Medicine: Fever v. St. Vitus’s Dance

By accident a Manhattan physician. Dr. Lucy Du Bois Porter Sutton, 40, has discovered a quick palliative if not a certain cure for St. Vitus’s Dance, hideous childhooddisease. Victims twitch, quiver, quake and grimace uncouthly. The posturings resemble a grotesque dance like the oldtime “shimmy” and “Charleston.” During the ignorant Middle Ages victims of the disease were taken to “dance” before images of St. Vitus, patron of comedians.* It was believed that those who danced before St. Vitus would be certain of good health during the following year. Hence the general name for the disease. The medical term is chorea, which like chorus connotes dancing. Chorea, or St. Vitus’s Dance, is a nervous ailment which the afflicted cannot help, caused by some infection. The causative organism has not yet been recognized. Rheumatic fever is often associated with St. Vitus’s Dance. Seven out of ten victims are girls. They are usually “nervous,” “high-strung” children to begin with. The disease usually burns itself out in two, three months. Sometimes, however, it recurs. Sometimes it extends into adult life. Last week Dr. Sutton explained how she had been treating a St. Vitus boy with sedative drugs, the usual remedy. In this case the drug aggravated the “dancing” spells. But through misunderstanding the child continued to receive the drugs, which were as mild poison to him. After two weeks he broke out with a rash. His fever climbed intermittently as high as 106.4° When Dr. Sutton cured the boy of his fever, she noted that his St. Vitus’s Dance was gone.

Fever is one of the body’s ways of killing germs. For every germ there is a maximum temperature above which it cannot live. Experimentally, doctors are trying to raise body temperature above the germ-death heat by injecting fever-causing germs or nonspecific proteins, or by electricity. Dr. Sutton, having noted her patient’s recovery from St. Vitus’s Dance after a poison-produced fever, took a chance on another St. Vitus child by injecting typhoid serum. This second case grew feverish, sweated, recovered. She tried typhoid-paratyphoid serum on another. He too sweated and recovered. When she had cured 24 children of ugly St. Vitus’s Dance with serums, she felt sufficiently confident to report, last week, her success.

*With Christian rites St. Vitus, a child, drove demons from a son of the pagan Roman Emperor Diocletian (284-305). Nonetheless, Diocletian had St. Vitus tossed into a kettle of boiling oil because he would not recant his Christianity. St. Vitus miraculously escaped from the oil, but died soon after from that and other tortures.