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produced in their homes.”
12
As one of Charcot's associates noted, hysteria
sometimes afflicted even those who escaped physically untouched. Even a
weak tremor could turn normal people into hysterics and “liars.” These con-
clusions were echoed by a Russian psychiatrist's report on the mental effects
of an earthquake in a Polish-speaking town, namely, a “weakening of the
cortical centers of inhibition and a significant elevation of nervous excitabil-
ity. . . . The people gave the impression of automata, which fell into tonic-
clonic convulsions as a consequence of the smallest noise.”
13
similarly, a
Dr. schwarz reported on the effects of the 1880 earthquake on the island of
Chios: “With regret i must report that the majority of the young women fell
sick after the beginning of the earthquakes, specifically some of epilepsy,
some of spasmodic attacks. if a keen observer of human nature were to be-
hold these suffering faces, tinged more blue than pink, he would certainly
be astounded that fear and horror can cause such a transformation.”
14
Psychiatrists considered the possibility that psychic “shock” could be
a direct result of the seismic “shock,” rather than of the fear it induced.
Eduard Phleps, an assistant at the psychiatric and neurological clinic in
the Austrian city of Graz, admitted the difficulty of this question in a 1903
article entitled “Psychosis after Earthquakes.” it was eight years after the
Austrian Earthquake Commission had begun collecting and publishing the
reports of lay observers (chapter 7), and Phleps noted that “in all lay ob-
servations [
Laienbeobachtungen
] illnesses are reported that, according to the
form of the phenomenon, may very well be connected in part to the pow-
erful natural disaster.” The self-reports of survivors were essential, Phleps
argued, since neither the scientific literature nor newspaper reports could be
trusted: “There are always elaborate descriptions of general panic, the manic
racing-around of those in despair, mortal fear, and the like.”
15
Phleps drew
his evidence primarily from the cases documented by the investigation of
the 1895 earthquake in Ljubljana, less than two hundred kilometers from
Graz. Phleps concluded that earthquakes did seem to correspond to a “well-
defined clinical picture,” distinguished by “headaches, dizziness, and nau-
sea.”
16
He was inclined to believe that the ills of earthquake victims had a
unique etiology, one explained by the significance of gravity for the human
psyche. He cited Humboldt: “'A bad earthquake destroys at once our oldest
associations'; we could add our most solid associations, since the constant
influence of gravity presents not only a constant stimulus for the molecular
constitution of all organic and inorganic bodies, but may also be a constant
and important factor for the formation of the totality of our purely psychic
capacities, perhaps the most fundamental and important, the significance of
which in psychology and physiology, it seems to me, has received too little
