"Vitus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... he jerked and skipped up and down, never stopping an instant, just as if he had Saint Vitus's dance. "Ain't I a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... flux can delight us, Blown like a billow by winds of the sea: Still let us bow to the shrine of St. Vitus— ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... lady friend to drink a cup 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 ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... declared she had 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 my client's indignation ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... that it gives a sore 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 to the verge ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... 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. If the hand of the same side be applied ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... her 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. They were making cigarettes. The woman rubbed ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... Jenny's excitement, "you've got one of your foolish fits on I think." "You will dirty the bed,—take your foot off." "Nonsense it's quite dry, besides it's on my chemise,—I wish you'd go and make tea, if you are in such a hurry,—one would think you had got St. Vitus' dance,"—for Jenny in her agitation, and also to make noise to prevent any indiscreet movement of mine being noticed, had kept moving about noisily and ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... and arranged themselves along the walls, which spread into dimly-lighted aisles and arches. On the painted windows he saw Interlachen, withits Franciscan cloister, and the Square Tower of the ruins. In a pendent, overhead, stood the German student, as Saint Vitus; and on a lavatory, or basin of holy-water, below, sat a cherub, with the form and features of Berkley. Then the organ-pipes began to blow, and he heard the voices of an invisible choir chanting. And anon the gilded ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... moment that this was a case of paralysis agitans, or St. Vitus' Dance. There was nothing involuntary in her unrest. It was all part of an intense vitality and an intense desire for self-expression. When she was in one of her worst tempers, she would pace up and down a room, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... autographs, a labour exacting enough in itself, and egregiously so to him, who, being no ready penman, cannot sign so much as his name without strange contortions of the face (his nose, even, being essential to complete success) and painfully suppressed Saint-Vitus-dance of every muscle in his body. This, with his having been put in the Commission of the Peace by our excellent Governour (O, si sic omnes!) immediately on his accession to office, keeps him continually employed. Haud inexpertus loquor, having for many ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... vigorously for herself in time of revolution. But experience proved no less plainly that the limbs, that is, the country districts, generally refused to follow the head in these fantastic movements. Hence, after a short spell of St. Vitus' activity, there always came a time of strife, followed only too often by torpor, when the body reduced the head to a state of benumbed subjection. The triumph of rural notions accounts for the reactions of 1831-47, and 1851-70. Paris having once more regained ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... diplomatic shrewdness, should have made such an egregious error as to part with Alaska at a merely nominal price,[72] the more so that when the transfer took place gold had long been known to exist in this Arctic province. Vitus Bering discovered traces of it as far back as the eighteenth century. William H. Seward, Secretary of State under President Johnson, was mainly responsible for the purchase of this huge territory, which covers an area of about 600,000 square miles, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... Injuries and Diseases of the Nervous System. It was a pleasant, suburban, old-fashioned country-seat, its gardens surrounded by a circle of wooden, one-story wards, shaded by fine trees. There were some three hundred cases of epilepsy, paralysis, St. Vitus's dance, and wounds of nerves. On one side of me lay a poor fellow, a Dane, who had the same burning neuralgia with which I once suffered, and which I now learned was only too common. This man had become hysterical from pain. He carried a sponge in his pocket, and a bottle of water ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... 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
... a nervous twitching of the eye at all times, and when he was excited the muscles of his face all jerked in unison like Saint Vitus' dance. At my question every muscle in his face, as the Princeton man in Bee's boat ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... severe. Persistent and serious infection, however, is capable of producing nervous symptoms even in children who were not before nervous, and we must recognise that prolonged infection makes a favourable soil for neuroses of all sorts. The frequency with which St. Vitus's dance accompanies rheumatism in childhood forms a good example of this tendency. The child who, from time to time, complains of the transient joint pains which are called "growing pains," and who is found by the doctor to be suffering from ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... Gang on the bleachers, Carl went mad with fervor. He kept shooting to his feet, and believed that he was saving his country every time he yelled in obedience to the St. Vitus gestures of the cheer-leader, or sang "On the Goal-line of Plato" to the tune of "On the Sidewalks of New York." Tears of a real patriotism came when, at the critical moment of a losing game against the Minnesota Military Institute, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... which he seemed to satisfy by an attempt at fellatio. Was this depravity? I would say 'No!' after reading his subsequent confession, found in his room after his death by suicide. This was brought about by his too intimate relations with the rector's son who contracted St. Vitus's dance and in the delirium of a fever that followed from nervous exhaustion told of him and his doings. A thorough investigation took place and M. fled, a broken-hearted and disgraced man, who, as the result of remorse, relentless ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... IV.—A. C., colored female, age 32 on admission to the Government Hospital for the Insane, on June 18, 1909. Father died of dropsy; one brother was killed in a railroad accident; one sister suffered from St. Vitus' dance; another died of tuberculosis. Patient was born in Jamestown, Virginia, was healthy as a child. Does not remember having had the usual diseases of childhood; had a severe attack of typhoid fever when quite young. Attended school until fourteen years of age, having reached the third grade. ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... other instances of the miraculous power of the child-saint from the lives of St. Genevieve (423-512, A.D.), St. Vitus, who at the age of twelve caused the arms and legs of the Emperor Aurelian to wither, but on the Emperor owning the greatness of God, the "child-magician," as the monarch had termed him, made Aurelian whole again; St. Sampson (565 A.D.), who cured ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... statistics of a large town is no easy matter, and I must therefore ask that I may be supposed to have taken every possible precaution in order not to exaggerate the reality of a great evil. Certain diseases, such as apoplexy, palsy, epilepsy, St. Vitus's dance, and lockjaw or tetanus, we all agree to consider as nervous maladies; convulsions, and the vast number of cases known in the death-lists as dropsy of the brain, effusion on the brain, etc., are to be looked upon with more doubt. The former, as every doctor knows, are, in a vast proportion ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell
... 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: [Sidenote: ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... written by its London author in ink which is scarcely dry, another boy at the adjoining instrument is, by the reverse of the process, attentively reading the quivering movements of the needles of his dial, which, by a sort of St. Vitus's dance, are rapidly spelling to him a message, via the wires of the South Western Railway, say from Gosport, which word by word he repeats aloud to an assistant, who, seated by his side, writes it down ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... where 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 ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... lived a man who was destined to establish a precedent. He was to prove to the world that a rolling stone is capable at times of gathering as much moss as a stationary one, and how it is possible for the rock with St. Vitus dance to become more coated than the one that is confined to perpetual isolation. Like most iconoclasts he was of humble birth, and had no foundation upon which to rest the cornerstone of his castle, which was becoming too heavy for his brain to ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... Coleridge," writes the former to his friend Rickman, "he is worse in body than you seem to believe; but the main cause lies in his own management of himself, or rather want of management. His mind is in a perpetual St. Vitus's dance—eternal activity without action. At times he feels mortified that he should have done so little, but this feeling never produces any exertion. 'I will begin to-morrow,' he says, and thus he has been all his lifelong letting to-day slip. He has had no heavy calamities ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... opera-glasses, she was seized with the eager desire to make him an habitue of her salon, the new salon that had just been launched. Madame Marsy was bitten by that tarantula whose bite makes modern society move as if afflicted with Saint Vitus's dance. A widow, rich and still young, very much admired, she had set herself to play the role of a leader in society to pass away the time. She was one of those women forever passing before the reporters' note-book, as others pass in front of a photographic apparatus. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... 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 ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... same flaw, or St.-Vitus' tic, manifests itself ere long in another way. In the year 1157, he went with his Standard to attend King Henry, our blessed Sovereign (whom we saw afterwards at Waltham), in his War with the Welsh. ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... which of course is very clever of him. He's marvellously ambidexterous so long as he doesn't know you're looking at him. Unfortunately, my eye arrested him in the double act. Lucy, my eye must have some horrible malignant power, for it instantly gave him St. Vitus's dance. Have you ever noticed ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... provincial town, where this day Professor Blank is to deliver one of his archaeological lectures at the Town Hall. We are met at the door by the secretary of the local archaeological society: a melancholy lady in green plush, who suffers from St Vitus's dance. Gloomily we enter the hall and silently accept the seats which are indicated to us by an unfortunate gentleman with a club-foot. In front of us an elderly female with short hair is chatting to a very plain young ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... touch them; but they are subject in youth to attacks upon the nerves, which one would not expect in so healthy a class. In a town situated near to, and like Prevorst, the children were often attacked with a kind of St. Vitus's dance. They would foresee when it would seize upon them, and, if in the field, would hasten home to undergo the paroxysms there. From these they rose, as from magnetic sleep, without memory of what ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... as if they had St. Vitus' dance, when Mrs. Simon's carriage stopped at their door, with the glossy, sleek-coated horses and their silver-mounted harness, and the liveried servants. They bowed and smirked, and skipped round, and pulled little "Cash's" ears for not getting her "change" quicker, and offered to send home ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... given to relieve spasm, or irregular and painful action of the muscles or muscular fibers, as in Epilepsy, St. Vitus' Dance, etc. ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... probable 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 from ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... were five in number, all of them experienced and able statesmen—Zuylen van Nyvelt, Joos de Menyn, Nicasius de Silla, Jacob Valck, and Vitus van Kammings. The Queen was in the privy council-chamber, attended by the admiral of England, Lord Thomas Howard, Lord Hunsdon, great-chamberlain, Sir Christopher Hatton, vice-chamberlain, Secretary Davison, and many other persons ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... kicked his slippers off keeping time, and his head dodged about with every turn of the quick tune. A stranger, not understanding the state of mind into which a negro gets after playing "The devil among the tailors," would have supposed he was afflicted with St. Vitus's dance. The mistake would soon have been perceived, for two of the boys having tired themselves out with manoeuvres of every kind, were obliged to sit down to get some breath, and Bacchus fell into a sentimental mood, after ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... 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 change many obstinate diseases. The bite of the tarantula is cured ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... old, Johnson in the fulness 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 coat, 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... there." He turned to the adjoining table where a younger man was sewing up a forearm, ripped from wrist to elbow by a piece of shell. "Lend me your saw, will you, Martin?—Yes, I know the heat's fearful! but I can't work by a lamp that has Saint Vitus!" He turned back to his table. "Now, my lad, you just clench your teeth. Miss Cary and I aren't going to hurt you any more than we can help. Yes, above the knee." The younger surgeon, having finished ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... rotating a wheel round a wooden axle wrapt in hemp, and that they drive their pigs through the fire thus made.[816] 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 cartwheel, 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 fire was made on the summit of ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... with decision, "and only enter. Valets do not usually enter a room shouting college songs or with St. Vitus's dance in their faces; so the contrary may be assumed without fatuous or ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... more curious than ever; and her hands and feet, and indeed her whole body, got such a fidgeting, that I fancied she began to think of getting St. Vitus for a bedfellow. Her eagerness made her ask me two or three times what made me think so; and, seeing her anxiety, I purposely delayed in order to worry her. I wished to see how far I could run her up. When I did begin to explain, I went ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... MacMurchada, Aillil Molt, Mag Mell and Donnchad Bodb, they form a galaxy of talent which, alike for the euphony of its nomenclature and the elasticity of its technique, has never been equalled since the days of ST. VITUS. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... a child or children, they are syphilitic. They may be deformed, or they may be feeble-minded or idiots. They may live at home for years, always ailing, always sick. They may develop epilepsy, St. Vitus' dance, skin disease, or mental vagaries, and they may have to be put into institutions for the feeble-minded, or they may die by ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... messengers had handed to him. They, in their turn, were seen to bound joyfully over the ground at some word which Don Rafael had spoken to them, and which seemed to have produced on Zapote an effect resembling the dance of Saint Vitus. ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... by these successive bold pushes towards north and east, it still remained uncertain whether Siberia did not join on to the northern part of the New World discovered by Columbus and Amerigo, and in 1728 Peter the Great sent out an expedition under VITUS BEHRING, a Dane in the Russian service, with the express aim of ascertaining this point. He reached Kamtschatka, and there built two vessels as directed by the Czar, and started on his voyage northward, coasting along the land. When he reached a little ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... at a great table in a room large enough for a marriage feast, ill-lighted by an oil-lamp, whose flame appears to be afflicted with St. Vitus's dance—a room quite free from ornament, with furniture responding exclusively to the purposes of resting, eating, and drinking, with curtainless windows looking out upon the moonless night that is beginning to sigh and moan at the approach of a storm—my dinner is not ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... which the captive was bound began to shine softly with a blue light. The slave twisted in his bonds, screaming again. Rhythmic shudders jerked at his limbs. His lips turned greenish white. The shudders grew more pronounced till it seemed as though he were afflicted with a sort of horrible St. Vitus dance. Then the tall Rogan pulled back the lever. The slave hung away from his supporting shackles, limp ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... way, would you like to know why universities suffer from this curse of nervous disease? Why the great personages stammer or have St Vitus' dance, or jabber at the lips, or hop in their walk, or have their heads screwed round, or tremble in the fingers, or go through life with great goggles like a motor car? Eh? I will tell you. It is the punishment of their intellectual pride, than which ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... all 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 the ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... 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 ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... 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 ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... boundless vanity and a romantic vein of maudlin sentiment that seduces him from time to time into the gin-and-water corner of an Indian newspaper. Under the heading of "The Forest Ranger's Lament," or "The Old Shikarry's Tale of Woe," he hiccoughs his column of sickly lines (with St. Vitus's dance in their feet), and then I believe he feels better. I have seen him do it; I have caught him in criminal conversation with a pen and a sheet ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... one child in ninety-one already examined has had the form of nervous disease known as St. Vitus's Dance, or chorea. So prone are we to overlook moderate evils and moderate needs that the child with aggravated St. Vitus's Dance is apt to be cured sooner than the child who is just "nervous." Teachers cannot know whether twitching eyes, emotional storms, constant motion ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... said, and he jerked and skipped up and down, never stopping an instant, just as if he had St. Vitus's dance. "Ain't ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... because the periods have been more carefully observed. Certain diseases are communicated to the child apparently by a process like inoculation, and the child is from the first affected; such cases may be here passed over. Large classes of diseases usually appear at certain ages, such as St. Vitus's dance in youth, consumption in early mid-life, gout later, and apoplexy still later; and these are naturally inherited at the same period. But even in diseases of this class, instances have been recorded, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... unintelligible. Decoded, it meant that I, whose betting pseudonym is Sanguine, wished to invest with Messrs. Lure, commission agents (not bookmakers, no, not for a moment), whose telegraphic address is "Pactolus, London," a sum of ten pounds (carburetter) on a horse called St. Vitus to win (stammer), and twenty pounds (tyre) for a place (scream). I had done this for various reasons, none really good, but chiefly because every paper that I had opened had urged me to do so, some even going so far as to dangle a double before me with St. Vitus as one of the horses. Nearly all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... of organs that his perceptions were uncommonly quick and accurate. His head, and sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like the effect of palsy. He appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps or convulsive contractions of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus' dance. He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair buttons of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings and silver buckles. Upon this tour when ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... into service; of the boys the oldest, Georgie, stayed at home, the second, Vitus by name, went to the Shuller Farm, and the third—well, I am going to tell ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the expiration of the hour, "smoothed her horrid front" in the polite and placable presence of Rufus. He insisted on shaking hands with her; he took pleasure in making her acquaintance; she reminded him, he did assure her, of the lady of the captain-general of the Coolspring Branch of the St. Vitus Commandery; and he would take the liberty to inquire whether they were related or not. Under cover of this fashionable conversation, Simple Sally was taken out of the room by Amelius without attracting notice. She ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... pavement; and in it loomed, strapped to a chair, dark in the shadow, a creature in a long black robe and a skull cap drawn close over his head; a vague, contorted, writhing and gibbering horror, of whose St. Vitus twistings and mouthings we children scarcely ventured to catch a glimpse as we hurried up the narrow street, followed by the bestial cries and moans of the solitary maniac. This weird and grotesque sight, more weird and more ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... to be suffering from St. Vitus's Dance, fits, chronic cold accompanied by violent sneezing, or any disease necessitating involuntary ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... arsk him all about it. The language question didn't worry me any. I can pitch the cuffer in any bat from Tamil to Arabic, an' the only chap I couldn't compree was a deaf-an'-dumb man who suffered from St. Vitus' Dance, which made 'im stutter ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... as much a profession as praying and shop-keeping. Happy is he who is born stroppiato, with a withered limb, or to whom Fortune sends the present of a hideous accident or malady; it is a stock to set up trade upon. St. Vitus's dance is worth its hundreds of scudi annually; epileptic fits are also a prize; and a distorted leg and hare-lip have a considerable market value. Thenceforth the creature who has the luck to have them is absolved from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... slight melancholia within the last year. Choreic movements have been present off and on for about a year, but have not been marked until a little while previous to the incident which brought her to us. The diagnosis had been made that it was a case of mild St. Vitus dance. During all the year Nellie had been regarded as in general unreliable, but nothing of importance had happened ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... afflicted with a sudden attack of St. Vitus's dance, so indefinite was the number of her courtesies; while Jeff, on the driver's seat, looked as solemn as if he were to drive Gregory to the cemetery instead ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... recommend the Makololo polka to the dancing world, but I have the authority of no less a person than Motibe, Sekeletu's father-in-law, for saying "it is very nice." They often asked if white people ever danced. I thought of the disease called St. Vitus's dance, but could not say that all our dancers were affected by it, and gave an answer which, I ought to be ashamed to own, did not raise some of our young countrywomen in the ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... hope and trust thy Tick doleru, or however you spell it, is vanished, for I have frightful impressions of that Tick, and do altogether hate it, as an unpaid score, or the Tick of a Death Watch. I take it to be a species of Vitus's dance (I omit the Sanctity, writing to "one of the men called Friends"). I knew a young Lady who could dance no other, she danced thro' life, and very queer and fantastic were her steps. Heaven bless thee from such ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... festivals 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 ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... it were worth while for Peter the Great of Russia to send Vitus Bering coasting the bleak headlands of ice-blocked, misty shores to find the Western Sea, it would—as one of the French governors reported—"be nobler than open war" for the little colony of New France to discover this "sea of the setting sun." ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... with a species of dance—not that of Saint Vitus, but a sort of double-shuffle, with a stamp of the right foot at the end—in which he was prone to indulge, consciously and unconsciously, at all times, and the tendency to which he sometimes found ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 from those ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... to write another letter to Herr Sesemann, stating that these unaccountable things that were going on in the house had so affected his daughter's delicate constitution that the worst consequences might be expected. Epileptic fits and St. Vitus's dance often came on suddenly in cases like this, and Clara was liable to be attacked by either if the cause of the general alarm ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... commonly known as St. Vitus' dance, is not a rare disease, and we doubt not that examples of it have been seen by most of our readers, more particularly in young ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... infirmities, especially if her 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
... he demanded. "Have you got St. Vitus' dance? Sit down an' quit frettin' people with ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... simply marking time with the body, as an accompaniment to music, though the same—without the music—is done with only the head and forefinger in a New England meeting-house at psalm time. (The peculiar dance named in honor of St. Vitus is executed with or without music, at the option of the musician.) But the body is a clumsy piece of machinery, requiring some attention and observation to keep it accurately in time to the fiddling. The smallest diversion of the thought, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... convulsions), if her eyes had not 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, Saint 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
... always, as long as I can remember, been very nervous and sensitive. When about seven years of age, I was attacked by St. Vitus' Dance. Before that I cannot say whether I was particularly nervous or not. Afterward it was impressed upon me by the remarks of relatives that I was nervous, so that I soon took note of this condition myself. The manner in which this ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... what even temporary absence means. A house without a man in it is as nice and tidy and peaceful and attractive and cheerful as a grave in a cemetery. It is as pleasant as Mark Twain's celebrated combination of rheumatism and St. Vitus dance, and as empty as a penny-in-the-slot chocolate machine in ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... impatience—she was in no mood to wait long—and then she rang the bell. It should be remarked that the old lady, either from excitement or some apprehension of failure, was shaking and jumping as if she had St. Vitus's dance. Hedges came in. ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... whole villages, transforming them into bedlams filled with unrestrained madmen. Those who have studied the strange and terrible mental epidemics that visited Europe in the middle ages, such as the tarantula dance of Apulia, the chorea Germanorum, and the great St. Vitus' dance, will be prepared to appreciate the nature of a scene at a Huron village, described by Father le Jeune in 1639. A festival of three days and three nights had been in progress to relieve a woman who, from the description, seems to have been suffering from ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... of the social Juggernaut slowly crushing the beautiful form of liberty lying prostrate on the ground. * * * I saw men, women and children, without number, sacrificed on the altar of the capitalistic Moloch, and I beheld a race of pitiful creatures, stricken with the modern St. Vitus's dance at the shrine ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... (a) Fits or Convulsions in Childhood, Epilepsy, St. Vitus Dance, or other nervous diseases? Insanity? Scrofula? Tuberculosis? (b) Mental and bodily state of near relations ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... Bunch, I know just how you feel. I'm quite a bit to the St. Vitus myself, because if Clara J. ever gets wise that I've been speculating again after faithfully promising her to cut out all the guessing contests, she's liable to say something unkind. I simply must get that money back, Bunch, before she knows I lost ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... ushered in by "the first expedition to Kamchatka". The commander of this expedition was the Dane VITUS BEHRING, who was accompanied by Lieutenant MORTON SPANGBERG, also a Dane by birth, and ALEXEI CHIRIKOV They left St. Petersburg in February 1725, and took the land route across Siberia, carrying with them the necessary materials with which in Kamchatka to build and equip the vessel ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... St. Vitus' Dance which prevailed in his day, and which he called chorea lasciva, by cooling his patients in tubs of cold water; and Priesnitz brings his patients also to the right point by baths that allow no idleness ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... a well-known name for erysipelas, and St. Vitus's dance for another distressing disease. These names came from the fact that these saints used to be chosen out as the special patrons of people suffering from such diseases. In the same way the disease which used to be called the King's Evil was so named because people formerly believed ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... like a bull; and, indeed, in almost all his most interesting scenes, performs such strange shakings of the head, and other antic gesticulations, that when I first saw him act, I imagined the poor man laboured under the paralytical disorder, which is known by the name of St. Vitus's dance. In short, he seems to be a stranger to the more refined sensations of the soul, consequently his expression is of the vulgar kind, and he must often sink under the idea of the poet; so that he has recourse ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... 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 will, but ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... saw only one individual) was by the lake-side, and within a rod or two of the bowling alley. What a strange, composite creature he is! thrush, warbler, and sandpiper all in one; with such a bare-footed, bare-legged appearance, too, as if he must always be ready to wade; and such a Saint Vitus's dance! His must be a curious history. In particular, I should like to know the origin of his teetering habit, which seems to put him among the beach birds. Can it be that such frequenters of shallow water are rendered less conspicuous by this wave-like, up-and-down motion, and have actually ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... bad health for a long time. We called our home doctor, but he got no better. Finally he had the St. Vitus's Dance, and our doctor did not know what to do. So I wrote to you and did as you told me; I got two bottles of your "Favorite Prescription," and one bottle and a half did the work all right. At that time, eighteen ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... saw, 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
... the 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 Saint Vitus's Dance—found, as I had 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 learned that I was sickening for it, and that the acute ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester |
