Sydenham's chorea

It was evidently a severe blow to him when the naughty thing went and married Signor Piozzi, for it left him without a single woman to show him how to take care of himself.

That nervous malady, which Boswell diagnosed as a sort of St. Vitus' dance, probably merely represented the violent, impulsive, and involuntary movements occasionally seen in psychasthenia.

Had the defect affected the nerves of speech, Johnson would probably have stammered, but one can never imagine a man so aggressive stammering.

How far back in life is it possible to remember? Freud thinks that the first five years of life are not retained in conscious memory, although they exercise the greatest possible influence upon our afterlives.

Between the 14th and 17th centuries, there came to exist a phenomenon known as dancing mania.

or as it was sometimes referred to, Saint Vitus' Dance.

This was a bizarre sort of choreomania that took over entire cities in medieval Europe, whereby people in their hundreds and sometimes thousands began dancing wildly and uncontrollably and in some cases for days at a time.

Some of these incidents, like the French city of Strasbourg in 1518, were started by only a handful of revelers, but the condition spread so fast that sometimes within just a day or two, the crowd of dancers swelled from dozens to literally thousands of people.

But, like, there's some sort of serious pathogenic something going on that is creating this autoimmune response in their brain.

Um, and there's a subtype of PANS/PANDAS called Sydenham's Chorea, and there's not a lot of research on this, but there's one study that shows that they did a swallow study on, um, a child with, uh, Sydenham's Chorea, a, a branch of PANS/PANDAS, and that child actually had a swallowing issue, had a dysphagia swallowing issue.

So here we are sending these kids to behavioral therapies when they have a swallowing disorder.

Um, it's pretty wild.

And so yeah, they took it from Black Sabbath.

Saint Vitus Dance.

Mm-hmm, Saint Vitus Dance.

That was one of the weirdest doom songs ever.

[laughs]

My kids, we're at the doctor's often and getting a lot of strep tests every fall and spring.

Did you recognize Sydenham chorea or St. Vitus' dance?

St. Vitus' dance.

I remember reading, I've read a lot about strep throat and St. Vitus' dance as part of it.

Okay, so here's why this is relevant to this topic.

The saint that these folks in Strasbourg believed was causing this dancing thing was Saint Vitus.

a band maybe like as like a dj i could be saint vitus's dance

St. Vitus is, it's a great band name too.

I came to typhoid fever, read the symptoms, discovered I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it, wondered what else I got.

Turned up St. Vitus' Dance, found, as I expected, that I had that too.

Began to get interested in my case and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically, reading up ague and learned I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight.

Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and so far as that was concerned, I might live for years.