Medicine: Modern Times

Four hundred uniformed young women tend the machines which sew and fill sacks of granulated sugar, fold and fill boxes of lump sugar in a factory at Lille, France. Flitting fingers, fixed eyes, bent heads heed every zip, snip, swish, zoop, bupp, bopp of the machines—60 seconds every minute, 60 minutes every hour, 40 hours every week.

Last week the pounding monotony became too much for one workwoman’s clattering brain. She silently fainted. Another, noticing her, fainted. That attracted the attention of a third, who screamed. Another screamed, and set off a concatenation of emotion in which startled women yelled, fought, fainted, writhed hysterically.

Finding no intoxicant gases in the sugar factory, doctors concluded that the monotonous machines had driven the young women into a mass hysteria, the psychic phenomenon used with striking effect by Charlie Chaplin in his last picture, Modern Times.