROM THE GERMAN OF
J. F. C. HECKER.

TRANSLATED BY
B. G. BABINGTON.

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
_LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_.
1888.




INTRODUCTION


Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker was one of three generations of
distinguished professors of medicine.  His father, August Friedrich
Hecker, a most industrious writer, first practised as a physician in
Frankenhausen, and in 1790 was appointed Professor of Medicine at the
University of Erfurt.  In 1805 he was called to the like professorship at
the University of Berlin.  He died at Berlin in 1811.

Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker was born at Erfurt in January, 1795.  He
went, of course--being then ten years old--with his father to Berlin in
1805, studied at Berlin in the Gymnasium and University, but interrupted
his studies at the age of eighteen to fight as a volunteer in the war for
a renunciation of Napoleon and all his works.  After Waterloo he went
back to his studies, took his doctor's degree in 1817 with a treatise on
the "Antiquities of Hydrocephalus," and became privat-docent in the
Medical Faculty of the Berlin University.  His inclination was strong
from the first towards the historical side of inquiries into Medicine.
This caused him to undertake a "History of Medicine," of which the first
volume appeared in 1822.  It obtained rank for him at Berlin as
Extraordinary Professor of the History of Medicine.  This office was
changed into an Ordinary professorship of the same study in 1834, and
Hecker held that office until his death in 1850.

The office was created for a man who had a special genius for this form
of study.  It was delightful to himself, and he made it delightful to
others.  He is regarded as the founder of historical pathology.  He
studied disease in relation to the history of man, made his study yield
to men outside his own profession an important chapter in the history of
civilisation, and even took into account physical phenomena upon the
surface of the globe as often affecting the movement and character of
epidemics.

The account of "The Black Death" here translated by Dr. Babington was
Hecker's first important work of this kind.  It was published in 1832,
and was followed in the same year by his account of "The Dancing Mania."
The books here given are the two that first gave Hecker a wide
reputation.  Many other such treatises followed, among them, in 1865, a
treatise on the "Great Epidemics of the Middle Ages."  Besides his
"History of Medicine," which, in its second volume, reached into the
fourteenth century, and all his smaller treatises, Hecker wrote a large
number of articles in Encyclopaedias and Medical Journals.  Professor
J.F.K. Hecker was, in a more interesting way, as busy as Professor A.F.
Hecker, his father, had been.  He transmitted the family energies to an
only son, Karl von Hecker, born in 1827, who distinguished himself
greatly as a Professor of Midwifery, and died in 1882.

Benjamin Guy Babington, the translator of these books of Hecker's,
belonged also to a family in which the study of Medicine has passed from
father to son, and both have been writers.  B.G. Babington was the son of
Dr. William Babington, who was physician to Guy's Hospital for some years
before 1811, when the extent of his private practice caused him to
retire.  He died in 1833.  His son, Benjamin Guy Babington, was educated
at the Charterhouse, saw service as a midshipman, served for seven years
in India, returned to England, graduated as physician at Cambridge in
1831.  He distinguished himself by inquiries into the cholera epidemic in
1832, and translated these pieces of Hecker's in 1833, for publication by
the Sydenham Society.  He afterwards translated Hecker's other treatises
on