Ergot and ergotism pdf

For example, an alkaloid present in high concentrations in ergots from Europe east of the Rhine may have caused convulsive ergotism, while ergot from the west caused epidemics of gangrenous ergotism. Ergot thrives in warm, damp, rainy springs and summers. Journal of Archaeological Science. Management therefore involves discontinuation ergotsim the ergot and other potential vasoconstrictors, and the use of vasodilators, anticoagulants, and consideration of endovascular procedures.

Severe peripheral ischaemia during concomitant use of beta blockers and ergot alkaloids. In addition, it has been documented that elastic arteries are known to distribute drugs more efficiently. That the question as to which is the active principle of ergot is not. Contact our editors with your feedback. This page was last modified Our website uses cookies to enhance your experience.

Threshold levels have yet to be established for different animal species. The hypothesis that ergotism could explain cases of bewitchment has been subject to debate and has been criticized by several scholars.

Create a free personal account to make a comment, adn free article PDFs, sign up for alerts and more. Pesticides Aluminium phosphide Organophosphates. Ingestion of infected rye grains, either directly or by eating flour milled from infected rye, can cause ergotism in humans and livestock, a condition sometimes called St.

Ergovaline-induced vasoconstriction in an isolated bovine lateral saphenous vein bioassay. Download the PDF to view the article, as well as its associated figures and tables. Ibidem quoque facta est magna pestilentia, qua multa pauperes, magni et parvi, sacro igne accendebantur. Speculo historiali Vincentii Bellovacensis, Bouquet, xxi. Pestilentia etiam sacri ignis tanta fuit, tunc in Lemo-vicinio et in Pictavia [Limousin and Poitou], quod divites et pauperes et pueros et senes ignis accendebat.

Majus chronicon Lemovicense, Bouquet, xxi. This, the last, appears to be the sole reference in the chronicles, in which the fire is named after the Saint, and the association of the two must be inferred chiefly from what is known of the Abbey of St Anthony, especially from the description of the visit of Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln in , quoted above.

Another contemporary record of this association has been preserved in the fifteenth-century frescoes of the Chapel of St Anthony at Waltalingen, north of Zurich; two of these are reproduced from Durrer. There is indeed not infrequent mention of St Anthony's fire in early printed books, down to the first half of the sixteenth century, but such simple allusion does not include any symptoms which would permit of certain identification with the holy fire.

One passage from Rabelais was quoted above which, according to his modern editor refers to ergotism, but in others it is more probable that Rabelais meant syphilis. Fuchs and Ehlers have collected a number of such later doubtful printed references.

They include an interesting one in a book on military surgery by Gerssdorff,. The section "von dem kalten Brandt" has a woodcut Fig. Ehlers seems to suggest that this illustration refers to gangrenous ergotism; perhaps it does, but the text of GerssdorfT s book brings no certainty on this point.

It identifies the cold fire with " estiomenum," the fire of St Anthony and St Martial and "cancrena" of the Greeks. Evidently GerssdorfT had no clear conception of St Anthony's fire, and when other authors identify it with smallpox and even with syphilis, the confusion towards the end of the Middle Ages is seen to be complete.

Incidentally GerssdorfT was one of the last writers to employ the term ignis sacer, which along with St Anthony's fire, fell out of use.

Fuchs cites a few epidemics of alleged ergotism in southern Europe, taken from Villalba's Epidemio-logia Espanola and from Portuguese writers. They do not refer to contemporary sources and such of these passages as I have been able to trace have not convinced me that they deal with ergotism.

The most likely is perhaps an outbreak at the siege of Majorca in , mentioned by Villalba p. The leg was shortened and convulsed. The patches seemed dried up, as if burned in a fire or dried for a long time in the sun. They were swollen, devoid of sensation and mortified, as is apt to happen in confirmed gangrene.

Since very little rye was grown in Italy cf. It is all the more remarkable that it is so rarely mentioned in Germany, where much rye was grown and convulsive ergotism was common in modern times. This problem is referred to in the discussion on the relationship of the two types. Some mention of gangrenous ergotism may yet be discovered in Pertz's collection of German chronicles, for the most part published after Fuchs' monograph.

I have found only one such reference 42 in the annals of Meissen in Saxony for the year i, which mention an outbreak of "scurvy," a name later applied in Germany to convulsive ergotism. This, together with the mention of gangrene and the separation of flesh from the bones, makes it very probable that the " new and unheard of disease " was gangrenous ergotism.

The fact that it was described as contagious is not much opposed to this view; convulsive ergotism was later often so described, since several members of a family were mostly attacked at the same time.

Fuit idem morbus contagiosus, multorum mortalium gravi periculo. Annales urbis Misnae i, in G. Fabricius, vol. Gangrenous ergotism in modern times. The attention of the Academy of Sciences had been directed to it and Dodart was asked to report.

He ascertained from Tuillier or Thuillier, a later spelling , a physician at Angers, that the latter's father had already observed the disease in , knew that it was due to ergot, and had noticed the fatal effects of the latter on poultry. Dodart stated that the diseased rye was called ergot in the Sologne, on account of its resemblance to a cock's spur, and bled cornu in the Gatinais district, respectively south and east of Orleans.

Ergot was also found in Berry t south of the Sologne , and the country round Blois south-west of Orleans , and occurred mostly on light sandy soils.

In l some years the ergot was not found to have any harmful effects ;. Ergot was said to be most poisonous when fresh, and to lose its toxicity on keeping. Dodart gives a brief description of the gangrene, which could only be treated by amputation. The publication of Dodart's letter did much to call attention to the harmful character of ergot, not only in France, but also in Germany [Brunner, , and others]. The next French outbreak took place in , and was recorded by the Academie des Sciences [].

According to Noel, physician of the Orleans hospital, the rye crop of the Sologne in contained nearly one-quarter of ergot, and after eating bread from the new harvest the peasants felt almost drunk. The disease also appeared in Languedoc and in Dauphine ; in the latter province it was identified at the Abbey of St Anthony as the mediseval fire of that Saint. A severe outbreak in was briefly recorded by du Hamel []. An epidemic of gangrene occurred in the marshy country round Lille but not in the town in and , immediately after the war of the Austrian Succession.

It was described in considerable detail by Boucher [] and is remarkable in several respects. In the first place this author expressly excludes any "particular degeneration" of the food and does not make a single reference to ergot; he quotes the Acadhnie des Sciences [ o] only in discussing the advisability of amputation; he attributes the disease to extremes of temperatures and to cold mists, to which the peasants working in the fields were exposed.

The spring of was unusually wet and in the summer of that year great heat and rains alternated. All later French authors agree, however, in regarding this epidemic as also due to ergot.

The second peculiar feature, rare in France, was the description of nervous symptoms in the early stages of the disease. This is characteristic of convulsive ergotism, but no mention is made of other symptoms of that disease, and the spasmodic contractions later gave way to gangrene.

It may be that the nervous symptoms in Flanders were connected with a great mortality of cattle a year or two earlier, mentioned by. Boucher; it may be also that Boucher saw the earlier and milder manifestations of the disease. This was obviously not the case with Salerne, who in described another epidemic in the Sologne; patients began to arrive at Orleans in the middle of August, and among them the mortality was very high.

Of patients, whether operated or no, only five left the hospital. For three to four weeks before death there was generally a severe colic. In cases of recovery from the gangrene the patients remained dull and stupid for the rest of their lives likewise in severe convulsive ergotism this, together with mania and other forms of insanity, was not uncommon.

Delarse and Taranget [] and Read [] described an outbreak of gangrene observed by them in near Arras and Douai. The year was marked by a great outbreak of ergotism in several countries of Europe. Vetillart [] reports that a peasant saw a farmer sifting his grain and begged the rejected portion, consisting largely of ergot.

In the course of a month the man, his wife and two children died; a third, still breast fed, was given a porridge made from the flour; it alone escaped death, but became completely deaf and lost both legs. In , people are said to have died of gangrene within a short time in the Sologne district where, according to Tessier [, iii. In the nineteenth century there were still several well-marked epidemics of gangrenous ergotism in France. The first followed the terrible winter of , which defeated Napoleon in Russia.

It continued in , and , particularly in the Departments of Saone-et-Loire and Allier; these epidemics were described by Bordot [], Francois, Orjollet [], Courhaut [] and Janson []. Gangrene was preceded in many cases by contraction of the limbs and formication. The last epidemic in France was described by Barrier, surgeon of the Hotel-Dieu at Lyons, and occurred in in southern. These epidemics of the nineteenth century yielded to medical treatment and the mortality was not so high as in the eighteenth.

Apart from them only sporadic cases of ergotism were observed. Few epidemics of gangrenous ergotism have been recorded outside France. The best known was in Switzerland in at the same time as a French one ; its notoriety is due to the accuracy of its description by C. Lang, 1 rather than to its severity or extent.

In the canton of Lucerne there were in , in the course of ten weeks, only fifty patients, most of whom suffered no permanent damage; some lost toes or finger, or a foot, a few lost a leg ; only one man died. During a recurrence in there were only ten cases, and these yielded to treatment. In there were observed in Berne only six cases requiring amputation. When we compare these figures with those of Salerne, quoted above, it is evident that the latter, in contrast to Lang, saw only the severest and most advanced cases.

Lang mentioned spasmodic movements " gichterische Bewegungen" in some patients, who did not suffer from gangrene, "either on account of the smaller quantity of poison absorbed or on account of a more robust constitution.

He considered that ergot is toxic only in certain years, when attacked by honey-dew, from which the rye inside the ear is protected. In a few epidemics in Germany and Eastern Europe cases of gangrene have been described, but here the convulsive.

His book on ergot was already rare in the eighteenth century, and is not included in the British Museum -and the national libraries of Berlin, Berne, Munich and Paris ; there are two copies in the library of the University of Basle. The occurrence of gangrenous ergotism among a poor Kabyl population in Algeria, living on ergotised barley, was described as late as by Legrain photograph of gangrenous feet.

There is a commemorative tablet on the church tower. On 10th January two children complained of pains in the calf of the leg; two days later all except the father were attacked. The pain became so violent that the neighbourhood was alarmed by the shrieks of the sufferers, and after about a week one or more legs were " sphacelated.

The father escaped such dire calamity and suffered only from numbness of the hands and loss of finger nails. These cases of " mortification of the limbs" are very typical of severe gangrenous ergotism ; the dry gangrene was rapid in its onset, so that the preliminary symptoms of cold and numbness were absent, or at least not prominent enough for mention, except in the much milder case of the father; apparently the gangrene was not fatal to life.

There was no rye in the neighbourhood but apart from dried pease, pickled pork, bread, cheese, milk and small beer, the family lived on bread from "clog-wheat, or revets, or bearded wheat" Triticum turgiduml which had been laid, was discoloured, and had been kept separate by the farmer. Some other men who had eaten it also suffered from numbness in the hands and a feeling of cold, but the farmer's family who had used this wheat exclusively was not affected.

Its effect must, however, have been reinforced by poverty or some other factor, in the case of the mother and children. Their greater susceptibility is typical of convulsive, rather than of. According to Carbonneaux le Perdriel [] wheat ergot is medicinally more active than that of rye. The Wattisham outbreak was accepted by Tissot [] as undoubtedly one of ergotism, but this unique occurrence still presents many obscure features. In the nineteenth century mild cases of ergotism in Ireland.

The only patient who came to the Dublin hospital was a young man from a farm in Co. Meath who had fed on bread from ergotised rye on marshy ground. In the year the rye crop was particularly bad and scanty in the same year the potato crop failed entirely. This patient had in the following April a cold pricking sensation in his fingers, and cramp in the legs; he lost all nails of both hands and one toe by gangrene. His hair fell out and his pupils were dilated.

He reported that he had also lost his nails three years before, and that a few relatives and neighbours were similarly affected. The disease seems to have been known in the district for a long time; its cause had, however, not been recognised. An even milder but more extensive epidemic of ergotism was reported recently from Manchester by Robertson and Ashby [], and by Morgan [], among Jewish immigrants from Central Europe who lived on rye bread.

These symptoms are characteristic of mild ergotism of the nervous kind. All the patients complained of formication, and all were in the habit of eating bread made from one part of rye meal with four parts of wheaten flour. The epidemic started in October after a wet summer.

The rye was grown in south Yorkshire, had been ground to meal in a stone mill and had probably not been cleaned or screened. It yielded per cent, of ergot by hand-picking, and colorimetric analysis showed per cent, which. Gaddum found later per cent. Something like 5 grams of ergot must have been contained in a half-pound loaf, and in October the alkaloidal content may have been higher than that found by Gaddum. Robertson and Ashby's publication induced Dilling and Kelly to communicate a case of gangrene of symmetrical toes which they had observed in in a patient at Liverpool who ate only rye bread.

In two successive Novembers a toe was amputated. The rye had been grown in Lancashire in , a wet year, and was suspect. The flour was later shown pharmacologically to contain at least o-1 per cent, of ergot. These sporadic cases of ergotism show how little is known about the subject in this country.

English analysts do not seem ta be aware of the many papers published in Germany,. Austria and Russia on the detection and estimation of ergot in flour see Chapter VI. How the ergot content of 1 per cent, was deduced in the Manchester epidemic is by no means clear.

Convulsive ergotism in Germany and Bohemia. As will be shown below, older German writers regarded convulsive ergotism as a variety of this disease. In his Medical Observations [] Dodonaeus attributes scurvy to bad food, particularly to bad rye, such as that imported in from Prussia into Brabant, "when not a few began to suffer from scurvy ; in most the effects of the evil only showed themselves in- the gums.

The first unmistakable description of convulsive ergotism is contained in the Epistolce Medicinales of Balduinus Ronsseus [ I ], a native of Ghent, who became physician to the Duke of Braunschweig-Luneburg and later to the town of Gouda in. The author describes a " new and unheard-of" disease, which broke out in August in many villages of the Duchy of Liineburg Fig. It began with paralysis and convulsions of hands and feet "compressing and bending the fingers to a fist, so that the strongest man could not unbend them.

To Ronsseus the disease was unknown, and he does not mention the word Kriebelkrankheit, so that this epidemic escaped the attention of Taube who begins his detailed historical account with Caspar Schwenckfeld []. This Silesian naturalist, in discussing the magpie, states that its flesh is an excellent remedy against convulsions and spasms, and then mentions a new disease which, some fifteen or ten years previously, had attacked the poor more especially.

The people called the spasm " das Kromme. These details are entirely characteristic, and with the popular German name leave no doubt as to the identity of the disease. It is interesting to note that Schwenckfeld, in another work, had three years previously given one of the first descriptions of ergot itself, and mentioned its styptic properties of course at that time it was not known that honey-dew and ergot are two stages in the life cycle of the same fungus.

Taube assigns the outbreak to the years and , but these dates can only be approximate. The district, on the northern slope of the Riesengebirge, was repeatedly visited in subsequent centuries by the same disease. An epidemic which broke out in the orphanage at Heidelberg in October is less certainly identified ; most modern writers e. Kobert seem not to have consulted the original, for they wrongly attribute it to Zarachias Brendelius; it was, however, in a collection by his namesake Johannes Philippus, that the report was published of the Heidelberg physicians, charged with.

They wrote: , Adfectus iste. The symptoms were therefore not typical of convulsive ergotism, nor would there appear to have been a shortage of vitamin-A. The disease lasted for more than three months; two similar isolated cases were observed at Worms. It seems to me that the Heidelberg outbreak has been wrongly identified as ergotism.

The next epidemic, in Hessen and Westphalia, during and , was one of the most important in the history of the subject, for it led the Marburg medical faculty to publish their famous description and warning in the vernacular, for the benefit of the people [Marburg, ].

The original is now very rare. The Marburg faculty gave the first detailed description of convulsive ergotism. The cries of the sufferers could be heard in villages " beyond the eighth or the tenth house and quite far off in the fields.

The Marburg physicians were in error in considering the disease to be infectious, a belief shared by some later writers, no doubt because often in a family several members were attacked who would naturally live on the same diet. The exact cause of the disease remained as yet unknown and the Marburg faculty merely attributed it to bad food in general. For a long time there were no further precise descriptions of convulsive ergotism.

The disease was often regarded as. Drawitz [] in his Unterricht von schmertz-ntachendem Scharbock was the first to use the name Affectus scorbutico-spasmodicus or scharbockische Kriebelkrankheit; he considered the disease due to bad food in times of scarcity. He still regarded it as infectious. The sufferers often seemed to be bewitched, or possessed by demons; their cries could be heard four or five houses off.

In the Vielvergroster und heller polirter Schorbocks - Spiegel of Horst discusses the question whether convulsive ergotism Kriebelkrankheit has anything in common with scurvy. Sennertus, in his book De Febribus, speaks of the Kriebelkrankheit as febris maligna cum spasmo " malignant fever with the cramp," as the English edition of has it. New outbreaks occurred in Vogtland the south-west corner of Saxony in and after the Thirty Years' War and in Leisner, F.

In and the disease occurred in Westphalia Barbeck, May. In France ergot was identified as the cause of gangrene by Dodart in Brunner in , a century after accurate descriptions of the Kriebelkrankheit had been available.

He discusses the effects of darnel and of certain black grains in the rye, known locally as Martinskorn, of which he learned with surprise that the natives believed them to cause convulsions. Brunner was even more surprised to learn that the black grains also caused fatal gangrene. He saw a woman who suffered from daily recurring convulsions; her fingers were as if burnt at the tips, rigid, indurated, devoid of sensation and of movement.

On questioning a surgeon he was told that rye was the cause; this surgeon had amputated one of her feet which had become gangrenous from the same cause. Brunner thus saw both kinds of ergotism in the same patient. Wepfer, in , observed a single case of « Kriebelsucht" with violent convulsions, and. This, like Brunner's cases, came from the Harz Mountains, where in one village there were patients. The poor did not separate these grains from sound corn, as was usual among the well-to-do.

About this time there are other less precise references to ergotism; Ramazzini attributed an epidemic of in Lombardy to rubigo rust , Hoyer one of near Miilhausen to honey-dew, which he considered identical with rubigo.

Hoyer did not connect the epidemic with ergot, although he stated that in there was more " Mutterkorn " in Thuringia than had been observed in living memory see also Sydenham. Later writers Hoffmann, Taube, p. Lang; Scheuchzer also blamed ergot. The disease reappeared in a mild form in Switzerland in , and in this and the following year an outbreak of the purely convulsive type occurred both in Holstein and in Saxony, giving rise to numerous publications nearly a dozen in The Holstein "peasants'disease" was described in the Breslauer Sammlung and in a dissertation under Waldtschmiedt; although they refer to ergot as the cause of gangrene, these two accounts do not attribute the convulsive disease to it, but rather to a peculiar constituent of the air.

Nevertheless most authors did not incriminate ergot; Longolius, for instance, attributed the disease to honey-dew. Budseus indeed regarded ergot as the primary cause, but honey-dew, poisonous vegetables and fungi as contributory; two-thirds of his book was devoted to promoting the sale of his own remedies, based on the prescriptions of the Marburg faculty years before. The Saxon epidemic was also dealt with by Wedel and by Wilisch. The latter writes of the " rare disease " of which few have heard and still fewer have seen anything.

Severe cases differed only from true epilepsy in that the patients were conscious. About this time some cases in St Annaberg in Saxony led to much controversy, as is reflected in such a title as Opisthotonus dcemoniacus deluce-datus et defensus. Arnold in his translation [] of Bishop Hutchinson's Historical Essay on Witchcraft, discusses this controversy at length.

Later in the eighteenth century the help of the clergy was enlisted in teaching the people the harmful effects of ergot. After the many publications due to the epidemic of "the pens of the learned rested until ," when in a dissertation under Christian Vater the Silesian disease was again described and the harmful effects of ergot were insisted on.

Poultry died from eating it; pregnant sows aborted; horses and cattle became ill; flies were killed after feeding on an infusion of ergot in milk. In and in the spring of outbreaks occurred in Pommerania north of Stettin, and in the Prignitz district, north-east of Wittenberg [Muller and Glockengiesser in Acta medicoruni Berolinensium, for ; Ludolff, ]. Ergot was fully recognised as the cause, and the Prussian Government exchanged the bad rye for sound grain.

Nevertheless Burghart questioned the poisonous nature of ergot in the next epidemic [, at the foot of the Sudeten Mountains, in Silesia]. The disease also occurred on the other side of this range, in northern Bohemia, where it was carefully described by J.

Out of patients more than died between September and March About three-fifths of the patients were under 15 years of age. Two houses died out completely. The poor suffered from a very great and indescribable famine; only one of the well-to-do was attacked, and he also had ergot among his corn. There was not a single case in the town of Niemes, where the bread was of good quality. The people. He considered that the toxicity of the latter was due to ergot and in part also to Bromus secalinus " Trespe " ; see also p.

Henceforth convulsive ergotism became well known in [Germany, and the celebrated Friedrich Hoffmann of Halle jcollected most of the available knowledge in his Medicina jrationalis systematica [], although he did not himself observe any cases.

There are several descriptions: a dissertation by Miiller under von Bergen; an account by Briickmann who reported that in one village persons were attacked, of whom 40 died between September and April ; most of the patients were children; two cases of cataract were observed; there was also much ergotised barley.

Hoffmeyer's account is interesting because of his conversation with a patient suffering from delusional insanity [March ].

The winter of had been excessively cold and the following spring was very wet. According to him the urban population eat the same rye as the rural, yet did not suffer. The next record related to a small epidemic near Potsdam which Cothenius ascribed to ergot; even the spirit made.

In , when gangrenous ergotism was observed in France, the convulsive type appeared extensively in northern Germany, Holstein and Sweden. He indeed published a preliminary note in , but his magnum opus of pages appeared in Fig. In the first pages he abstracts nearly all German writers on the subject, and gives his own careful description of the disease, together with what was then known about ergot.

The bulk of the work is taken up by numerous detailed reports on patients in hospital, and the last pages form an appendix, consisting of eight accounts by neighbouring colleagues.

Taube mentions that the winter of was not continuously severe ; the spring was late, in June there was much cold and mist, particularly during the flowering of the rye, and then after heavy rains, followed a period of great heat and drought; much honey-dew was observed and was not washed off by rain, but dried up and harvested ; even long before the harvest fears of disease were expressed. Taube states that the peasants in his district Celle, 25 miles north of Hanover were in the habit of collecting the so-called Knimmelkorn which falls out of the ears in harvesting, and baking bread from this before threshing the main harvest, partly from curiosity, partly from necessity.

Since the larger grains of ergot fall out readily, Krummelkorn is particularly rich in ergot, and several days after the new bread had been eaten the disease appeared; on 29th August , Taube was called to his first four patients, two of whom soon died. Many more cases occurred in September and October and were often rapidly fatal; later, the disease took a less rapid course.

Early in December a few cases occurred in the town of Celle as a result of importation of rye from some of the affected villages. As was generally observed in previous epidemics, only particular villages were attacked; in February. The Hanoverian Government, acting on medical advice, gave warning to millers and bakers, and exchanged ergotised rye for sound grain in the villages, so that many patients recovered in the course of a week ; yet others could not be convinced that the rye was poisonous and preferred to "eat death in their own harvest" rather than accept the exchange.

Later, when the Government supplies gave out, absolute necessity caused a recrudescence of the disease in the spring of ; the last deaths occurred in September of that year.

Taube gives a statistic of cases from Celle and some forty villages. Of patients who remained at home 91 died; of 95 patients removed to hospitals only 6 died, so that treatment was effective emetics, purgatives, and better food!

Shocks from a frictional electrical machine were tried extensively, but seem to have been useless. Of 91 dead, 56 were males, 35 females; 41 were between 2 and ro years of age. Taube records several cases of insanity, and of cataract, but observed no gangrene of whole parts. He, however, figures a unique case in which the dried skin of fingers and toes was cast off in one piece. Hensler of Altona, in an appendix to Taube's treatise, gives a graphic picture of the misery of the peasants.

In all respects this is one of the severest plagues of the agricultural labourer. The misery of a labourer's family may be imagined, when some children lie in spasms on the floor and others cry for bread, while their parents are and long will be unable to help.

Few scenes are more poignant. Next in importance after Taube's book, is the account by his friend and colleague Wichmann, of the same epidemic near Celle. He distinguishes three stages of the disease, and gives interesting information as to the diet of the peasants. The widespread interest taken in convulsive ergotism at that time is proved by a collection of nineteen reports from physicians all over Schleswig-Holstein to the Konigl.

The Royal College of Physicians of that town in. This author ate, in the course of three days, bread containing a pound of darnel seeds and recovered, after taking an emetic, which hardly proved his contention that darnel was the cause of the Kriebelkrankheit. Griiner in a preface to this pamphlet writes: " Wofern meine Stimme et was vermag, kann ich nicht umhin, die Unschad-lichkeit des Mutterkorns aus Erfahrung zu vertheidigen.

The great diminution of ergotism after is due to various causes. In the first place the cleaning of the grain became general, partly through Governmental action.

For examples. Further, owing to improvements in agriculture, particularly by drainage, ergot became less common. Another important factor, as Hecker points out, was the great increase in the cultivation of the potato, much stimulated by Frederick the Great. According to Hecker it already had an influence on the Silesian campaign during the Seven Years' War. The great extension of potato growing, however, only resulted in Germany from the famine of , when the advantage of a subsidiary food supply became evident in certain villages.

In the south maize later fulfilled the same function Meier. Sporadic German cases from are most fully dealt with by Lorinser pp. In the latter year, which was very wet, the rye harvest in some parts of lower Silesia contained over one-third of ergot.

It is related that the father of a family separated the ergot from several bushels of rye, but later, persuaded by his wife, added it all again to the first bushel to be milled.

Thus the percentage of ergot in the flour was multiplied, and within six days the father and three children died; the mother alone survived. A more extensive outbreak occurred in and , in a swampy district of the Nieder Lausitz in Saxony ; the descriptions of this outbreak by Wagner, a local physician, and by his nephew and namesake, are among the most useful in the literature.

An epidemic of , in Upper Hessen, was described and illustrated by Heusinger. The numerous other publications of the time are mainly of interest, because they show that even at this late period the belief in the poisonous qualities of ergot was far from universal. Indeed, temporarily the defenders of ergot were in the majority.

Taube devotes a special section to them. Foremost among these was Schleger [], professor at Cassel, who attempted to prove the harmless nature of ergot by animal experiments, as did Model by chemical ones. When Nebel of Giessen described the epidemic in Hessen and gave very good evidence that ergot was the cause of the Kriebelkrankheit, Schleger [] replied, without adducing additional experiments; in any case his doses of ergot were far too small.

Nebel's retort was virulent; inter alia he attacked his opponent's Latinity! Baldinger Jena also wrote against Schleger and translated Nebel's first paper into German, providing it with a preface of its own. Vogel Gottingen defended ergot in his Schutzschrift fur das Mutterkorn als einer angeblichen Ursache der sogenannt. Kriebelkrankheit [], but next year, in his textbook of medicine, he was more cautious. With the exception of Nebel, none of these polemical writers appear to have seen many cases, but others who had to deal with local epidemics Brawe of Verden, near Bremen, Herrmann in Hessen, Marcard of Stade near Hamburg failed to recognise ergot as the cause.

I have not seen the writings of Miicke, who observed the disease at Werningerode in the Harz Mountains, of Weickart who saw it near Fulda, of Smieder and of Richter. Long after the epidemic of Lentin of Gottingen remained in doubt as to the effects of ergot, which he considered innocuous unless honey-dew descended on it.

He even gives the peculiar advice to wash such contaminated ergot with dilute potash and then to feed it to cattle. Ergot itself could not be harmful since it was merely a stick of corn sap dried in the air! The inability of many physicians of this time to see in ergot the cause of a disease is no less remarkable than the persistence of the peasants in eating bread made from ergotised rye.

After the great epidemic of the harm done by ergot became generally recognised, although as late as there appeared a. He records cases with 12 deaths 11 children and 1 adult. Jahrmaerker traced the records of many patients and examined a few survivors as late as Of Heusinger's cases at least 19 ultimately died of ergotism ; of 35 children under 10 years of age 18 died. At least half the patients never recovered completely.

The year produced sporadic fatal cases in Bohemia, described in considerable detail by Hussa. In several cases from East Prussia in the hospital at Konigsberg came to the notice of von Leyden who afterwards dealt with them somewhat briefly in his textbook of diseases of the spinal cord. The same year with a cold spring after a mild winter produced two other small outbreaks in Germany. Flinzer observed one on a farm near Annaberg in Saxony; he picked out 10 to 12 per cent, of ergot from a rye of which three parts had been mixed with one each of oats and barley ; the meal must therefore have contained at least 6 to 7 per cent, of ergot.

The bread baked from this was almost black, and had a sweetish, not unpleasant taste. The bread was eaten only from 6th to nth October; on the 10th a boy of sixteen became ill; he died next day. Jump to Page. Search inside document.

Hofman Hofmann. Regina Lawson. Mennatallah M. Salah El Din. Daria Schka. Saraswati Wulandari Hartono. Bryan Gavilan. Scribd Government Docs. Pace Ajja. Myla Riza Sintones Nepomuceno. Anand Kumar Panduragan. Issues in Toxicology No. Diana Lizeth Cabrera Rojas. Pamela Davis. Nemaraj Raj. Bastiaan Achternaam. Popular in Belief.

Sonakshi Gupta. Mike Jacson D. Kevin Brennan MP. Atang-Wabone Malik. Catherine Sosa Morales. Girish Sharma.

Rashida Naing Edding. Javer Borngo. David Judge. Sudeesh Menon. Maryann Mojica Gonzales. Malik Muhammad Ali.