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These old accounts from Baglivi are curious and interesting, but I am cautious about receiving any stories a hundred years old, if they involve an improbability, as his stories about the cure of the tarantula bite by music certainly do. I am disposed to wait for future developments, bearing in mind, of course, the very singular case you have unearthed.
A younger contemporary of his at Rome, Baglivi, was unceasing in his call to the profession to return to Hippocratic methods, to stop reading philosophical theories and to give up what he calls the "fatal itch" to make systems.
It was indeed, gradually on the decline, but up to the termination of this period showed such extraordinary symptoms that Baglivi, one of the best physicians of that time, thought he did a service to science by making them the subject of a dissertation.
Mead, Baglivi, and all the learned of their time throughout Europe, seem to have entertained no doubt of this fact, which, however, philosophical and curious enquirers have since found to be built upon fraud and fallacy. Vide Serrao, della Tarantula o vero falangio di Puglia. See a curious Dissertation on the musical modes of the Hindoos by Sir W. Jones.
From these first symptoms the child rallied, but his entire organism had been profoundly affected by the venom circulating through it. The phenomena which have been observed in this young patient correspond so nearly with those enumerated in the elaborate essay of the celebrated Baglivi that one might think they had been transcribed from his pages.
Homer, Plutarch, Theophrastus, and Galen say that music cures rheumatism, the pests, and stings of reptiles, etc. Diemerbroeck, Bonet, Baglivi, Kercher, and Desault mention the efficacy of melody in phthisis, gout, hydrophobia, the bites of venomous reptiles, etc. There is a case in the Lancet of a patient in convulsions who was cured in the paroxysm by hearing the tones of music.
From these first symptoms the child rallied, but his entire organism had been profoundly affected by the venom circulating through it. The phenomena which have been observed in this young patient correspond so nearly with those enumerated in the elaborate essay of the celebrated Baglivi that one might think they had been transcribed from his pages.
Whether regular or irregular, the house is plastered to a certain depth with a coat of silk, which prevents earth-slips and facilitates scaling when a prompt exit is required. Baglivi, in his unsophisticated Latin, teaches us how to catch the Tarantula.
Until it shall have done so, the bridge of organic evolution is not quite complete; yet even as it stands to-day it is perhaps the most stupendous scientific structure of the nineteenth century. The work of Baglivi was hardly begun before his early death removed one of the most promising of the early eighteenth-century physicians.
Baglivi refines on the doctrine of effluvia, by ascribing his cures of the bite of the tarantula to the peculiar undulation any instrument or tune makes by its strokes in the air; which, vibrating upon the external parts of the patient, is communicated to the whole nervous system, and produces that happy alteration in the solids and fluids which so effectually contributes to the cure.
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