Religious Madness in the Vormärz : Culture, Politics, and the Professionalization of Psychiatry

In 1849 Germany’s leading psychiatric journal reported a curious “illness” that, “like a plague,” had swept through a number of rural Swedish communities: young girls subject to an “involuntary drive to preach.” The “preaching illness” began with symptoms of a “strongly-felt awakening towards repentance and improvement,” headaches, and burning in the chest. It then progressed to “automatic convulsions” and visions, which the girls “imagine are the effects of God’s spirit.” In this state, they preached a message admonishing against sin—against dancing, drinking, card-playing, and other depraved behavior—and prophesied the coming destruction of the world. Whole communities had been infected, believing in the girls’ message and in their connection to God. Identifying new forms of religious “madness” (and other mental illnesses) was a learning process, and one important venue for this was the collegial exchange of case histories in professional journals. In a postscript to the article, Carl Friedrich Flemming (1799–1880), an editor of the journal and one of Germany’s leading asylum psychiatrists, appended his own recent treatment of a case in Prussia that remarkably matched the symptoms of the Swedish preaching illness. A young village girl took to falling into “epileptic fits” and, in a trance state, would admonish people in her community about their sins. She attained “great respect through her preachings and prophesying”; “listeners streamed” to hear her, even paying money for the privilege. A doctor was called in to examine her; she was ultimately removed to an asylum where, through Flemming’s successful cure, she “never again made the least attempt to preach,” and was able to be returned home without any further “public nuisance.” The preaching illness was but one variant of a larger epidemic of religious madness that physicians, asylum alienists, and others were convinced plagued their society. They saw patients troubled by anxiety, guilt, and terror over real or imagined sins; people who were bewitched or possessed by the devil; prophets and mystics whose diseased imaginations led them to believe themselves endowed with divine powers. This was the heyday of religious madness, an illness discussed at length in the professional literature and registered in asylum statistics across Europe and North America.