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Updated: April 30, 2025
According to Wood, gangrenous ergotism, or "Ignis Sacer" of the Middle Ages, killed 40,000 persons in Southwestern France in 922 A. D., and in 1128-29, in Paris alone, 14,000 persons perished from this malady.
It was supposed to kill an unhallowed child and cure a hallowed one. In the Hebrides, likewise, there were many cases of similar poisoning. Epidemics of ergotism have been recorded from time to time since the days of Galen, and were due to poverty, wretchedness, and famine, resulting in the feeding upon ergotized bread.
In this pamphlet Guarini traversed the professor's propositions with a good deal of scholastic ergotism: 'As in compounds the hot accords with the cold, its mortal enemy, as the dry humour with the moist, so the elements of tragedy and comedy, though separately antagonistic, yet when united in a third form, et cetera et cetera.
Very generally the appetite and digestion are preserved to the last, and not rarely there is a most ferocious hunger. Wood also mentions a species of ergotism characterized by epileptic paroxysms, which he calls "spasmodic ergotism."
There have been epidemics of poisoning from eating cheese containing tyrotoxicon. Ergotism from eating bread made with ergotized wheat is now rare, but pellagra from the consumption of mouldy maize, and lathyrism, due to the admixture with flour of the seeds of certain kinds of vetch, are still common in Southern Europe. Symptoms.
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