The great physician Sydenham gave
the first accurate description of what is to-day called chorea,
and hence the disease has been named "Sydenham's chorea." So true
to life was his portrayal of the disease that it has never been
surpassed by modern observers.
The disease variously named palmus, the jumpers, the twitchers,
lata, miryachit, or, as it is sometimes called, the emeryaki of
Siberia, and the tic-convulsif of La Tourette, has been very well
described by Gray who says that the French authors had their
attention directed to the subject by the descriptions of two
American authors--those of Beard upon "The Jumpers of Maine,"
published in 1880, and that of Hammond upon "Miryachit," a
similar disease of the far Orient. Beard found that the jumpers
of Maine did unhesitatingly whatever they were told to do. Thus,
one who was sitting in a chair was told to throw a knife that he
had in his hand, and he obeyed so quickly that the weapon stuck
in a house opposite; at the same time he repeated the command
given him, with a cry of alarm not unlike that of hysteria or
epilepsy. When he was suddenly clapped upon the shoulder he threw
away his pipe, which he had been filling with tobacco. The first
parts of Virgil's aeneid and Homer's Iliad were recited to one of
these illiterate jumpers, and he repeated the words as they came
to him in a sharp voice, at the same time jumping or throwing
whatever he had in his hand, or raising his shoulder, or making
some other violent motion.
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