The Album That Arrived From Vienna
The Bureau’s Central European desk has spent the spring with a photographic album that arrived unasked from an address in the ninth district of Vienna. It holds forty-one mounted plates, each captioned in pencil on the mount, and a covering letter of eleven pages. Our correspondent signs himself only as the Custodian of the Forty-Second Plate. The album, he writes, documents the Unexplained Worldwide Laughter Epidemic of 1925 and 1926: a compulsion that took hold without warning in a small village in Europe, crossed the world inside a year, and was gone by the following Christmas. Sufferers laughed for hours, and in some cases for days. The laughter was not joy. It was a physical compulsion, and it left those it took exhausted, dehydrated and bewildered. He names three theatres of the outbreak — a market square in India, a school in Japan, a factory in the United States — and offers no fourth.
The Bureau prints the substance of the album below and sets it against the record, as is its practice. It should be said at the outset that the difficulty is not the laughing. Compulsive, exhausting, contagious laughter in a crowd is a real thing that has really happened, that has been counted school by school, and that was in a medical journal inside eighteen months of starting. The Bureau has read that paper. The difficulty is the word worldwide, and, immediately behind it, the word 1925.
The Village That Cannot Be Named
The first question the Bureau put to Vienna was the smallest one available: which village. The answer came back that the village had asked not to be named. Asked in which country the village lay, the correspondent replied that the question was less simple than the Bureau supposes.
It is not, in fact, less simple. An outbreak of this kind has a doorstep, and the doorstep is invariably the best-recorded thing about it. The dancing plague of 1518 began when Frau Troffea stepped into the narrow cobbled street outside her own half-timbered house in Strasbourg on 14 July and danced without music for a week, stopping only to sleep and then going on again; within days more than thirty had joined her, and by August somewhere between fifty and four hundred of the city’s people were dancing. At Salem Village in February 1692 it was Betty Parris, aged nine, and her cousin Abigail Williams, aged eleven, in the minister’s own house; the doctor examined them and could find no physical evidence of any ailment, and John Hale, the minister at Beverly, the next town along, set the fits down as beyond the power of epileptic fits or natural disease to effect. More than two hundred people were accused on the strength of it and nineteen went to the gallows, and years later several of the accusers, mostly teenage girls, admitted they had made the whole thing up.
That is what the record does with an outbreak. It keeps the name, the house and the day. It also keeps the bill: Strasbourg’s council refurbished guild halls for the afflicted, tried the remedy of more dancing, then reversed itself, banned music in public and packed the dancers off to a shrine of Saint Vitus in red shoes sprinkled with holy water. A mania that goes through a town leaves an invoice behind it. The correspondent’s leaves a pencilled caption.
What a Laughter Epidemic Actually Does
There is one thing in the album the Bureau would very much like to be true, and the reason is that something extremely close to it happened. On 30 January 1962, at a mission-run boarding school for girls at Kashasha, on the western shore of Lake Victoria, pupils began to laugh and could not stop. Ninety-five of the school’s hundred and fifty-nine pupils were affected, all of them between twelve and eighteen. It was not merriment: laughing and crying together, restlessness, pain, fainting, difficulty breathing, rashes. Attacks ran from a few hours to sixteen days and averaged about seven. The staff were untouched throughout. The school shut on 18 March after some forty-eight days, reopened on 21 May, and fifty-seven more girls went down at once.
Then it moved. To Nshamba, a village fifty-five miles west of Bukoba, where two hundred and seventeen people were affected across thirty-four days in the spring; to Ramashenye girls’ middle school in June, where forty-eight girls were affected. In the end fourteen schools closed, about a thousand people were affected, and the whole thing burned out eighteen months after it began. Rankin and Philip published it in the Central African Journal of Medicine in 1963: four pages, indexed to this day under the subject headings hysteria and laughter.
Note the shape. Every case fell inside a hundred-mile radius of Bukoba, and a hundred miles is not an epidemiological constant. It is the length of the roads the pupils of those schools went home along. That is the geometry of the thing, and it is not incidental to it.
The Bulletin That Went Out on a Friday
The rule is stated plainly in the clinical literature. Among the eight features of a mass sociogenic outbreak — no plausible organic basis, transient and benign symptoms, rapid onset and recovery, a segregated group, extraordinary anxiety, a spread down the age scale, a preponderance of women and girls — the sixth is the one that governs a map: the symptoms spread via sight, sound or oral communication. Not by water, not by rat, not by ship. By being in the room. A thing that travels only as far as people can see and hear one another does not arrive in a market square in India, a school in Japan and a factory in the United States in the same season, because nothing carries it there.
Where a channel does exist, it shows. Between 21 March and 3 April 1983, nine hundred and forty-three people were admitted to hospital, seventy-seven per cent of them adolescent girls: thirty-two at Arraba, where trace hydrogen sulfide from a faulty latrine seems to have started it, fifty-seven at a school in Jenin, thirty-seven at Tulkarem, three hundred and ten at Hebron. The channel that carried it that far and that fast was the newspapers, and the amplification is documented.
Which brings the Bureau to the awkward part. The correspondent has chosen, of all decades, the one in which the world first acquired a machine for noticing exactly this. In 1925 the League of Nations Health Organisation opened its Eastern Bureau at Singapore and began collecting epidemiological intelligence from the ports. It broadcast a bulletin free of charge once a week, normally on a Friday, by wireless from the French station at Saigon and the Dutch station at Malabar on Java. It was in touch with sixty-six ports in 1926 and with a hundred and thirty-five, in fifty states and territories, by 1931. Its founding members included India and Japan.
The Record of Outbreaks, With the Claim Set In It
Every mass compulsion the Bureau can put a date to, and the two years the correspondent has placed his between.
Strasbourg. Frau Troffea dances alone in her own street on the 14th; by August between 50 and 400 citizens are dancing, and the council is paying for halls to put them in.
Salem Village. Two girls, aged nine and eleven, begin to fit. The doctor finds nothing. More than two hundred are accused; nineteen hang.
Encephalitis lethargica. Over a million cases, more than half a million dead, and no established cause to this day.
Influenza. About 500 million infected — close to a third of the human race — across four waves.
The correspondent’s epidemic. No village, no date, no physician, no admission, no death, no Friday bulletin.
Kashasha. 95 of 159 pupils; then Nshamba, then Ramashenye. Fourteen schools, about a thousand people, eighteen months, and every case inside a hundred miles.
Rankin and Philip publish the Kashasha outbreak in the Central African Journal of Medicine. Four pages, and in print while the epidemic still had months to run.
The West Bank. 943 admitted to hospital in a fortnight; the UN Security Council calls for an investigation on 4 April, and an American team reports before the month is out.
Mumbai. The first laughter club: a physician, his wife and three friends, in a public park.
The Decade Already Had Its Epidemic
The Bureau now sets down the objection it considers decisive, and does so with some reluctance, because it is not a matter of arithmetic but of proportion. The correspondent asks us to believe that the years 1925 and 1926 held a global epidemic that medicine could not explain. They did. He has simply not noticed it.
Encephalitis lethargica ran from about 1915 to 1927 and was recognised as a distinct disease in 1917. More than a million people contracted it and it killed more than half a million outright. It came with high fever, headache, double vision, an inverted sleep, a slowing of every physical and mental response, and in the worst cases a catatonia so complete the patient could neither move nor speak. Those who survived it very often did not recover; they went on into a post-encephalitic parkinsonism, and it was that population Oliver Sacks found still in institutions and described in Awakenings. Its cause has never been established. It is, on any reading, the unexplained epidemic of the correspondent’s decade.
It was described by Constantin von Economo, an Austrian neurologist who spent his working life at the Clinic for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases at Vienna’s General Hospital, in a paper published in 1917. The disease still carries his name. The Bureau observes without further comment that our correspondent writes from Vienna, that his eleven pages address the mystery of a worldwide nervous affliction of the mid-nineteen-twenties, and that von Economo’s name appears in them nowhere.
Nor does the other one. The influenza of 1918 to 1920 infected something near five hundred million people, close to a third of everyone then alive, and killed between twenty-five and fifty million of them in four waves. Even that pandemic’s name is a fact about record-keeping: it is called Spanish because Spain was neutral and its newspapers were free to print what the belligerents were censoring. An epidemic of that decade could be lied about. It could not be kept quiet.
The Muscle That Gives It Away
In fairness to Vienna, the central assertion of the file is medically respectable. Laughter without mirth exists. A gelastic seizure is a sudden burst of laughing that is not amusement at all, classically arising from a hypothalamic hamartoma, usually declaring itself before the age of three or four, and the sound of it may be unpleasant and sardonic rather than joyful. The correspondent’s phrase — a compulsion, not a pleasure — describes something real. It describes something real that lasts under a minute, that happens in one person’s own hypothalamus and temporal lobe, and that is not in the smallest degree catching.
That leaves the plates, and the plates will bear one test. A smile of genuine enjoyment runs on two muscles: the zygomatic major, which pulls up the corners of the mouth, and the orbicularis oculi, which lifts the cheek and gathers the crow’s foot at the outer corner of the eye. The counterfeit, the courtesy smile, is precisely the one in which only the mouth is doing the work. The Bureau’s picture desk went through all forty-one mounts with a glass, and reports that on every laughing face in the album the eyes are gathered. Whatever these people were doing, they were enjoying it thoroughly. The file insists the laughter was not joy. The photographs say otherwise, and they say it with the muscle the courtesy smile never troubles.
The desk adds a second note. A body in its sixth hour of convulsive laughter does not hold a pose for a plate camera. Not one of the forty-one plates is blurred.
Nineteen Twenty-Six Had a Mania, and It Had a Composer
The album closes on what the correspondent calls the aftermath: laughter clubs, formed by survivors, in which the afflicted met to recall what had happened to them. The Bureau went looking. The laughter club is a real institution with a precise beginning — Mumbai, 1995, where a family physician named Madan Kataria, his wife Madhuri and three friends began meeting in a public park. Five people. That is sixty-nine years after the aftermath they are offered as the aftermath of, on a different continent, for entirely unrelated reasons.
The decade did have its compulsion, and the Bureau records it here because the correspondent has left it out. The Charleston took hold on a 1923 tune by James P. Johnson, written for the Broadway show Runnin’ Wild, which opened on 28 October 1923 and closed on 28 June 1924. The dance reached its peak between the middle of 1926 and 1927 — the back half of the correspondent’s own window, to the season. It subsided after 1930, and the reason offered is the flattest imaginable: the new floor-length sheath evening dresses constricted the legs and would not take the step.
That is what a genuine craze of the nineteen-twenties looks like from the archive. It has a composer, a copyright, a theatre with an opening night and a closing night, a peak that can be dated to the half-year, and a decline explained by hemlines. It is the best-documented outbreak of helpless rhythmic behaviour in the whole period, it convulsed the same two years, and it does not appear anywhere in the forty-one plates.
What the Bureau Is Able to Certify
The Bureau is able to certify that crowds have laughed until they were ill; that a girls’ school at Kashasha lost ninety-five of its hundred and fifty-nine pupils to it and fourteen schools shut; that Strasbourg danced in the summer of 1518 and the council paid for the halls; that laughter can arrive as a compulsion with no pleasure in it whatever; and that a decade can carry an epidemic nobody has explained to this day, because the correspondent’s decade carried one and it is called von Economo’s disease. It is not able to certify that any of these things is the thing in the album, or that the thing in the album took place in 1925, or in Europe, or at all.
We wrote once more to Vienna and asked for the forty-second plate. The reply came within the week, and the Bureau prints it as received. The forty-second plate is not a plate. It is the two years themselves, in which everybody then alive was laughing and nobody thought it worth remarking on, which is precisely why no physician recorded it, no bulletin carried it and no newspaper printed a line. He adds that the village has since emptied, that we should find nothing there in any case, and that this too is worth considering.
The Bureau has considered it.
