October 18, 2018 • 51 mins
Vampire legends are a global phenomenon, and the trope of the blood-sucking humanoid shows no signs of vanishing from human traditions. But can we trace its origins back to any specific diseases and medical symptoms? In this blood-stained episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick haul up the vampire’s casket and look for signs of rabies, syphilis, dermatitis, tuberculosis and more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and welcome back for Part two of the Vampire Clinic.
We are going to be spending today exploring the second
(00:24):
part of our investigation into the link between medical conditions
and the inspiration of vampire legends and vampire lore. If
you haven't heard part one yet, you should go back
and listen to that first. We lay a lot of
groundwork there. We explore some interesting conditions in cases that
may or may not apply to varying degrees to the
vampire legend. But we wanted to continue our exploration today,
(00:47):
so let's open the clinic and allow the waiting room
to fill up with potential vampires. All right, let's let's
get these patients sorted out. Last time, who do we talk?
We talked about rabies, we talked about syphilis, We talk
talked about porphyria, conditions which we ultimately concluded were not
a good inspiration for the vampire legend. It was actually
kind of a case of the media running with something
(01:09):
that was actually a pretty tenuous link So so who
do we have to kick off the episode with today? What? What?
What is our next patient consist of? Well, I think
today we should start with a condition that has extremely
clear links to folk vampire beliefs, something that's way less
iffy than the conditions we've talked about before, and that
is going to be tuberculosis. So this is going to
(01:31):
be one that may not account for all cases or
for the ultimate origins of vampire beliefs, but it quite
clearly accounts for some of them. There's very good evidence
that at least in some cases, vampire beliefs were linked
to tuberculosis and not just inspired by tuberculosis, like they
saw somebody who had tuberculosis and thought that's a vampire,
(01:52):
but they were consciously associated with the disease, if that
makes sense. So tuberculosis is, first of all, a bacterial
infection that primarily infects the lungs, and it's spread by
way of airsolized droplets that get dispersed through the air
when an infected person coughs or sneezes. Tuberculosis or t
B is contagious, but it's known primarily for spreading among
(02:14):
people who are sharing close living conditions. And though TB
usually attacks the lungs, it can also infect other parts
of the body, including everything from the kidneys to the
spine to the brain. The bacterium that causes it is
micro Bacterium tuberculosis. And one of the crucial things is
that not everybody who has TV shows symptoms. There's what's
(02:36):
known as latent TV, in which you are infected with
the bacterium, but symptoms haven't appeared yet. And we mentioned
in the last episode how diseases that have latency periods,
one of which can be some types of syphilis, infection
um get that can very easily lend itself to supernatural interpretations, right,
because it becomes even less clear what the link between
(02:59):
you getting the disease and having the symptoms is, right,
it becomes this this hidden force. And so I want
to look at a paper from the American Journal of
Physical Anthropology that documents one specific case showing a link
between tuberculosis and vampire beliefs. And the papers by Paul S.
Sled Zick and Nicholas Belotoni called Bioarchaeological and Biocultural Evidence
(03:23):
for the New England Vampire folk belief from nineteen ninety
four So the modern pop culture vampire is, as we've
been talking about, somewhat different from the eighteenth century euro
American folk belief in vampires. One thing is that eighteenth
century European peasants often thought they could look at an
unearthed corpse and tell whether or not it was a vampire.
(03:46):
So a vampire would have maybe a bloated chest, long fingernails,
and and what looked like fresh blood draining away from
the mouth. And if people exhumed a corpse and they
they found a quote vampire in this state, it was
assumed that this was because it had it had been
leaving its grave to drain life from the living. Now,
vampires were associated with and blamed for all kinds of
(04:09):
epidemic diseases. Uh, And if people in an area became
sick and started wasting away and dying, it was because
there was a vampire preying on them. And you know,
so when we're thinking about where to locate these these
sort of folk villager beliefs and vampires, we very often
turned to like eighteenth and nineteenth century Eastern Europe, as
we talked about in the last episode, that was a
(04:31):
time and place where vampire beliefs were rampant, but they
were also pretty common in nineteenth century New England. You
could go to parts of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island
in the eighteen hundreds and find people with diseases who
believed they were being preyed on by vampires. And a
lot of those beliefs are deeply bound up with tuberculosis infection.
(04:52):
So the author's right quote, following the death of a
family member from consumption and that's another word for tuberculosis,
other family members began to show signs of tuberculosis infection.
According to the New England folk belief, the wasting away
of these family members was attributed to the recently deceased
consumptive who returned from the dead as a vampire to
(05:14):
drain the life from the surviving relatives. The apotropaic remedy,
and that means apotropaic magic. It means like warding off evil,
you know, to repel evil magic. The apotropaic remedy used
to kill the vampire was to exhume the body of
the supposed vampire and if the body was undecomposed, remove
(05:34):
and burn the blood filled heart or the entire body.
So in this case we're looking at an illness that
is um it's basically providing a script for the victim
more so than the the monster itself. Yeah, exactly. I
mean it is an illness that creates conditions for people
to think I am being preyed on by a vampire,
(05:56):
or my family members are being preyed on by a vampire,
and we've got to do something. We've got to you know,
Jeff died last week. We're pretty sure it's him. We
got to dig up his corpse and do something about it.
Got to apply the apotropaic remedy, which would mean take
out the heart, check and see if it's full of blood.
If it is, it's obviously because he's a vampire and
he's been drinking my blood, and you've got to burn
(06:18):
the heart. Yeah, maybe just go and burn the heart anyway,
because you've come this far. Well. As we mentioned in
the last episode, it seems that it was very common
to dig up a corpse wondering if the corpse was
a vampire and discover yes, it was a vampire. Yeah. Yeah,
you don't want to be the one to have to
go back and say, look, Jeff was okay, he was fine.
After we violated his grave and removed his heart. We
(06:41):
just we just stuffed it right back in there. I
think it's it's basically basically, we reinstalled it. His corps
is good to go, no harm, no foul. It's a
factory REFERB REFERB corpse. Uh So the paper, this paper,
in particular, it explores the impact of this set of
beliefs I just described on the bio archical logical record,
which means the study of skeletal remains through one fascinating
(07:04):
example in particular, so in November nineteen in the town
of Grizzwald, Connecticut, which I just have to report every
time I typed when making notes for this episode, I
typed Grizzworld. I'm just unable to type grizz Wald, and
I don't know why. But in in grizz World, a
privately owned sand and gravel business discovered an abandoned eighteenth
(07:28):
to nineteenth century cemetery was eroding into their work site, right,
So their quarrying out sand and gravel, and then there's
this old abandoned cemetery just sort of eroding into their workspaces.
That's kind of putting the blame on the cemetery. It's
just like that like this, this uh, this sacred burial
ground is really infringing on our business here, when I
(07:49):
think it's more arguably the other way around. Well, I
don't know for sure, but from the way it was
written about, I tend to assume that the people operating
the quarry did not know that they were digging into cemetery. Yeah,
still the ghost don't care well. So the original cemetery,
because it was a roading, could not be salvaged where
it was, so the skeletons had to be removed and
(08:12):
relocated elsewhere. So all in all, the Forgotten Graveyard contained
the skeletal remains of twenty nine people. There were six
adult men, aid adult women in fifteen subadults, and the
researchers were able to determine through land deeds that the
area had been used as a family graveyard since the
middle of the eighteenth century by the Walton family, who
(08:33):
had moved to Grizz World from Rhode Island in sixteen nine.
Hence it was known as the Walton Cemetery. So when
they looked at the skeletons, one of the first things
they saw is okay, the remains clearly indicated that the
people buried here led lives of hard physical labor. These
were hard working people. One skeleton in particular caught the
attention of the archaeologists, the remains of a fifty to
(08:56):
fifty five year old male in a coffin within a
stone line grave. They were on the lid of the coffin.
There was a pattern of tacks shoved into the lid
that spelled JB. Presumably this was the man's initials and
the age at which he died. Now inside the coffin,
things got weirder. Instead of the bones lying in the
(09:19):
normal arrangement you would see of a dead body, you know,
like you know, flat with like skull connecting to neck
and everything JB's skull and his fhemera meaning it's you know,
his thigh bones, uh, his femurs. They were on top
of everything else in a skull and crossbones pattern. And
then underneath the ribs in the vertebrae were also scattered
(09:42):
out of their natural positions. Beyond that, there were periostitic
lesions on the left, second, third, and fourth ribs, and
these would be lesions consistent with what could be caused
by pulmonary tuberculosis or at the very least a condition
that people in the nineteenth century probably would have confused
with tuberculosis. Something uh consisting of violent coughing fits powerful
(10:04):
enough to cause lesions on the membrane surrounding the rib bones.
So we have evidence of death by pulmonary tuberculosis or
some other pulmonary disease that would have looked like tuberculosis,
and the crazy rearrangement of the bones and the coffin.
So what's going on. At the time of this paper,
there were twelve known historical accounts of vampire belief based
(10:27):
activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth century New England. I've
included a chart that we can look at, but in
at least eleven of the twelve cases, the cause of
death for the supposed vampire was consumption, meaning tuberculosis. So
there's a clear link between this one particular disease and
vampire attacks. Now, the authors indicated that the New England
(10:51):
vampire myth is strongly based in the physical realities of tuberculosis,
both in how tuberculosis symptoms appear and and how the
disease is transmitted. So tuberculosis was known as consumption because
it gave the the appearance of a person wasting away,
essentially being slowly drained of life and vitality, while at
(11:12):
the same time remaining conscious and retaining this desire to
survive and the author's right quote. This dichotomy of desire
and wasting away is reflected in the vampire folk belief
the vampire's desire for quote food forces it to feed
off of living relatives who suffer a similar wasting away
a lot, and in vampire legends you often see a
(11:35):
lot of these kind of intentional ironies and uh and juxtapositions,
you know, the contradictions of like having this otherworldly appetite
while at the same time appearing gaunt or to to
waste away in the body. You Know, this does bring
me back to brown Stoker's Dracula, because I feel like
this is an aspect of the vampire legend that is
(11:57):
well represented in that. You know, It's like someone is
wasting way and what is the cause? Clearly something is
coming uh into their room in the night, and is
the the supernatural cause of this consumption? Right with's it's
there in Dracula when for example, Lucy has to keep
receiving blood transfusions, right, they all these people keep giving
her blood because it's like something is making her anemic
(12:18):
and draining her life away and they don't see what
it is. But anyway, so in these historical accounts of
New England vampires, what generally happens is you've got family
members all living huddled together in close quarters. One member
of the family gets infected with tuberculosis and dies. Then
just before or soon after that family member dies, another
(12:39):
becomes infected with tuberculosis, which is interpreted as the one
who just died draining the second patient's life in order
to survive. And of course tuberculosis is well known for
the ease with which it's transmitted between people living in closer,
crowded quarters, which would have been common for farmers in
rural nineteenth century New England. Uh. The author's note also
(13:00):
that there there would be seasonal lulls and nutrition and
constant unsanitary conditions, which would of course just make things worse. Yeah,
I can only imagine. And the author's right quote. Although
there is no evidence of tuberculosis in the remaining Walton
Cemetery skeletons, and eighteen o one narrative of Griswold History
indicates that during the twenty five years preceding the account,
(13:22):
consumptions had proved to be mortal to a number. So, okay,
let's say half your family they've got consumption, and you
think it's because the one of you who just died
is a vampire. What do you do to stop it? Well,
you have to go out and kill the vampire. So
in eighteenth and nineteenth century New England, the contemporaneous accounts
indicate you would do this as follows. First you've got
(13:44):
to dig up the body. Then you check and see
is their blood in the heart, And if there's blood
in the heart, you've got to burn the heart. Many
accounts of the time seemed to indicate that when people
dug up bodies for this reason, they just generally found
the body undecomposed with blood in the heart, so they'd
find what they were looking for. And the reason dead
bodies often had these appearances is normal, and it's due
(14:06):
to post mortem decomposition. There's a book called Vampires, Burial
and Death, Folklore and Reality by an author named Barbera
that gets cited a lot on this account about how
people would mistake and naturally uh the natural effects of
post mortem decomposition for stuff that indicated a dead body
was still alive and feeding, like the you know, the
(14:26):
bloating and the blood running from the mouth and all that,
or that prominent genitalia. Oh yeah, from the from the
rabies case. Right, Okay, So what about JB. Back to
j B who had his his bones arranged in the
Skull and Crossbones, Well, the evidence indicates that when his
family members dug him up, he was already decomposed. There
was not any soft tissue left on his bones. So
(14:49):
what do you do You think JB is the vampire
that's draining your family members of life. You dig him up,
there's no soft tissue, there's no heart to burn. So
the authors have a hypothesis of apparently the alternative to
burning the heart if there's no heart left is to
rearrange the bones and to place the skull in an
apotropaic symbol. The skull and crossbones and the author's right quote.
(15:12):
In support of this hypothesis, we note that decapitation was
a common European method of dispatching a dead vampire, and
that the Celts and the Neolithic Egyptians were known to
separate the head from the body supposedly to prevent the
dead from doing harm. And on top of that, the
authors provide some documentary evidence in the form of newspaper
articles showing that vampire beliefs were to be found in
(15:34):
the vicinity of Griswold, Connecticut in the middle of the
nineteenth century. There's a story from an eighteen fifty four
issue of the Norwich Courier about an incident near in
nearby Jewitt City in which consumption had killed a man
named Horace Ray and three of his sons, and then
several of their dead bodies were exhumed and burned in
order to stop them from feeding on other members of
(15:56):
the living family. So this is a somewhat different kind
of case than the things we looked at in the
last episode. Uh, this is a case where sort of
where the local epidemiology of tuberculosis included beliefs about vampireism. Yeah,
this one really surprised me. I was not I was
not expecting it, partially, I think because when when I
went into it, I really was more focused. I was
(16:18):
thinking about what are the diseases that line up with
the monster. I wasn't thinking about the Uh, the traumatic
scenario of people wasting away uh in a family and
then looking for what is the supernatural cause of this,
what is the source of the curse? Well, it seems
to be like it's extending the symptoms of the disease
(16:38):
to beyond death. Right, So it combines this idea that
people who had consumption were wasting away, they needed some
kind of nourishment or they needed some kind of vitality
to come back to them, and they strongly wanted to survive.
They remained lucid, and they like had their will to live.
And it's almost like saying, Okay, even after they die
in they're buried, those coptoms continue like they're still wasting away.
(17:03):
They still need life and they still must return to
get it somehow. I mean, the nefarious thing about this
is that it is a predictive legend, like it is
predicting how the how the the illness will likely spread
within a given family and what will happen to those individuals. Um.
It just has this uh supernatural explanation for what's occurring
(17:23):
and a remedy that is ultimately going to be rather
indifferent to the actual spread of the disease. I think
that that would be the ultimate horror, wouldn't it that
you you dig up the grave, you violate the corpse
of a family member, and then it doesn't stop the illness,
(17:44):
which I guess probably forces one to think, well, what
it must We must have got the wrong grave, we
didn't get the vampire. There's a second vampire, and maybe
the madness continues UM, as opposed to just realizing, oh,
this line of thinking is UM is incorrect. You know
one thing I often think about with UM stuff like
this that's not clearly self limiting, Like the disease is
(18:06):
going to do what it's gonna do either way. It's
not like a an easily placebo effect controlled condition where
you can you know, you're experiencing pain and maybe doing
some kind of magic spell or apotropaic remedy might make
you think you feel better. Right, you still have a
TV infection and thinking that you've fixed it with apotropaic
(18:26):
magic is not going to make the bacteria bacterial infection
go away, right. Um, So you have to wonder, like,
how did people react to the clear failure of their interventions? Well, yeah,
I mean part of it I think probably goes back
to our episode on Curses, is that either would be
this period where you feel a little better, perhaps due
to the placebo effect, the placebo effect of of of
(18:49):
graveyard desecration, uh, you know, by the placebo effect. Nonetheless,
so I could they could, I could see where that
might make. That may be a factor. It's like, well,
we killed the vampire and she got a little better,
but it was really too late. Oh yeah, it had
already gotten the fangs in it. Yeah. I mean. Fortunately,
one thing about tuberculosis is also today there are real
(19:10):
treatments for tuberculosis. I mean, you can get courses of antibiotics.
I don't I don't think it's the easiest thing to treat.
I think I've read that you have to get like
long courses of antibiotics to treat tuberculosis today. But there
do exist treatments. So for this one, I think I
keep coming back to Dracula as being a good, um,
(19:30):
a good cinematic literary vampire to consider, as as the
TV vampire. The way it's causing say Lucy to slowly
waste away over days and they don't know how to
stop it. Yeah, And then I mean, and that was
a very influential work. So I think he's the shades
of that another vampire fiction, Salem's Lot, comes to mind.
You know, that's that's definitely one that plays with the
idea of the vampire essentially slipping in in the night
(19:54):
and doing it's uh, it's uh, it's it's um, it's
work on you. All right, On that note, we're gonna
tell a quick break, and when we come back, we
will diagnose some more blood drinkers. Thank thank Alright, we're back.
The vampire clinic is open, and we're going to see
the next patient apparently presenting with vampirism. And now, the
last case we looked at, it turned out what was
(20:16):
really inspiring this belief in vampirism was tuberculosis. And I
would say in that last case, we've been offering verdicts
on how clear we think the link is between certain
diseases and vampire lore. Clearly there is some link with tuberculosis.
That's pretty much undisputable. This next one, I think is
more disputable, but it's also very historically interesting. So I
(20:39):
want to look at a paper by Jeffrey S. Hample
and William S. Hample. I assume they're probably related called
Pelagra in the Origin of a myth. Evidence from European
Literature and Folklore from the Journal of the Royal Society
of Medicine from so. The authors write that in eighteenth
and nineteenth century Europe, villagers often mixed edicine and magic,
(21:01):
with many diseases assumed to have supernatural causes, and when
a disease lingered in a village, villagers often assumed that
the first person to come down with the disease was
a vampire. And the vampire legend can be seen as
an early attempt to try to understand contagion. I think
that's been coming through and a lot of what we've
talked about already. It's almost like vamporism is a folk
(21:22):
logic way of trying to understand the mechanics of contagion
and infection. And one of the things, actually the authors
of this paper point out that's kind of interesting, the
term nos ferrato. You know where that comes from, Robert
uh No, not well, so, it was popularized by Bram
Stoker in the novel Dracula. It most probably comes from
a Romanian word used for like satan or devil, but
(21:46):
maybe kind of a generic term for some sort of
embodied evil, like that's a nos feratu or the nos
ferato will come in. I think it, yeah, I mean,
I think it means something like that, you know, the
the unwanted one or something like that. But it's a
term that Romanian speaking people would have used for the
devil or for satan. But the authors of the paper
also note a possible, just possible connection to the Greek
(22:09):
word no suffer us, meaning disease carrier counts. I want
to see that show up somewhere, and it could be
a false cognate, but but I like the idea of
that link that, and it certainly makes sense given all
the historical accounts we've been talking about and that, you know,
they mentioned that other diseases have been proposed as the
possible link to as the possible inspiration or genesis of
(22:30):
the vampire legend, rabies, tuberculosis, orthropoietic porphyria, which in the
last episode we talked about how we think is not
a good explanation actually, but the authors here believe that
that none of the proposed diseases is adequate to explain
widespread belief in vampires in Europe during this period, and
they propose an alternative that's pretty interesting. A vitamin deficiency.
(22:53):
So they propose pelagro, which is quote a dietary deficiency
of niacin, which is also known is vitamin B three
and UH, and a deficiency of trip to fan which
is something that the body converts in denias and kind
of the same way the body converts beta caroteen into
vitamin A. This is interesting. I go to health food
stores so with with a fair amount of frequency, I
(23:15):
never see a vampire there. So I'm already liking this
theory a lot. Right, Vitamin supplements keep the vampires away? Yeah,
what is it? A vitamin B three a day keeps
the van helsing away. Yeah, A perfect ring of B
three uh. Tablets or or even lozenges or um will
will surround If you surround your bed with that, it'll
(23:36):
keep the nosferatus from creeping in. So how could a
vitamin deficiency explain vamporism. Well, plagro was first recognized in
seventeen thirty five, and it affected lots of people throughout
Europe in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
And we we've been talking in the past couple episodes
about how common vampire beliefs seem to be in especially
(23:57):
like eighteenth and nineteenth century Eastern Europe. So why then,
why they're and the authors write about how before this
many bulk food crops in Europe would have been rye
or wheat, but in the eighteenth century, European farmers begins
substituting corn or corn you know, maize, the crop from America,
(24:18):
because it actually yielded more food calories per acre of
crop land. So you might think, okay, yeah, that's easy.
You've got the same amount of farmland, but you get
more food out of it. It's a no brainer, right.
So corn became a staple crop, spreading slowly from the
Iberian Peninsula to the east and eventually becoming common in
eastern Europe. But there's a downside to switching over from
(24:39):
wheat and ride a corn meal based to a corn
meal based diet. Corn Meal contains niacin and tripped to
fan in a chemically bound state with low bioavailability, meaning
that though your body can get lots of usable calories
of energy out of corn meal, it can't get much
nicacin or tripped to fan to turn into nice and
(24:59):
so poor people throughout Europe who had switched over to
a corn meal based diet began to suffer from a
deficiency of niacin or vitamin B three, a deficiency known
as pelagra. Okay, I see where this is heading then,
uh so so so I guess now we have to
really get into the symptoms of pellagra, right, So, doctors
(25:19):
in Spain and Italy were quicker to recognize the disease
and its cause, and in Eastern Europe, apparently poverty and
the lack of medical expertise sort of kept the disease
from being diagnosed very much until well into the eighteen hundreds.
So the symptoms you mentioned, pelagra is characterized by what's
known as the four d s. You've got dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia,
(25:41):
and death. And those are some dastardly ds. I want
no part of any of those. Yeah, death is especially dastardly,
as we all know. So pellagra causes first of all, dermatitis,
which is inflammation of the skin. One easy thing to
remember is that pretty much any time you see itis
in a word, it means something about inflamation or swelling. Uh,
(26:02):
dermatitis inflammation of the skin. Now, there are many types
of dermatitis. Any rash is a form of dermatitis, but
the severe dermatitis brought on by PELAGRAAH can include rashes
on the face, rashes on the mouth, the hands and feet,
or around the neck in a formation that's known as
a castle collar casle necklace. If you look it up,
(26:23):
it's very creepy looking. It looks like a it's it's
this rash around the base of the neck. It's it's
super Does it look like something that's been like gnawing
at your neck, well, yeah, or it looks like something
somebody's put a noose around your neck or something interesting. Now,
these rashes can be discolored with reference to the rest
of the skin. They can be red and flaky, they
(26:44):
can crust over, be scaly or thick, dry and cracked,
and there can also be sores on the mouth, tongue, gums,
and lips. And what's more, the author's point out that
these areas of the skin with dermatitis can be hyper
sensitive to light quote sun Exposed areas at first become
red and thick with hypercrotosis and scaling. This is followed
(27:08):
by inflammation and adema, which eventually leads to depigmented, shiny skin,
alternating with rough brown scally areas with repeated episodes of
ari athema, a pelagrin's skin become becomes paper thin and
assumes a parchment like texture. And this is this is
an aspect of the vampire that I don't think we've
(27:30):
discussed yet, the fact that the vampire almost always has
this this pale, deathly pallor. Yeah, the vampire is often
portrayed as having a depigmented look, often depicted as kind
of an alternating like pale and then rosy red like
in the lips or the mouth. Um. And the obvious
comparison is that vampires displayed sensitivity to sunlight, of course,
(27:52):
and they must come to in the words of Count
Dracula loved the Shade and Shadow, And the authors actually
cite the novel Draecula as a point of comparison. They
I don't know if this is the best way to
do it, but the reason that citing comparison to Dracula
is reasonable because Stoker did lots of research collecting vampire
folklore from Eastern Europe, so they say his novel serves
(28:13):
as a pretty good record of folk vampire beliefs sort
of wrapped up into one character. I don't know how
legitimate that is. Maybe, I mean, I think he did
do research r right, I mean, I guess this is
a legitimate is wondering if he had syphilis or not. Yeah,
I mean, given the time period, a lot of people
had syphilis, right, so they say, you know, Count Dracula
is also described as a man of quote extraordinary pallor,
(28:36):
with not quote a speck of color about him, and
yet with a quote bloated face. Stoker also says that
the vampire has remarkable ruddiness of the lips, so pale face,
pale bloated face, and then remarkably red lips, and he
describes the three vampire brides and Dracula's castle with the
words the ruddy color, the voluptuous lips. And this could
(28:59):
be sort of a third hand reflection of the way
people with pelagra would have redness and swelling of the lips,
though often leading to a cracking that you probably would
not describe as voluptuous. I guess you know. This reminds me, specifically, though,
of some of the depictions I've seen of ghoules, which
have certain vampire qualities. And we did a whole episode
(29:21):
on ghouls a while back, that's running as a Vault
episode this month, but in particular, there was a Tales
from the Crypt episode called Morning Mess. Uh. Mourning is
in like Mourning for the Dead? Uh that in it's
a fabulous episode, my favorite Tales from the Crypt episode.
But it has some wonderful ghouls in it. And the
ghouls are depicted, you know as this kind of like
(29:41):
grayish pale creatures, hairless, um kind of eleven ears. And
they have these big grotesque lips though, that are cracked
in the manner that you're describing. Oh, I just looked
it up. Yes, exactly, They're red. They're all cracked, parched,
almost showing clear evidence of hyperkerotosis. Uh. That's that's interesting.
(30:04):
And so another thing that the authors point out here
is that vampires in folklore are often characterized as having
quote a foul mouth or bad breath, and the authors
note that this maybe the origin of the use of
garlic as a remedy for vamporism through homeopathic logic, right,
you like cures, Like, so the villagers wanted to fight
fire with fire, you've got foul mouth, give them garlic
(30:26):
to cure it. I'm thinking a lot of people had
foul mouth though, that is a very good point. Now,
I'm sure you could have fouler than average mouth, but yeah,
just eating eating a lot of a lot of corn meal,
never brushing your teeth. Yeah, so you described the lips.
But but how about the tongue of the vampire. Job, Oh,
this is a good you know, this gets reference. Sometimes
(30:46):
you dig up a corpse and say, oh, the face
is swollen. There's something you know, the tongue is swollen
or something. And apparently a person with pelaugraa will often
have an alarming looking tongue with gloss sitis, swelling of
the tongue, an extreme redness, sort of visually associating the
mouth with blood, while the skin might be pale, cracked
and parchment like. So try to picture it. You've got shiny, depigmented,
(31:11):
parchment like skin and then like a red, blistering mouth
with a swollen, red tongue. You look at that and
he's like, that could be a vampire. Yeah. Then again,
I wonder how much of that is just playing on
like the vampires we've come to know through twentieth century
movies and stuff. I think about the depiction of once
Lucy becomes a vampire and Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. You know,
(31:33):
the pale parchment like shiny depigmented skin and the hugely
red mouth. I don't know if that's always there in
the more traditional vampire folklore. I know, in fact, one
thing we've read is that sometimes it not always, but
sometimes people believed vampires to look healthy and look, you
know the opposite of this. Well, we get into the
(31:54):
swelling of the lips, right it gets confusing because like
like like thick certainly had lips are generally considered alluring.
It's one of the things about like the cracked lips,
Like that's where you get into the idea that that
it's like almost category confusion. They're right, like the lips
are big and red, but they are also grotesque. I
did not know if I should be repelled or attracted
(32:15):
to the vampire. Well, and you know, some eighteenth century
Eastern European peasants probably didn't like category confusion. Right now, another,
so that's the first d dermatitis. Another symptom is diarrhea
pea causes uh dysfunction of the gut and the g
I tract. And I know everybody from when we when
(32:36):
you first mentioned the four ds, they've they've been waiting
for you to hit this and explain the link between
diarrhea and vampires. Well, this might have the least link
to the vampire, but we'll see. So the authors say,
vampire legends, of course don't often mention diarrhea. Uh you know,
But they say, well, you probably wouldn't have expected the
records of the time to make a lot of about diarrhea.
(32:56):
But there are some associated ideas. A common part of
the vampire a gend is the idea that the vampire
needs only blood and will refuse normal food, and there
are sections in Dracula that talk about this, like the
Count keeps apologizing to Jonathan Harker for not dining with him.
You know I have dined already, and that donuts up.
Also later, when Mina Harker is turning into a vampire,
(33:18):
she describes how she found herself unable to eat food.
She says, I could not eat. To even try to
do so was repulsive to me. It's convincing, but I
would be more convinced if there were parts in Dracula
where the Count says, excuse me, I must go to
the restroom. Again, and this occurs like every like ten minutes,
and he's constantly drinking water orange juice. You know, I
(33:39):
didn't think to do this, but I should have just
searched the medical literature for the phrase diarrhea of vampire,
and I didn't try it. You know, maybe something will
come up. There's our there's our our, our metal band
name for the for the episode the vampire diarrhea. I
think that would be a good, good, good name. Wait,
what's better, diarrhea vampire or vampire diarrhea? Diarrhea of vampire?
(34:02):
Probably almost starting to move on. So the author is
right that the inability or unwillingness to eat is a
common feature of pelagra because of discomfort caused by the
mucous membrane lesions and the esophagus, the stomach, the colon.
So you get diarrhea, lack of appetite, and you might wonder, like,
why would pelagra affect dermatitis and diarrhea. Well, niacin deficiency
(34:26):
is most apparent where new cells are manufactured most frequently,
and this includes the skin and the g I tract. Okay,
you ready for the next day. For d number three,
I think three this is dementia, so people suffering from
pelagra will eventually develop neurological symptoms appearing as some form
of dementia. The lack of nyacin causes a metabolic deficiency
(34:48):
that causes neurons in the brain to degenerate, manifesting as
things like insomnia, anxiety, aggression, and depression, and these symptoms,
the author's note, are of the manic depressive type. So
folklore often claims that the vampire does not sleep at
night and becomes more rose or irritable, and the authors
compare this set of symptoms to the character of Rinfield
(35:09):
in the novel Dracula. The Rinfields is not a vampire himself,
he wants to become one. He's emulating the vampire, and
he still exhibits the characteristics associated in the folklore with
burgeoning vampiism and the character of Dr Seward, Rinfield's doctor
in the book, describes Rnfield as follows quote sanguine temperament,
(35:29):
morbidly excitable, periods of gloom, a possibly dangerous man, a
great character to be sure, yes. The authors point out
that pelagrea can also sometimes be associated with pika, and
pika of course as a disorder in which you have
a pathological appetite often, you know, for substances that are
not foods, like soil or paper, hair, ice, clay, and
(35:52):
stuff like that. Yeah, dirt and clay in particular often
are often explored in this area. Yeah, And the authors
speculate that this would be a part of the body's
desperate attempt to find something to eat with niacin in it. Right,
people with pelagra have been reported to crave substances like
vinegar and spices, and the authors draw the connection with
Rinfield's obsessive appetite for living things like spiders, birds, and mice.
(36:17):
Though I don't know, I feel like that one might
be kind of a stretch because from the vampire point
of view, wouldn't spiders, birds and mice contain some actual
nutrition and it's sort of a form of meat. Yeah,
this one feels like more of a stretch, though I
love the idea of I mean, we know that there's
often this this this necessity for the vampire to have
access to its grave dirt from its native soil. I mean,
(36:40):
that's indracula itself. Um, I don't think it's I've never
heard of story where's where it's implied that the vampire
eats the dirt. But now I kind of want that.
I want a nice grave, dirt eating vampire. Well, there's
also the idea that consecrated soil can be dangerous to
the vampire. Is it because the vampire is tempted to
ingest it? Yeah, it could be accidental, uh sort of
(37:01):
holy poisoning there. Yeah, Okay, so the fourth d time
for death. So as opposed to the modern vampire, where
we all know the modern movie vampire, I think of
like when I try to think of the best modern
movie vampire, example, maybe it's Chris Srandon and Fright Night. Right,
that's just like that's modern movie vampire to the max
(37:22):
for right Night. Uh So in that kind, in that case,
like a single bite or encounter is enough to kill
a person and turn them into a vampire. Right. But
in the vampire of eighteenth the nineteenth century Eastern European folklore,
it's generally a creature that slowly drains life, essence, and
health over a long period of time, repeatedly attacking the
(37:42):
same victims again and again in the night, and leaving
evidence in the form of a person's wasting, illness becoming
worse and worse over time, Robert, would you agree with
that characterization? Yeah, yeah, the idea that someone has drained
too much too often they can become the thing that
drained them. Yeah, or at least just be killed. But
(38:04):
it's not just like one random attack usually does it
in this lore, so the vampire was also never caught
in the attack. Instead, it was like, oof, well, you know,
Victor looks even worse than he did yesterday. Must have
been that vampire again, right, And it helps classify the
vampire more as a parasitic entity as opposed to a
predatory Uh. Entity. I think that's a good point. Yeah. So,
(38:26):
as we discussed with other diseases, including things like tuberculosis,
vampire folklore often takes what we would interpret as a
bunch of people all getting the same disease and dying
over time as the first person who got this disease
and died from it was a vampire, and they were
returning from the grave for revenge against their friends and
family members by slowly draining their life essence. Since the
(38:50):
impoverished families of Eastern Europe generally would have all had
the same diet, if one person got pelagra, you would
expect other members of the family to develop it as well,
And how long it takes pelagra to kill you is
not fixed. If untreated, it can take four to five
years to kill somebody, but it can also kill suddenly
in earlier stages when symptoms are less pronounced. And they
(39:12):
also note that a person with advanced pelagra who appears
anemic from gastro intestinal bleeding could have been interpreted as
the living dead. Well in all, I think this makes
for an interesting argument. They offer a few more shorter
lines of evidence, and I think let's look at those
after we take a break. Thank alright, we're back. Okay.
Other bits of evidence that the authors of this paper
(39:34):
we've been talking about have for pelagra being the cause
of vampires. M one is historical timing. So they point
out that the word vampire, the verd vampire first entered
English in seventeen thirty four, quote a year before pelagra
was noted by a royal physician as a quote disgusting
indigenous disease among Spanish peasants. Nothing like a like a
(39:58):
condescending royal physician. Yeah, um, but yeah, so this is
not really a piece of evidence. But the authors just
note that. Even in the novel Dracula, when Jonathan Harker
is on his way to count Dracula's castle, he stops
somewhere and eats a local breakfast, which is a porridge
of maize flower. So if people were eating corn meal
products as their main staple, they may very well have
(40:20):
been susceptible to pelagra. A couple of other interesting things
that might be kind of a stretch. One is the
link between seeds. So you know that old legend that
you can protect yourself against a vampire by scattering seeds
on the ground. Oh, this is an idea. They have
to count them all and the kind of similar in
the idea that you have like a complex not they
have to like analyze the string, right, Yeah, so you
(40:43):
can you can distract a vampire by giving them something
to occupy their attention. You throw the throw rice or
seeds on the ground and they'll be forced to count
them all right, So like the modern vert, you can
leave a magic eye book out and they would or
they've not some suducu and they would have to go
through the entire booklet and in the sunlight would destroy them.
It's the Sunday times here, do the crossword puzzle. So yeah,
(41:06):
the the author's note that millet seeds were commonly cited
for this usage, and they say, you know, that's ironic
because millet actually has an excess of loosine, which is
an amino acid that blocks the conversion of trip to
fan in denyasin, meaning millet could make a case of
pelagra even worse. I think that's an interesting coincidence, but
that doesn't really strike me as evidence. Still, it's basically
(41:29):
the joke I made earlier about taking B three tablets
and spreading them all over your your bedroom, Like that's
kind of what they're arguing here, is that you've done
that with the seats. Well, but it would be the
exact opposite of that. Actually, it would be like it
would be like spreading around B three blockers. Um. Another
thing they bring up is timing during the year. So
pellagra is often referred to as a springtime disease. Why
(41:51):
is that, Well, in the springtime, the new crops haven't
come in yet, so dried corn meal is going to
be a big part of the diet. You don't have
fresh produce to eat yet. So pair this with the
idea that St. George's day, which is in late April
or early May, is traditionally believed to be the day
that vampires would come together to plan their attacks for
(42:11):
the coming year. And in Dracula, Jonathan Harker is told
upon his arrival in Transylvania, quote, it is the eve
of St. George's Day? Do you not know that tonight,
when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in
the world will have full sway. Wow. This reminds me
a lot of the werewolf game. Right, It's like, now
all the villagers go to sleep, the vampires wake up
(42:33):
and plot against the villagers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
who do you want to kill tonight? Uh? So finally
they cite disinterment and this connection seems likely coincidental to me,
but also interesting, kind of like the millet thing. So
when a vampire was suspected, villagers would often dig up
a recently buried body to inspect it for signs of
(42:54):
vampiresm We've been talking about that. But one sign apparently
of the corpse being a vampire was that the face,
of course was read and marked with fresh blood. But
another sign was a ring of corn meal around the
vampire's mouth. Oh I don't know. It seems like kind
of a stretch. But that's also interesting now that this
is a great example of something that's just too stupid
(43:15):
to really make its way into any like cinematic or
literary treatment of the vampire. Right, the corn meal around
the mouth, Well, wouldn't that have been great if you
put that into Coppola's Dracula. So Gary oldman's walking around
in his dandy costume, but he's got corn meal all
over his mouth. He's constantly eating corn flakes. He's a
vitamin deficiency vampire, modern day London. I've got another piece
(43:36):
of evidence for them. Okay, who is the bane of
the of the vampires and Dracula? Dr Van Helsing? And
who played him so well in Francis Ford Coppola's version,
Anthony Hopkins. And what famous nutritionist figure did Anthony Hopkins
also play? I don't know Kellogg? He did? Yes, I
didn't know that. Yeah, the Road to Wellville? Okay, I
(43:56):
didn't know. Did did Kellogg give people vitamin B three?
I'm not shotting on that, but he gave a lot
of people a lot of things. And uh, Anthony Hopkins's
performance and that movie is so wonderful and so absurd.
I want to see I want to see his Kellogg
fight the vampires. I think that would have been amazing.
Man Kellogg versus Dracula, somebody make that movie right now.
(44:20):
That would be amazing. Somebody should make a series of
like the Greatest Quacks in the History of Medicine versus Vampires.
I want to see Dracula versus Who's that guy that
that US doctor who did like the goat go nad
implants on people. Oh goodness, I feel like we've discussed
him on the show before, but his name is not
(44:40):
coming to mind. Brinkley, John Brinkley, Yeah, yeah, or the
the character who thought that you could treat mental ailments
by removing teeth. That one would be another one to
throw up against the fan. I don't remember who that was. Yeah,
his name isn't isn't coming to me either, But he's
a character that showed up on the television series The
Nick as well, played by John Hodgman. Actually, oh really, yeah,
(45:02):
John Hodgman's finest performance in my opinion. Okay, so we
gotta wrap up Pelagres. So in conclusion, the authors note
you know they're there are actually some other vitamin deficiencies
that could cause similar symptoms, like the ones they mentioned
gloss idis, the spelling of the tongue anemia, and arexia pika.
But pellagra is the one that would have been historically
(45:23):
most likely to do so because of the historical timing
in the spread of corn you know, corn meal as
a food staple throughout Europe. So coming down the end here,
what do we think our verdict is? I think this
is this one seems like a mixed bag to me.
Some of the evidence, like the historical timing seems very good,
and other stuff it really seems like they're reaching at
(45:45):
the most. I feel like any of these illnesses is
going to match up with you know, just aspects of
the vampirement would have helped contribute to the way the
myth took shape. But yeah, I feel like it's it's
ultimately kind of a fool's errand to try and just
boil it all down to one particular ailment. Now, there
are a number of different illnesses that we didn't have
time to discuss here, um, particularly in cases where that
(46:08):
connection is maybe less robust. For instance, uh, the work
of Juan Gomez Alonso m D that I referenced in
the first episode. In passing, he mentioned that some connections
have been made between the vampire myth and schizophrenia. Uh.
And I feel like, you know, based on what we've
we've we've read and discussed regarding schizophrenia in the past,
(46:30):
I think there there is a lot of room for
supernatural ideas to emerge from either directly from individuals who
are struggling with schizophrenia, or people who are observing or
or trying to help individuals who are dealing with schizophrenia.
But oh yeah, I mean it's always you always have
to wonder if certain supernatural beliefs have some kind of
(46:53):
origin and conditions that cause hallucination. Right, and then I
didn't see any particular studies that looked at this, but
I I can't help but think of course of our
old our old friends sleep paralysis as well. Sleep paralysis
is often mentioned, uh in episodes or experiences that involve
demons or ghosts or your alien visitations. But certainly one
(47:18):
of the cores in the vampire myth, right, is something
came to you in your bed while you were asleep
and and preyed upon you, fed upon your blood. Uh.
So I think the idea of you know, of waking
in this this weird lucinogenic state, being unable to move.
I think that would lend itself well to uh, to
vampire interpretations, or at the very least as any of
(47:39):
these things are ultimately doing, like provide fuel for the
pre existing vampire myth flame. Yeah, And I think that's
a lot of what we need to emphasize here is
that we don't want to create the impression we think
that there is any one single condition that created the
vampire legend. I mean, it's clearly something that is a
(47:59):
very good ad myth in its own right. You know,
a lot of different versions of it, especially since you know,
we've been focusing on especially like the eighteenth nineteenth century
Eastern European version of the vampire lore, which itself is
fairly varied but contributed to what became you know, the
the Dracula vampire. But they're all kinds of vampires around
the world that have their own local inspirations. Oh yeah,
(48:22):
I mean, the so many of the like the mesu
American and South American versions are just so grotesquely fascinating. Um.
I think I've discussed some of those in the show before.
One more thing I just remembered that we hadn't mentioned,
but we took a quick look at was the idea
of linking vampire lore and specifically the story of Dracula,
to the idea of hereditary somnambulism. You know, the sleepwalk, Yeah,
(48:46):
which you can certainly see. Before people understood that that
might have just sort of mundane neurological causes. Uh, people
could look at that kind of behavior and say, oh, something,
something very creepy is going on. Now, my you know,
my child is sleepwalking out of the house in the night.
He or she is being lured out by some kind
(49:06):
of predator, some kind of supernatural parasite, inviting them out
to be drained. All right, Well, there you have it.
We're gonna go and close up the clinic for today,
but who knows, maybe we'll be back uh someday to
discuss uh and evaluate us some additional cases of alleged vamporism. Well,
I'm absolutely positive we have not exhausted the possible links
(49:27):
between medical conditions and vampire lore. So there's no way
there's not more to talk about. There will always be
more patients, all right, if you want to check out
more episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, including the
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(49:49):
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(50:10):
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(50:32):
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(50:56):
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com?
Everybody Little. The Four starts about
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and welcome back for Part two of the Vampire Clinic.
We are going to be spending today exploring the second
(00:24):
part of our investigation into the link between medical conditions
and the inspiration of vampire legends and vampire lore. If
you haven't heard part one yet, you should go back
and listen to that first. We lay a lot of
groundwork there. We explore some interesting conditions in cases that
may or may not apply to varying degrees to the
vampire legend. But we wanted to continue our exploration today,
(00:47):
so let's open the clinic and allow the waiting room
to fill up with potential vampires. All right, let's let's
get these patients sorted out. Last time, who do we talk?
We talked about rabies, we talked about syphilis, We talk
talked about porphyria, conditions which we ultimately concluded were not
a good inspiration for the vampire legend. It was actually
kind of a case of the media running with something
(01:09):
that was actually a pretty tenuous link So so who
do we have to kick off the episode with today? What? What?
What is our next patient consist of? Well, I think
today we should start with a condition that has extremely
clear links to folk vampire beliefs, something that's way less
iffy than the conditions we've talked about before, and that
is going to be tuberculosis. So this is going to
(01:31):
be one that may not account for all cases or
for the ultimate origins of vampire beliefs, but it quite
clearly accounts for some of them. There's very good evidence
that at least in some cases, vampire beliefs were linked
to tuberculosis and not just inspired by tuberculosis, like they
saw somebody who had tuberculosis and thought that's a vampire,
(01:52):
but they were consciously associated with the disease, if that
makes sense. So tuberculosis is, first of all, a bacterial
infection that primarily infects the lungs, and it's spread by
way of airsolized droplets that get dispersed through the air
when an infected person coughs or sneezes. Tuberculosis or t
B is contagious, but it's known primarily for spreading among
(02:14):
people who are sharing close living conditions. And though TB
usually attacks the lungs, it can also infect other parts
of the body, including everything from the kidneys to the
spine to the brain. The bacterium that causes it is
micro Bacterium tuberculosis. And one of the crucial things is
that not everybody who has TV shows symptoms. There's what's
(02:36):
known as latent TV, in which you are infected with
the bacterium, but symptoms haven't appeared yet. And we mentioned
in the last episode how diseases that have latency periods,
one of which can be some types of syphilis, infection
um get that can very easily lend itself to supernatural interpretations, right,
because it becomes even less clear what the link between
(02:59):
you getting the disease and having the symptoms is, right,
it becomes this this hidden force. And so I want
to look at a paper from the American Journal of
Physical Anthropology that documents one specific case showing a link
between tuberculosis and vampire beliefs. And the papers by Paul S.
Sled Zick and Nicholas Belotoni called Bioarchaeological and Biocultural Evidence
(03:23):
for the New England Vampire folk belief from nineteen ninety
four So the modern pop culture vampire is, as we've
been talking about, somewhat different from the eighteenth century euro
American folk belief in vampires. One thing is that eighteenth
century European peasants often thought they could look at an
unearthed corpse and tell whether or not it was a vampire.
(03:46):
So a vampire would have maybe a bloated chest, long fingernails,
and and what looked like fresh blood draining away from
the mouth. And if people exhumed a corpse and they
they found a quote vampire in this state, it was
assumed that this was because it had it had been
leaving its grave to drain life from the living. Now,
vampires were associated with and blamed for all kinds of
(04:09):
epidemic diseases. Uh, And if people in an area became
sick and started wasting away and dying, it was because
there was a vampire preying on them. And you know,
so when we're thinking about where to locate these these
sort of folk villager beliefs and vampires, we very often
turned to like eighteenth and nineteenth century Eastern Europe, as
we talked about in the last episode, that was a
(04:31):
time and place where vampire beliefs were rampant, but they
were also pretty common in nineteenth century New England. You
could go to parts of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island
in the eighteen hundreds and find people with diseases who
believed they were being preyed on by vampires. And a
lot of those beliefs are deeply bound up with tuberculosis infection.
(04:52):
So the author's right quote, following the death of a
family member from consumption and that's another word for tuberculosis,
other family members began to show signs of tuberculosis infection.
According to the New England folk belief, the wasting away
of these family members was attributed to the recently deceased
consumptive who returned from the dead as a vampire to
(05:14):
drain the life from the surviving relatives. The apotropaic remedy,
and that means apotropaic magic. It means like warding off evil,
you know, to repel evil magic. The apotropaic remedy used
to kill the vampire was to exhume the body of
the supposed vampire and if the body was undecomposed, remove
(05:34):
and burn the blood filled heart or the entire body.
So in this case we're looking at an illness that
is um it's basically providing a script for the victim
more so than the the monster itself. Yeah, exactly. I
mean it is an illness that creates conditions for people
to think I am being preyed on by a vampire,
(05:56):
or my family members are being preyed on by a vampire,
and we've got to do something. We've got to you know,
Jeff died last week. We're pretty sure it's him. We
got to dig up his corpse and do something about it.
Got to apply the apotropaic remedy, which would mean take
out the heart, check and see if it's full of blood.
If it is, it's obviously because he's a vampire and
he's been drinking my blood, and you've got to burn
(06:18):
the heart. Yeah, maybe just go and burn the heart anyway,
because you've come this far. Well. As we mentioned in
the last episode, it seems that it was very common
to dig up a corpse wondering if the corpse was
a vampire and discover yes, it was a vampire. Yeah. Yeah,
you don't want to be the one to have to
go back and say, look, Jeff was okay, he was fine.
After we violated his grave and removed his heart. We
(06:41):
just we just stuffed it right back in there. I
think it's it's basically basically, we reinstalled it. His corps
is good to go, no harm, no foul. It's a
factory REFERB REFERB corpse. Uh So the paper, this paper,
in particular, it explores the impact of this set of
beliefs I just described on the bio archical logical record,
which means the study of skeletal remains through one fascinating
(07:04):
example in particular, so in November nineteen in the town
of Grizzwald, Connecticut, which I just have to report every
time I typed when making notes for this episode, I
typed Grizzworld. I'm just unable to type grizz Wald, and
I don't know why. But in in grizz World, a
privately owned sand and gravel business discovered an abandoned eighteenth
(07:28):
to nineteenth century cemetery was eroding into their work site, right,
So their quarrying out sand and gravel, and then there's
this old abandoned cemetery just sort of eroding into their workspaces.
That's kind of putting the blame on the cemetery. It's
just like that like this, this uh, this sacred burial
ground is really infringing on our business here, when I
(07:49):
think it's more arguably the other way around. Well, I
don't know for sure, but from the way it was
written about, I tend to assume that the people operating
the quarry did not know that they were digging into cemetery. Yeah,
still the ghost don't care well. So the original cemetery,
because it was a roading, could not be salvaged where
it was, so the skeletons had to be removed and
(08:12):
relocated elsewhere. So all in all, the Forgotten Graveyard contained
the skeletal remains of twenty nine people. There were six
adult men, aid adult women in fifteen subadults, and the
researchers were able to determine through land deeds that the
area had been used as a family graveyard since the
middle of the eighteenth century by the Walton family, who
(08:33):
had moved to Grizz World from Rhode Island in sixteen nine.
Hence it was known as the Walton Cemetery. So when
they looked at the skeletons, one of the first things
they saw is okay, the remains clearly indicated that the
people buried here led lives of hard physical labor. These
were hard working people. One skeleton in particular caught the
attention of the archaeologists, the remains of a fifty to
(08:56):
fifty five year old male in a coffin within a
stone line grave. They were on the lid of the coffin.
There was a pattern of tacks shoved into the lid
that spelled JB. Presumably this was the man's initials and
the age at which he died. Now inside the coffin,
things got weirder. Instead of the bones lying in the
(09:19):
normal arrangement you would see of a dead body, you know,
like you know, flat with like skull connecting to neck
and everything JB's skull and his fhemera meaning it's you know,
his thigh bones, uh, his femurs. They were on top
of everything else in a skull and crossbones pattern. And
then underneath the ribs in the vertebrae were also scattered
(09:42):
out of their natural positions. Beyond that, there were periostitic
lesions on the left, second, third, and fourth ribs, and
these would be lesions consistent with what could be caused
by pulmonary tuberculosis or at the very least a condition
that people in the nineteenth century probably would have confused
with tuberculosis. Something uh consisting of violent coughing fits powerful
(10:04):
enough to cause lesions on the membrane surrounding the rib bones.
So we have evidence of death by pulmonary tuberculosis or
some other pulmonary disease that would have looked like tuberculosis,
and the crazy rearrangement of the bones and the coffin.
So what's going on. At the time of this paper,
there were twelve known historical accounts of vampire belief based
(10:27):
activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth century New England. I've
included a chart that we can look at, but in
at least eleven of the twelve cases, the cause of
death for the supposed vampire was consumption, meaning tuberculosis. So
there's a clear link between this one particular disease and
vampire attacks. Now, the authors indicated that the New England
(10:51):
vampire myth is strongly based in the physical realities of tuberculosis,
both in how tuberculosis symptoms appear and and how the
disease is transmitted. So tuberculosis was known as consumption because
it gave the the appearance of a person wasting away,
essentially being slowly drained of life and vitality, while at
(11:12):
the same time remaining conscious and retaining this desire to
survive and the author's right quote. This dichotomy of desire
and wasting away is reflected in the vampire folk belief
the vampire's desire for quote food forces it to feed
off of living relatives who suffer a similar wasting away
a lot, and in vampire legends you often see a
(11:35):
lot of these kind of intentional ironies and uh and juxtapositions,
you know, the contradictions of like having this otherworldly appetite
while at the same time appearing gaunt or to to
waste away in the body. You Know, this does bring
me back to brown Stoker's Dracula, because I feel like
this is an aspect of the vampire legend that is
(11:57):
well represented in that. You know, It's like someone is
wasting way and what is the cause? Clearly something is
coming uh into their room in the night, and is
the the supernatural cause of this consumption? Right with's it's
there in Dracula when for example, Lucy has to keep
receiving blood transfusions, right, they all these people keep giving
her blood because it's like something is making her anemic
(12:18):
and draining her life away and they don't see what
it is. But anyway, so in these historical accounts of
New England vampires, what generally happens is you've got family
members all living huddled together in close quarters. One member
of the family gets infected with tuberculosis and dies. Then
just before or soon after that family member dies, another
(12:39):
becomes infected with tuberculosis, which is interpreted as the one
who just died draining the second patient's life in order
to survive. And of course tuberculosis is well known for
the ease with which it's transmitted between people living in closer,
crowded quarters, which would have been common for farmers in
rural nineteenth century New England. Uh. The author's note also
(13:00):
that there there would be seasonal lulls and nutrition and
constant unsanitary conditions, which would of course just make things worse. Yeah,
I can only imagine. And the author's right quote. Although
there is no evidence of tuberculosis in the remaining Walton
Cemetery skeletons, and eighteen o one narrative of Griswold History
indicates that during the twenty five years preceding the account,
(13:22):
consumptions had proved to be mortal to a number. So, okay,
let's say half your family they've got consumption, and you
think it's because the one of you who just died
is a vampire. What do you do to stop it? Well,
you have to go out and kill the vampire. So
in eighteenth and nineteenth century New England, the contemporaneous accounts
indicate you would do this as follows. First you've got
(13:44):
to dig up the body. Then you check and see
is their blood in the heart, And if there's blood
in the heart, you've got to burn the heart. Many
accounts of the time seemed to indicate that when people
dug up bodies for this reason, they just generally found
the body undecomposed with blood in the heart, so they'd
find what they were looking for. And the reason dead
bodies often had these appearances is normal, and it's due
(14:06):
to post mortem decomposition. There's a book called Vampires, Burial
and Death, Folklore and Reality by an author named Barbera
that gets cited a lot on this account about how
people would mistake and naturally uh the natural effects of
post mortem decomposition for stuff that indicated a dead body
was still alive and feeding, like the you know, the
(14:26):
bloating and the blood running from the mouth and all that,
or that prominent genitalia. Oh yeah, from the from the
rabies case. Right, Okay, So what about JB. Back to
j B who had his his bones arranged in the
Skull and Crossbones, Well, the evidence indicates that when his
family members dug him up, he was already decomposed. There
was not any soft tissue left on his bones. So
(14:49):
what do you do You think JB is the vampire
that's draining your family members of life. You dig him up,
there's no soft tissue, there's no heart to burn. So
the authors have a hypothesis of apparently the alternative to
burning the heart if there's no heart left is to
rearrange the bones and to place the skull in an
apotropaic symbol. The skull and crossbones and the author's right quote.
(15:12):
In support of this hypothesis, we note that decapitation was
a common European method of dispatching a dead vampire, and
that the Celts and the Neolithic Egyptians were known to
separate the head from the body supposedly to prevent the
dead from doing harm. And on top of that, the
authors provide some documentary evidence in the form of newspaper
articles showing that vampire beliefs were to be found in
(15:34):
the vicinity of Griswold, Connecticut in the middle of the
nineteenth century. There's a story from an eighteen fifty four
issue of the Norwich Courier about an incident near in
nearby Jewitt City in which consumption had killed a man
named Horace Ray and three of his sons, and then
several of their dead bodies were exhumed and burned in
order to stop them from feeding on other members of
(15:56):
the living family. So this is a somewhat different kind
of case than the things we looked at in the
last episode. Uh, this is a case where sort of
where the local epidemiology of tuberculosis included beliefs about vampireism. Yeah,
this one really surprised me. I was not I was
not expecting it, partially, I think because when when I
went into it, I really was more focused. I was
(16:18):
thinking about what are the diseases that line up with
the monster. I wasn't thinking about the Uh, the traumatic
scenario of people wasting away uh in a family and
then looking for what is the supernatural cause of this,
what is the source of the curse? Well, it seems
to be like it's extending the symptoms of the disease
(16:38):
to beyond death. Right, So it combines this idea that
people who had consumption were wasting away, they needed some
kind of nourishment or they needed some kind of vitality
to come back to them, and they strongly wanted to survive.
They remained lucid, and they like had their will to live.
And it's almost like saying, Okay, even after they die
in they're buried, those coptoms continue like they're still wasting away.
(17:03):
They still need life and they still must return to
get it somehow. I mean, the nefarious thing about this
is that it is a predictive legend, like it is
predicting how the how the the illness will likely spread
within a given family and what will happen to those individuals. Um.
It just has this uh supernatural explanation for what's occurring
(17:23):
and a remedy that is ultimately going to be rather
indifferent to the actual spread of the disease. I think
that that would be the ultimate horror, wouldn't it that
you you dig up the grave, you violate the corpse
of a family member, and then it doesn't stop the illness,
(17:44):
which I guess probably forces one to think, well, what
it must We must have got the wrong grave, we
didn't get the vampire. There's a second vampire, and maybe
the madness continues UM, as opposed to just realizing, oh,
this line of thinking is UM is incorrect. You know
one thing I often think about with UM stuff like
this that's not clearly self limiting, Like the disease is
(18:06):
going to do what it's gonna do either way. It's
not like a an easily placebo effect controlled condition where
you can you know, you're experiencing pain and maybe doing
some kind of magic spell or apotropaic remedy might make
you think you feel better. Right, you still have a
TV infection and thinking that you've fixed it with apotropaic
(18:26):
magic is not going to make the bacteria bacterial infection
go away, right. Um, So you have to wonder, like,
how did people react to the clear failure of their interventions? Well, yeah,
I mean part of it I think probably goes back
to our episode on Curses, is that either would be
this period where you feel a little better, perhaps due
to the placebo effect, the placebo effect of of of
(18:49):
graveyard desecration, uh, you know, by the placebo effect. Nonetheless,
so I could they could, I could see where that
might make. That may be a factor. It's like, well,
we killed the vampire and she got a little better,
but it was really too late. Oh yeah, it had
already gotten the fangs in it. Yeah. I mean. Fortunately,
one thing about tuberculosis is also today there are real
(19:10):
treatments for tuberculosis. I mean, you can get courses of antibiotics.
I don't I don't think it's the easiest thing to treat.
I think I've read that you have to get like
long courses of antibiotics to treat tuberculosis today. But there
do exist treatments. So for this one, I think I
keep coming back to Dracula as being a good, um,
(19:30):
a good cinematic literary vampire to consider, as as the
TV vampire. The way it's causing say Lucy to slowly
waste away over days and they don't know how to
stop it. Yeah, And then I mean, and that was
a very influential work. So I think he's the shades
of that another vampire fiction, Salem's Lot, comes to mind.
You know, that's that's definitely one that plays with the
idea of the vampire essentially slipping in in the night
(19:54):
and doing it's uh, it's uh, it's it's um, it's
work on you. All right, On that note, we're gonna
tell a quick break, and when we come back, we
will diagnose some more blood drinkers. Thank thank Alright, we're back.
The vampire clinic is open, and we're going to see
the next patient apparently presenting with vampirism. And now, the
last case we looked at, it turned out what was
(20:16):
really inspiring this belief in vampirism was tuberculosis. And I
would say in that last case, we've been offering verdicts
on how clear we think the link is between certain
diseases and vampire lore. Clearly there is some link with tuberculosis.
That's pretty much undisputable. This next one, I think is
more disputable, but it's also very historically interesting. So I
(20:39):
want to look at a paper by Jeffrey S. Hample
and William S. Hample. I assume they're probably related called
Pelagra in the Origin of a myth. Evidence from European
Literature and Folklore from the Journal of the Royal Society
of Medicine from so. The authors write that in eighteenth
and nineteenth century Europe, villagers often mixed edicine and magic,
(21:01):
with many diseases assumed to have supernatural causes, and when
a disease lingered in a village, villagers often assumed that
the first person to come down with the disease was
a vampire. And the vampire legend can be seen as
an early attempt to try to understand contagion. I think
that's been coming through and a lot of what we've
talked about already. It's almost like vamporism is a folk
(21:22):
logic way of trying to understand the mechanics of contagion
and infection. And one of the things, actually the authors
of this paper point out that's kind of interesting, the
term nos ferrato. You know where that comes from, Robert
uh No, not well, so, it was popularized by Bram
Stoker in the novel Dracula. It most probably comes from
a Romanian word used for like satan or devil, but
(21:46):
maybe kind of a generic term for some sort of
embodied evil, like that's a nos feratu or the nos
ferato will come in. I think it, yeah, I mean,
I think it means something like that, you know, the
the unwanted one or something like that. But it's a
term that Romanian speaking people would have used for the
devil or for satan. But the authors of the paper
also note a possible, just possible connection to the Greek
(22:09):
word no suffer us, meaning disease carrier counts. I want
to see that show up somewhere, and it could be
a false cognate, but but I like the idea of
that link that, and it certainly makes sense given all
the historical accounts we've been talking about and that, you know,
they mentioned that other diseases have been proposed as the
possible link to as the possible inspiration or genesis of
(22:30):
the vampire legend, rabies, tuberculosis, orthropoietic porphyria, which in the
last episode we talked about how we think is not
a good explanation actually, but the authors here believe that
that none of the proposed diseases is adequate to explain
widespread belief in vampires in Europe during this period, and
they propose an alternative that's pretty interesting. A vitamin deficiency.
(22:53):
So they propose pelagro, which is quote a dietary deficiency
of niacin, which is also known is vitamin B three
and UH, and a deficiency of trip to fan which
is something that the body converts in denias and kind
of the same way the body converts beta caroteen into
vitamin A. This is interesting. I go to health food
stores so with with a fair amount of frequency, I
(23:15):
never see a vampire there. So I'm already liking this
theory a lot. Right, Vitamin supplements keep the vampires away? Yeah,
what is it? A vitamin B three a day keeps
the van helsing away. Yeah, A perfect ring of B
three uh. Tablets or or even lozenges or um will
will surround If you surround your bed with that, it'll
(23:36):
keep the nosferatus from creeping in. So how could a
vitamin deficiency explain vamporism. Well, plagro was first recognized in
seventeen thirty five, and it affected lots of people throughout
Europe in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
And we we've been talking in the past couple episodes
about how common vampire beliefs seem to be in especially
(23:57):
like eighteenth and nineteenth century Eastern Europe. So why then,
why they're and the authors write about how before this
many bulk food crops in Europe would have been rye
or wheat, but in the eighteenth century, European farmers begins
substituting corn or corn you know, maize, the crop from America,
(24:18):
because it actually yielded more food calories per acre of
crop land. So you might think, okay, yeah, that's easy.
You've got the same amount of farmland, but you get
more food out of it. It's a no brainer, right.
So corn became a staple crop, spreading slowly from the
Iberian Peninsula to the east and eventually becoming common in
eastern Europe. But there's a downside to switching over from
(24:39):
wheat and ride a corn meal based to a corn
meal based diet. Corn Meal contains niacin and tripped to
fan in a chemically bound state with low bioavailability, meaning
that though your body can get lots of usable calories
of energy out of corn meal, it can't get much
nicacin or tripped to fan to turn into nice and
(24:59):
so poor people throughout Europe who had switched over to
a corn meal based diet began to suffer from a
deficiency of niacin or vitamin B three, a deficiency known
as pelagra. Okay, I see where this is heading then,
uh so so so I guess now we have to
really get into the symptoms of pellagra, right, So, doctors
(25:19):
in Spain and Italy were quicker to recognize the disease
and its cause, and in Eastern Europe, apparently poverty and
the lack of medical expertise sort of kept the disease
from being diagnosed very much until well into the eighteen hundreds.
So the symptoms you mentioned, pelagra is characterized by what's
known as the four d s. You've got dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia,
(25:41):
and death. And those are some dastardly ds. I want
no part of any of those. Yeah, death is especially dastardly,
as we all know. So pellagra causes first of all, dermatitis,
which is inflammation of the skin. One easy thing to
remember is that pretty much any time you see itis
in a word, it means something about inflamation or swelling. Uh,
(26:02):
dermatitis inflammation of the skin. Now, there are many types
of dermatitis. Any rash is a form of dermatitis, but
the severe dermatitis brought on by PELAGRAAH can include rashes
on the face, rashes on the mouth, the hands and feet,
or around the neck in a formation that's known as
a castle collar casle necklace. If you look it up,
(26:23):
it's very creepy looking. It looks like a it's it's
this rash around the base of the neck. It's it's
super Does it look like something that's been like gnawing
at your neck, well, yeah, or it looks like something
somebody's put a noose around your neck or something interesting. Now,
these rashes can be discolored with reference to the rest
of the skin. They can be red and flaky, they
(26:44):
can crust over, be scaly or thick, dry and cracked,
and there can also be sores on the mouth, tongue, gums,
and lips. And what's more, the author's point out that
these areas of the skin with dermatitis can be hyper
sensitive to light quote sun Exposed areas at first become
red and thick with hypercrotosis and scaling. This is followed
(27:08):
by inflammation and adema, which eventually leads to depigmented, shiny skin,
alternating with rough brown scally areas with repeated episodes of
ari athema, a pelagrin's skin become becomes paper thin and
assumes a parchment like texture. And this is this is
an aspect of the vampire that I don't think we've
(27:30):
discussed yet, the fact that the vampire almost always has
this this pale, deathly pallor. Yeah, the vampire is often
portrayed as having a depigmented look, often depicted as kind
of an alternating like pale and then rosy red like
in the lips or the mouth. Um. And the obvious
comparison is that vampires displayed sensitivity to sunlight, of course,
(27:52):
and they must come to in the words of Count
Dracula loved the Shade and Shadow, And the authors actually
cite the novel Draecula as a point of comparison. They
I don't know if this is the best way to
do it, but the reason that citing comparison to Dracula
is reasonable because Stoker did lots of research collecting vampire
folklore from Eastern Europe, so they say his novel serves
(28:13):
as a pretty good record of folk vampire beliefs sort
of wrapped up into one character. I don't know how
legitimate that is. Maybe, I mean, I think he did
do research r right, I mean, I guess this is
a legitimate is wondering if he had syphilis or not. Yeah,
I mean, given the time period, a lot of people
had syphilis, right, so they say, you know, Count Dracula
is also described as a man of quote extraordinary pallor,
(28:36):
with not quote a speck of color about him, and
yet with a quote bloated face. Stoker also says that
the vampire has remarkable ruddiness of the lips, so pale face,
pale bloated face, and then remarkably red lips, and he
describes the three vampire brides and Dracula's castle with the
words the ruddy color, the voluptuous lips. And this could
(28:59):
be sort of a third hand reflection of the way
people with pelagra would have redness and swelling of the lips,
though often leading to a cracking that you probably would
not describe as voluptuous. I guess you know. This reminds me, specifically, though,
of some of the depictions I've seen of ghoules, which
have certain vampire qualities. And we did a whole episode
(29:21):
on ghouls a while back, that's running as a Vault
episode this month, but in particular, there was a Tales
from the Crypt episode called Morning Mess. Uh. Mourning is
in like Mourning for the Dead? Uh that in it's
a fabulous episode, my favorite Tales from the Crypt episode.
But it has some wonderful ghouls in it. And the
ghouls are depicted, you know as this kind of like
(29:41):
grayish pale creatures, hairless, um kind of eleven ears. And
they have these big grotesque lips though, that are cracked
in the manner that you're describing. Oh, I just looked
it up. Yes, exactly, They're red. They're all cracked, parched,
almost showing clear evidence of hyperkerotosis. Uh. That's that's interesting.
(30:04):
And so another thing that the authors point out here
is that vampires in folklore are often characterized as having
quote a foul mouth or bad breath, and the authors
note that this maybe the origin of the use of
garlic as a remedy for vamporism through homeopathic logic, right,
you like cures, Like, so the villagers wanted to fight
fire with fire, you've got foul mouth, give them garlic
(30:26):
to cure it. I'm thinking a lot of people had
foul mouth though, that is a very good point. Now,
I'm sure you could have fouler than average mouth, but yeah,
just eating eating a lot of a lot of corn meal,
never brushing your teeth. Yeah, so you described the lips.
But but how about the tongue of the vampire. Job, Oh,
this is a good you know, this gets reference. Sometimes
(30:46):
you dig up a corpse and say, oh, the face
is swollen. There's something you know, the tongue is swollen
or something. And apparently a person with pelaugraa will often
have an alarming looking tongue with gloss sitis, swelling of
the tongue, an extreme redness, sort of visually associating the
mouth with blood, while the skin might be pale, cracked
and parchment like. So try to picture it. You've got shiny, depigmented,
(31:11):
parchment like skin and then like a red, blistering mouth
with a swollen, red tongue. You look at that and
he's like, that could be a vampire. Yeah. Then again,
I wonder how much of that is just playing on
like the vampires we've come to know through twentieth century
movies and stuff. I think about the depiction of once
Lucy becomes a vampire and Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. You know,
(31:33):
the pale parchment like shiny depigmented skin and the hugely
red mouth. I don't know if that's always there in
the more traditional vampire folklore. I know, in fact, one
thing we've read is that sometimes it not always, but
sometimes people believed vampires to look healthy and look, you
know the opposite of this. Well, we get into the
(31:54):
swelling of the lips, right it gets confusing because like
like like thick certainly had lips are generally considered alluring.
It's one of the things about like the cracked lips,
Like that's where you get into the idea that that
it's like almost category confusion. They're right, like the lips
are big and red, but they are also grotesque. I
did not know if I should be repelled or attracted
(32:15):
to the vampire. Well, and you know, some eighteenth century
Eastern European peasants probably didn't like category confusion. Right now, another,
so that's the first d dermatitis. Another symptom is diarrhea
pea causes uh dysfunction of the gut and the g
I tract. And I know everybody from when we when
(32:36):
you first mentioned the four ds, they've they've been waiting
for you to hit this and explain the link between
diarrhea and vampires. Well, this might have the least link
to the vampire, but we'll see. So the authors say,
vampire legends, of course don't often mention diarrhea. Uh you know,
But they say, well, you probably wouldn't have expected the
records of the time to make a lot of about diarrhea.
(32:56):
But there are some associated ideas. A common part of
the vampire a gend is the idea that the vampire
needs only blood and will refuse normal food, and there
are sections in Dracula that talk about this, like the
Count keeps apologizing to Jonathan Harker for not dining with him.
You know I have dined already, and that donuts up.
Also later, when Mina Harker is turning into a vampire,
(33:18):
she describes how she found herself unable to eat food.
She says, I could not eat. To even try to
do so was repulsive to me. It's convincing, but I
would be more convinced if there were parts in Dracula
where the Count says, excuse me, I must go to
the restroom. Again, and this occurs like every like ten minutes,
and he's constantly drinking water orange juice. You know, I
(33:39):
didn't think to do this, but I should have just
searched the medical literature for the phrase diarrhea of vampire,
and I didn't try it. You know, maybe something will
come up. There's our there's our our, our metal band
name for the for the episode the vampire diarrhea. I
think that would be a good, good, good name. Wait,
what's better, diarrhea vampire or vampire diarrhea? Diarrhea of vampire?
(34:02):
Probably almost starting to move on. So the author is
right that the inability or unwillingness to eat is a
common feature of pelagra because of discomfort caused by the
mucous membrane lesions and the esophagus, the stomach, the colon.
So you get diarrhea, lack of appetite, and you might wonder, like,
why would pelagra affect dermatitis and diarrhea. Well, niacin deficiency
(34:26):
is most apparent where new cells are manufactured most frequently,
and this includes the skin and the g I tract. Okay,
you ready for the next day. For d number three,
I think three this is dementia, so people suffering from
pelagra will eventually develop neurological symptoms appearing as some form
of dementia. The lack of nyacin causes a metabolic deficiency
(34:48):
that causes neurons in the brain to degenerate, manifesting as
things like insomnia, anxiety, aggression, and depression, and these symptoms,
the author's note, are of the manic depressive type. So
folklore often claims that the vampire does not sleep at
night and becomes more rose or irritable, and the authors
compare this set of symptoms to the character of Rinfield
(35:09):
in the novel Dracula. The Rinfields is not a vampire himself,
he wants to become one. He's emulating the vampire, and
he still exhibits the characteristics associated in the folklore with
burgeoning vampiism and the character of Dr Seward, Rinfield's doctor
in the book, describes Rnfield as follows quote sanguine temperament,
(35:29):
morbidly excitable, periods of gloom, a possibly dangerous man, a
great character to be sure, yes. The authors point out
that pelagrea can also sometimes be associated with pika, and
pika of course as a disorder in which you have
a pathological appetite often, you know, for substances that are
not foods, like soil or paper, hair, ice, clay, and
(35:52):
stuff like that. Yeah, dirt and clay in particular often
are often explored in this area. Yeah, And the authors
speculate that this would be a part of the body's
desperate attempt to find something to eat with niacin in it. Right,
people with pelagra have been reported to crave substances like
vinegar and spices, and the authors draw the connection with
Rinfield's obsessive appetite for living things like spiders, birds, and mice.
(36:17):
Though I don't know, I feel like that one might
be kind of a stretch because from the vampire point
of view, wouldn't spiders, birds and mice contain some actual
nutrition and it's sort of a form of meat. Yeah,
this one feels like more of a stretch, though I
love the idea of I mean, we know that there's
often this this this necessity for the vampire to have
access to its grave dirt from its native soil. I mean,
(36:40):
that's indracula itself. Um, I don't think it's I've never
heard of story where's where it's implied that the vampire
eats the dirt. But now I kind of want that.
I want a nice grave, dirt eating vampire. Well, there's
also the idea that consecrated soil can be dangerous to
the vampire. Is it because the vampire is tempted to
ingest it? Yeah, it could be accidental, uh sort of
(37:01):
holy poisoning there. Yeah, Okay, so the fourth d time
for death. So as opposed to the modern vampire, where
we all know the modern movie vampire, I think of
like when I try to think of the best modern
movie vampire, example, maybe it's Chris Srandon and Fright Night. Right,
that's just like that's modern movie vampire to the max
(37:22):
for right Night. Uh So in that kind, in that case,
like a single bite or encounter is enough to kill
a person and turn them into a vampire. Right. But
in the vampire of eighteenth the nineteenth century Eastern European folklore,
it's generally a creature that slowly drains life, essence, and
health over a long period of time, repeatedly attacking the
(37:42):
same victims again and again in the night, and leaving
evidence in the form of a person's wasting, illness becoming
worse and worse over time, Robert, would you agree with
that characterization? Yeah, yeah, the idea that someone has drained
too much too often they can become the thing that
drained them. Yeah, or at least just be killed. But
(38:04):
it's not just like one random attack usually does it
in this lore, so the vampire was also never caught
in the attack. Instead, it was like, oof, well, you know,
Victor looks even worse than he did yesterday. Must have
been that vampire again, right, And it helps classify the
vampire more as a parasitic entity as opposed to a
predatory Uh. Entity. I think that's a good point. Yeah. So,
(38:26):
as we discussed with other diseases, including things like tuberculosis,
vampire folklore often takes what we would interpret as a
bunch of people all getting the same disease and dying
over time as the first person who got this disease
and died from it was a vampire, and they were
returning from the grave for revenge against their friends and
family members by slowly draining their life essence. Since the
(38:50):
impoverished families of Eastern Europe generally would have all had
the same diet, if one person got pelagra, you would
expect other members of the family to develop it as well,
And how long it takes pelagra to kill you is
not fixed. If untreated, it can take four to five
years to kill somebody, but it can also kill suddenly
in earlier stages when symptoms are less pronounced. And they
(39:12):
also note that a person with advanced pelagra who appears
anemic from gastro intestinal bleeding could have been interpreted as
the living dead. Well in all, I think this makes
for an interesting argument. They offer a few more shorter
lines of evidence, and I think let's look at those
after we take a break. Thank alright, we're back. Okay.
Other bits of evidence that the authors of this paper
(39:34):
we've been talking about have for pelagra being the cause
of vampires. M one is historical timing. So they point
out that the word vampire, the verd vampire first entered
English in seventeen thirty four, quote a year before pelagra
was noted by a royal physician as a quote disgusting
indigenous disease among Spanish peasants. Nothing like a like a
(39:58):
condescending royal physician. Yeah, um, but yeah, so this is
not really a piece of evidence. But the authors just
note that. Even in the novel Dracula, when Jonathan Harker
is on his way to count Dracula's castle, he stops
somewhere and eats a local breakfast, which is a porridge
of maize flower. So if people were eating corn meal
products as their main staple, they may very well have
(40:20):
been susceptible to pelagra. A couple of other interesting things
that might be kind of a stretch. One is the
link between seeds. So you know that old legend that
you can protect yourself against a vampire by scattering seeds
on the ground. Oh, this is an idea. They have
to count them all and the kind of similar in
the idea that you have like a complex not they
have to like analyze the string, right, Yeah, so you
(40:43):
can you can distract a vampire by giving them something
to occupy their attention. You throw the throw rice or
seeds on the ground and they'll be forced to count
them all right, So like the modern vert, you can
leave a magic eye book out and they would or
they've not some suducu and they would have to go
through the entire booklet and in the sunlight would destroy them.
It's the Sunday times here, do the crossword puzzle. So yeah,
(41:06):
the the author's note that millet seeds were commonly cited
for this usage, and they say, you know, that's ironic
because millet actually has an excess of loosine, which is
an amino acid that blocks the conversion of trip to
fan in denyasin, meaning millet could make a case of
pelagra even worse. I think that's an interesting coincidence, but
that doesn't really strike me as evidence. Still, it's basically
(41:29):
the joke I made earlier about taking B three tablets
and spreading them all over your your bedroom, Like that's
kind of what they're arguing here, is that you've done
that with the seats. Well, but it would be the
exact opposite of that. Actually, it would be like it
would be like spreading around B three blockers. Um. Another
thing they bring up is timing during the year. So
pellagra is often referred to as a springtime disease. Why
(41:51):
is that, Well, in the springtime, the new crops haven't
come in yet, so dried corn meal is going to
be a big part of the diet. You don't have
fresh produce to eat yet. So pair this with the
idea that St. George's day, which is in late April
or early May, is traditionally believed to be the day
that vampires would come together to plan their attacks for
(42:11):
the coming year. And in Dracula, Jonathan Harker is told
upon his arrival in Transylvania, quote, it is the eve
of St. George's Day? Do you not know that tonight,
when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in
the world will have full sway. Wow. This reminds me
a lot of the werewolf game. Right, It's like, now
all the villagers go to sleep, the vampires wake up
(42:33):
and plot against the villagers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
who do you want to kill tonight? Uh? So finally
they cite disinterment and this connection seems likely coincidental to me,
but also interesting, kind of like the millet thing. So
when a vampire was suspected, villagers would often dig up
a recently buried body to inspect it for signs of
(42:54):
vampiresm We've been talking about that. But one sign apparently
of the corpse being a vampire was that the face,
of course was read and marked with fresh blood. But
another sign was a ring of corn meal around the
vampire's mouth. Oh I don't know. It seems like kind
of a stretch. But that's also interesting now that this
is a great example of something that's just too stupid
(43:15):
to really make its way into any like cinematic or
literary treatment of the vampire. Right, the corn meal around
the mouth, Well, wouldn't that have been great if you
put that into Coppola's Dracula. So Gary oldman's walking around
in his dandy costume, but he's got corn meal all
over his mouth. He's constantly eating corn flakes. He's a
vitamin deficiency vampire, modern day London. I've got another piece
(43:36):
of evidence for them. Okay, who is the bane of
the of the vampires and Dracula? Dr Van Helsing? And
who played him so well in Francis Ford Coppola's version,
Anthony Hopkins. And what famous nutritionist figure did Anthony Hopkins
also play? I don't know Kellogg? He did? Yes, I
didn't know that. Yeah, the Road to Wellville? Okay, I
(43:56):
didn't know. Did did Kellogg give people vitamin B three?
I'm not shotting on that, but he gave a lot
of people a lot of things. And uh, Anthony Hopkins's
performance and that movie is so wonderful and so absurd.
I want to see I want to see his Kellogg
fight the vampires. I think that would have been amazing.
Man Kellogg versus Dracula, somebody make that movie right now.
(44:20):
That would be amazing. Somebody should make a series of
like the Greatest Quacks in the History of Medicine versus Vampires.
I want to see Dracula versus Who's that guy that
that US doctor who did like the goat go nad
implants on people. Oh goodness, I feel like we've discussed
him on the show before, but his name is not
(44:40):
coming to mind. Brinkley, John Brinkley, Yeah, yeah, or the
the character who thought that you could treat mental ailments
by removing teeth. That one would be another one to
throw up against the fan. I don't remember who that was. Yeah,
his name isn't isn't coming to me either, But he's
a character that showed up on the television series The
Nick as well, played by John Hodgman. Actually, oh really, yeah,
(45:02):
John Hodgman's finest performance in my opinion. Okay, so we
gotta wrap up Pelagres. So in conclusion, the authors note
you know they're there are actually some other vitamin deficiencies
that could cause similar symptoms, like the ones they mentioned
gloss idis, the spelling of the tongue anemia, and arexia pika.
But pellagra is the one that would have been historically
(45:23):
most likely to do so because of the historical timing
in the spread of corn you know, corn meal as
a food staple throughout Europe. So coming down the end here,
what do we think our verdict is? I think this
is this one seems like a mixed bag to me.
Some of the evidence, like the historical timing seems very good,
and other stuff it really seems like they're reaching at
(45:45):
the most. I feel like any of these illnesses is
going to match up with you know, just aspects of
the vampirement would have helped contribute to the way the
myth took shape. But yeah, I feel like it's it's
ultimately kind of a fool's errand to try and just
boil it all down to one particular ailment. Now, there
are a number of different illnesses that we didn't have
time to discuss here, um, particularly in cases where that
(46:08):
connection is maybe less robust. For instance, uh, the work
of Juan Gomez Alonso m D that I referenced in
the first episode. In passing, he mentioned that some connections
have been made between the vampire myth and schizophrenia. Uh.
And I feel like, you know, based on what we've
we've we've read and discussed regarding schizophrenia in the past,
(46:30):
I think there there is a lot of room for
supernatural ideas to emerge from either directly from individuals who
are struggling with schizophrenia, or people who are observing or
or trying to help individuals who are dealing with schizophrenia.
But oh yeah, I mean it's always you always have
to wonder if certain supernatural beliefs have some kind of
(46:53):
origin and conditions that cause hallucination. Right, and then I
didn't see any particular studies that looked at this, but
I I can't help but think of course of our
old our old friends sleep paralysis as well. Sleep paralysis
is often mentioned, uh in episodes or experiences that involve
demons or ghosts or your alien visitations. But certainly one
(47:18):
of the cores in the vampire myth, right, is something
came to you in your bed while you were asleep
and and preyed upon you, fed upon your blood. Uh.
So I think the idea of you know, of waking
in this this weird lucinogenic state, being unable to move.
I think that would lend itself well to uh, to
vampire interpretations, or at the very least as any of
(47:39):
these things are ultimately doing, like provide fuel for the
pre existing vampire myth flame. Yeah, And I think that's
a lot of what we need to emphasize here is
that we don't want to create the impression we think
that there is any one single condition that created the
vampire legend. I mean, it's clearly something that is a
(47:59):
very good ad myth in its own right. You know,
a lot of different versions of it, especially since you know,
we've been focusing on especially like the eighteenth nineteenth century
Eastern European version of the vampire lore, which itself is
fairly varied but contributed to what became you know, the
the Dracula vampire. But they're all kinds of vampires around
the world that have their own local inspirations. Oh yeah,
(48:22):
I mean, the so many of the like the mesu
American and South American versions are just so grotesquely fascinating. Um.
I think I've discussed some of those in the show before.
One more thing I just remembered that we hadn't mentioned,
but we took a quick look at was the idea
of linking vampire lore and specifically the story of Dracula,
to the idea of hereditary somnambulism. You know, the sleepwalk, Yeah,
(48:46):
which you can certainly see. Before people understood that that
might have just sort of mundane neurological causes. Uh, people
could look at that kind of behavior and say, oh, something,
something very creepy is going on. Now, my you know,
my child is sleepwalking out of the house in the night.
He or she is being lured out by some kind
(49:06):
of predator, some kind of supernatural parasite, inviting them out
to be drained. All right, Well, there you have it.
We're gonna go and close up the clinic for today,
but who knows, maybe we'll be back uh someday to
discuss uh and evaluate us some additional cases of alleged vamporism. Well,
I'm absolutely positive we have not exhausted the possible links
(49:27):
between medical conditions and vampire lore. So there's no way
there's not more to talk about. There will always be
more patients, all right, if you want to check out
more episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, including the
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