"St. Vitus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... left the ranch and came to Oakland, where I spent so much of my time in the Free Public Library, eagerly reading everything that came to hand, that I developed the first stages of St. Vitus' dance from lack of exercise. Disillusions quickly followed, as I learned more of the world. At this time I made my living as a newsboy, selling papers in the streets; and from then on until I was sixteen I had a thousand ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... moved as in a dream, as if they all were only half-awakened somnambulists; but the actors were simply victims of St. Vitus's dance. One of them, a tall old man, a mere skeleton with a long white beard, left the ring and begun whirling vertiginously, with his arms spread like wings, and loudly grinding his long, wolf-like teeth. He was painful and disgusting to look at. He soon fell ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... Flings— For they made you overseas In politer times than these, In an age when grace could please, Ere St. Vitus Clutched and shook us, spine and knees;— Loosed a plague of jerks ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... driven more than one spike into the hide of humanity; and of course she howls and dances with the pain. It's just a natural reflex action. Why, they had a fox-trot epidemic just like this after the Black Death in the fourteenth century; only then they called it St. Vitus's dance." ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... mentioned, there were five banquets annually given by the State on the several days of St. Mark, St. Vitus, St. Jerome, and St. Stephen, and the Day of the Ascension, all of which were attended with religious observances. Good Friday was especially hallowed by church processions in each of the campos; and St. Martha's Day was occasion for junketings on the Giudecca Canal, when a favorite fish, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... fevers; wine in which the bones of a saint had been dipped cured lunacy; oil from a lamp burning before the tomb of St. Gall cured tumours; St. Valentine cured epilepsy; St. Christopher, throat diseases; St. Eutropius, dropsy; St. Ovid, deafness; St. Gervase, rheumatism; St. Apollonia, toothache; St. Vitus, St. Anthony, and a multitude of other saints, the maladies which bear their names. Even as late as 1784 we find certain authorities in Bavaria ordering that any one bitten by a mad dog shall at once put up prayers at ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... language was vulgar and her appearance repulsive, ran the risk of being defamed as a witch. If in her neighbourhood a murrain seized the cattle, or a disease entered a family which baffled the little knowledge of the country practitioners—such as epilepsy, St. Vitus' dance, or St. Anthony's fire—it was ascribed to witchcraft, and vengeance was wreaked upon any reputed witch. In many parts of England she was tried by a kind of Lynch law, in a very summary manner. Her hands and feet being bound together, she was thrown ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... irate virago, "that I will allow my daughter who is studying French, Latin, Greek, and German to wash your dirty dishes?" I was driven from the house at the point of the boot. That daughter is to-day shaking and twitching with St. Vitus's dance, a physical and mental wreck from overstudy, ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... turbulence, perturbation; commotion, turmoil, disquiet; tumult, tumultuation|; hubbub, rout, bustle, fuss, racket, subsultus[obs3], staggers, megrims, epilepsy, fits; carphology[obs3], chorea, floccillation[obs3], the jerks, St. Vitus's dance, tilmus[obs3]. spasm, throe, throb, palpitation, convulsion. disturbance, chaos &c. (disorder) 59; restlessness &c. (changeableness) 149. ferment, fermentation; ebullition, effervescence, hurly-burly, cahotage[obs3]; tempest, storm, ground swell, heavy sea, whirlpool, vortex ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... temptation to the blood to make an assault upon the head, causing you, when you lift it, to look darkly upon various green spots dancing about your eyes. Raspberries again, and blackberries, sting like the dev—I beg pardon, making your hands twitch up like a fit of St. Vitus' dance. But picking whortleberries is all plain sailing. Here are the berries and there are your baskets; no getting on your knees, (although it must be confessed the bushes are somewhat low,) and no pricking your fingers ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... demanded. "Have you got St. Vitus' dance? Sit down an' quit frettin' people with your ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him, his chat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish sauce and veal pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... shaking in every muscle, afflicted by a sort of St. Vitus' dance induced by physical fear and outraged propriety. Quite apart from these, however, she experienced a third sensation which made for a nameless inquietude. She was a woman of the world, well ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... of St. Vitus on the dock was Remsen Van Dam! Well, that's all right. She isn't engaged to ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... conceal his rage, disappointment, and surprise; and in the passage (I have no doubt) was shaken by St. Vitus. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... couldn't jump out of a Boat and hit the Water, and the Short-Stop wouldn't be able to pick up a Ball if it was handed to him on a Platter with Water Cress around it, and the Easy One to Third that ought to have been Sponge Cake was fielded like a One-Legged Man with St. Vitus dance trying to ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... nearer the truth to say that they are voluntary victims of a mental epidemic like that which developed itself in the St. Vitus's dance of the Middle Ages. The subjects of that disease went through the same spasms, convulsions, and painful racking of the limbs which accompany such cases of this personation as are not designed deceptions. Even those accidentally ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... wonder sometimes how it feels To be an ass—a beast we beat condignly Because, like yours, his life is in his heels And he is prone to use them unbenignly. The ladies (bless them!) say you dance divinely. I like St. Vitus better, though, who deals His feet about him with a grace more just, And hops, not for he ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... called "La Pisciarella" was peculiarly adapted to those ailments which are incidental to childhood and youth—to wit: chlorosis, St. Vitus' Dance, constipation, ringworm, otootitis and other perimingeal disturbances, urticaria, moon-sickness, scrofula and ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... its good luck it was not safe to loiter near the place after dark, if you wished to keep your senses. And if you took so much as a fallen apple belonging to Miss Betty, you might look out for palsy or St. Vitus' dance, or be carried off bodily to ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... woman now led Miriam into the room. The girl's hands were bound with thick cords, and dry grass clung to her dress and rough black hair. A dark fire glowed in her eyes, and the muscles of her face moved incessantly, as if she had St. Vitus' dance. When Dorothea looked at her she drew herself up defiantly, and looked around the room, as if to estimate the strength ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... shouting with laughter at the appearance of the car; and even my lips twitched, though I would have vowed it was St. Vitus's dance if anyone had accused me of a smile. "Ha, ha, the automobile looks like nothing so much as a market-woman going home with the family provisions for a month. But will she ever get home?" Here he became spasmodic, and as he had made ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... perhaps, ill concealed, was Madame Rosalie's evolutions on these occasions. I fancy, now, that I see her slight figure skipping into the room, dancing a jig round the table, never at rest, screeching all the while at the highest pitch of her voice, with every limb in motion, as if she had St. Vitus's dance, or, as they say, went on wires. I can only compare the play of her limbs to that of one of those children's puppets of which all the limbs—head, legs, and arms—are set in motion by pulling ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... fault! You haven't got St. Vitus' dance, have you? I never heard there were any Tarantula spiders here. You don't go dancing into the Doctor's room, do you? He'll give you a dancing lesson!' said the old gentleman, sitting down again to chuckle, and looking ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... of coffee. From behind the receipt of custom he took an observation, and then he began to prance round, as one who had suddenly been attacked by a combination of the fire of St. Anthony and the dance of St. Vitus. He skipped around the saloon like a grasshopper on a gravel lot, and smiled, and smiled, and smiled—looking his Fourth-of-July prettiest. Of course Miss Ruff nudged her companion above the fifth rib, and whispered something complimentary to the beaming proprietor; and when ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... and punctilious, he had obviously no power to afford relief. He was a curiously nervous man of polished manners whose eyelids twitched at intervals with a sort of slow St. Vitus' dance. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... sought a spell to make the man, she was forced into marrying, fall into a trance, just before the marriage ceremony was to take place; and that, instead of bringing this about, the spell Edward Curtis had sold her had caused her to have St. Vitus's Dance,—was adroitly trapped into admitting that she had really wanted her fiance smitten with paralysis. "A wish," Gerald Kirby announced, with a dramatic flourish of his hands, "that so aroused ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... said, for Miss Bibby was fidgeting about as if afflicted with St. Vitus's dance in her arms and shoulders. "Is there any ammonia in the house? Never mind, I'll go across and get ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... St. Vitus's dance is said to have been cured by the afflicted person paying a visit to the tomb of the saint, near Ulm, every May. Indeed, there is no little reason in this assertion; for exercise and change of air will ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... came from Mazzara in Sicily, whither they still carry, to his lonely shrine, epileptics and others distraught in mind. And were I in a discursive mood, I would endeavour to trace some connection between his establishment here and the tarantella—between St. Vitus' dance and that other one which cured, they say, the bite of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... to its origin, on the lips of a small unseemly rag of human-kind. The speaker's skin was grey and blotched; he spoke in a kind of broken song, with much variety of key; his gestures seemed (as in the disease called St. Vitus's dance) to be imperfectly under control; he was badly dressed; he carried himself with an air of shrinking assumption, as though he were proud to be where he was and to do what he was doing, and yet half expected to be called in question and kicked out. I think I never ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... swollen by oedema beyond all recognition, looking, in fact, like bags full of rags. One woman, suffering from hydrocephalus, sat in a little cart, the dolorous motions of her head bespeaking her grievous malady. A tall girl afflicted with chorea—St. Vitus's dance—was dancing with every limb, without a pause, the left side of her face being continually distorted by sudden, convulsive grimaces. A younger one, who followed, gave vent to a bark, a kind of plaintive animal cry, each time that the tic douloureux which was torturing ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... psychological fox—the-law-of-association-of-ideas, you will understand. Meanwhile, thank your stars, dear, that you did not live in Massachusetts some years ago, or you would certainly nave gone to heaven in the shape of smoke. How you stare, you white owl! As if you thought St. Vitus had rented my tongue for a dancing-saloon. It is all because the Bishop is coming. My blessed Bishop! Yes, put the handsomest spray in my hair, and then, if you make me look young and very pretty, you may do as you like with ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... marriage I had bought a connection in the Paddington district. Old Mr. Farquhar, from whom I purchased it, had at one time an excellent general practice; but his age, and an affliction of the nature of St. Vitus's dance from which he suffered, had very much thinned it. The public not unnaturally goes on the principle that he who would heal others must himself be whole, and looks askance at the curative powers of the man whose own case is beyond the reach of his drugs. ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... that this sort of mania marked the dancing in Europe which was suppressed by Pope and Bishop. This choreomania marked a Flemish sect in 1374 who danced in honour of St. John, and it was so furious that the disease called St. Vitus' dance takes its name ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... not wanting some signs of a healthy skepticism. When, during an epidemic of St. Vitus's dance at Strassburg, [Sidenote: 1588] the citizens proposed a pilgrimage to stop it, the episcopal vicar replied that as it was a natural disease natural remedies should be used. Just as witches were becoming common in England, Gosson wrote in his School of Abuse: ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... of the mind; and Hildesheim, morbos imaginationis, aut rationis laesae, (diseases of the imagination, or of injured reason,) which are three or four in number, frenzy, madness, melancholy, dotage, and their kinds: as hydrophobia, lycanthropia, Chorus sancti viti, morbi daemoniaci, (St. Vitus's dance, possession of devils,) which I will briefly touch and point at, insisting especially in this of melancholy, as more eminent than the rest, and that through all his kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, cures: as Lonicerus hath done de apoplexia, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... every nerve to make the most of. Here are fasts, processions, Prayers of Forty-Hours; here, as in Vienna and elsewhere. In Vienna was a Three Days' solemn Fast: the like in Prag, or better; with procession to the shrine of St. Vitus,—little likely to help, I should fear. 'Rise, all fencible men,' exclaims the Government,—'at least we will ballot, and make you rise:'—Militia people enter Prag to the extent of 10,000; like to avail little, one would fear. General Harsch, with reinforcement of real soldiers, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... is not a very satisfactory explanation of St. Vitus's dance; and though St. Vitus is not in the Roman martyrology of our day, yet he is in the almanacs of the fifteenth century, and probably earlier. The martyr Vitus makes the 15th of June a red letter-day in the first almanac ever printed. Who was St. Vitus, and how did ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... is particularly valuable in intermittent fever or ague, malignant measles, dysentery, diarrhoea, intermittent rheumatism, St. Vitus's dance, indigestion, nervous affections, malignant sore throat, and erysipelas; its use being indicated in all ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... and bodies of infants, also called milk scurf, if suppressed by salves, cream, unsalted butter or merely by warm bathing, are often followed by chorea (St. Vitus' dance), epilepsy, a scrofulous constitution and in ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... seventy-four female epileptics, twenty-two were born dead, one hundred and ninety-five died from convulsions in infancy, twenty-seven died in infancy from other causes, seventy-eight were epileptics, eleven were insane, thirty-nine were paralyzed, forty-five were hysterical, six had St. Vitus's dance, one hundred and five were ordinarily healthy. That variations in the nervous system which produce more or less unusual mental peculiarities and which do not take the form of nervous disease are inherited, the most superficial consideration ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... tempest shakes the windows with a furious hand. The room is faintly illuminated by a candle which has St. Vitus' dance. Rousselot, our little orderly, knits away industriously in the circle of light. I smoke a pipe at once acrid and consoling, like this minute itself in the midst of the ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... Eve by rotating a wheel round a wooden axle wrapt in hemp, and that they drive their pigs through the fire thus made. At Obermedlingen, in Swabia, the "fire of heaven," as it was called, was made on St. Vitus's Day (the fifteenth of June) by igniting a cart-wheel, which, smeared with pitch and plaited with straw, was fastened on a pole twelve feet high, the top of the pole being inserted in the nave of the wheel. This ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... his hand to his heart: "Have you ever known me to fight for evanescent laurels? Have I ever tried to feed the human race, which is a race of minors, on surrogates? Have I ever imitated the flights of Heaven with St. Vitus dance, confusing the one with the other? Have I not always acted in accord with the best, the inmost knowledge I had, and in obedience to my conscience? Was I ever ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... had its effects subsided, and the graves of its 25,000,000 victims were hardly closed, when it was followed by an epidemic of the dance of St. John, or St. Vitus, which like a demoniacal plague appeared in Germany in 1347, and spread over the whole empire and throughout the neighboring countries. The dance was characterized by wild leaping, furious screaming, and foaming at the mouth, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it - wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that too, - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... waddling tot you ever saw, a Minnie Warren of a little duck, and put him in the cage. A tempest in a teapot! Cheri went immediately into fits and furies. He hopped about convulsively. You might have supposed him attacked simultaneously with St. Anthony's fire, St. Vitus's dance, and delirium tremens. He shrieked, he writhed, he yelled, he raved. The chicken was stupid. If he had exerted himself a little to be agreeable, if he had only shown the smallest symptom of ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... loss of balance in walking and standing are due to St. Vitus' Dance will be treated under that head. Other cases, where loss of power in the motor nerves causes this unsteadiness, are treated of here. As these cases differ totally from St. Vitus' Dance in cause and treatment, it is well carefully to distinguish between them. In St. Vitus' Dance, ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... house, standing back from the road, and with a double row of boards laid down to serve as a path to it. But this board-walk was scrubbed perfectly clean. They went in without knocking. There was nobody there but an old woman seated before the fire shaking all over with the St. Vitus's Dance. She gave them no salutation, calling instead on "Barby!"—who presently made her appearance from ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... or thought she saw, the young woman to whom a certain person was engaged. She turned to look, backed into the traffic-sign and put it in motion. Instantly motors were careering at each other. Instantly a purple policeman grown suddenly black, was smitten with St. Vitus. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... Then, after a dreadful wait, he heard queer noises down below, and was positive the exit ports had opened. The snakelike slithering and shuffling which followed would mean that the enemy was inside the NX-1. The thought brought St. Vitus' dance to his limbs, and, try as he might, he couldn't still them. Then again the ports opened, the gloomy silence returned, and Angus McKegnie was alone ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... me! his lordship among revellers! oh! the blest prodigy! well, well, I give no promise, mark; but should a certain damsel lack a partner, adod. I know not—sixty-live shows with an ill-grace in a rigadoon, but for a minuet: well, well, St. Vitus strengthen me, and I ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... encountered Caleb Plummer leading in his daughter. This spectacle restoring her to a sense of the proprieties, she stood for some few moments silent, with her mouth wide open; and then, posting off to the bed on which the Baby lay asleep, danced in a weird, St. Vitus manner on the floor, and at the same time rummaged with her face and head among the bedclothes, apparently deriving much relief ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... to which Mr. Pope alludes, appeared to me also, as I have elsewhere[408] observed, to be of the convulsive kind, and of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus's dance; and in this opinion I am confirmed by the description which Sydenham gives of that disease. 'This disorder is a kind of convulsion. It manifests itself by halting or unsteadiness of one of the legs, which the patient draws after him like an ideot. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... hands and fingers on the table, with great speed, trembling nervously the while, as though in a fit. Opposite her sat a young girl, who was also engaged in something, and who trembled in the same manner. Both women appeared to be afflicted with St. Vitus' dance. I stepped nearer to them, and looked to see what they were doing. They raised their eyes to me, but went on with their work with the same intentness. In front of them lay scattered tobacco and paper cases. ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi |
