Vampire Clinic, Part 2

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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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

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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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,

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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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? 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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, 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, 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 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 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 episode that preceded this one. Head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you will

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