A History Teacher Reacts | "Mass Hysteria Throughout History" by Sam O'Nella

hey youtube welcome back to another history teacher reacts video with mr. Terry as I continued my search for historical knowledge found here on the Internet alright I thought it was time to check out another video from Salmonella going through his videos this one kind of caught my eye it is titled mass hysteria cases throughout history I don't know right people talk about humanity is pretty hysterical a person is smart but people are insert adjectives there but yeah I thought this guy my and and definitely thought it'd be something to check out so um if you liked this video make sure you and I know that just go down to the description and go to the link for the original video so you can give them like and subscribe I'm sure you'll love Salmonella z' videos good chance you might have seen one already but if you haven't definitely check that out and if you haven't sub to my channel yet love to have you along as I continue again for my search to find as much great history content as I can and hopefully add a little bit from a teacher's perspective as well alright with that let's go ahead and get started with mass hysteria cases throughout history [Music] hey kids if you've ever been Black Friday shopping or visited the Diablo subreddit recently chances are you've encountered mass hysteria at some point we've done both of those right so anything more cancerous than Black Friday crowds and video game forums if there is I don't want to meet it s hysteria is known medically as mass psychogenic illness or mpi for short it's basically just when a bunch of people start acting a fool for no discernible reason other than maybe it eating this meat this guy's ripping his head off this guy's beating out a guy the book this lady is she's got issues stressful environment being that this sort of thing is naturally very noticeable there's loads of documented cases found all throughout history let's take a look at a few this first one is what made me make this video in the first place so one day sometime in the Middle Ages a group of nuns in a French convent or enjoying a quiet uneventful day until one of them decided to start meowing you know like a cat you'd think this would last all of four seconds before another nun was like excuse me sister Gertrude would you kindly cut the [ __ ] but instead another nun joined in and another until basically the entire nunnery was exchanging mouths like a group of Communists trading card enthusiasts this was a communist trading card enthusiast but what nunnery was exchanging mouths like a group of Communists trading card enthusiasts Oh integrated into their way of life it said that on the given day they would stand there meowing in each other's faces for hours at a time could you imagine being the first outsider to witness this you might laugh now but as they say everybody gangsta til the nuns start meowing I'd board my belt II moved to Malaysia without even thinking miles more terrifying than this pile of garbage as you can imagine though after a while it stopped being scary and just got annoying leading to the neighbors calling in a band of soldiers to deal with the situation hey guys can we talk to you for a second bout oh yeah all due respect but we have orders to literally beat the hell out of you with whips till you start acting like people again sorry sir it's just force of habit haha have it seriously though we would rather go to hell for throttling a gaggle of nuns then put up with another minute of your [ __ ] caprese our next event took place in the parish so what's one person started and then they all started meowing wait so does that mean they stopped did they really whipped all these nuns to stop stopping to meow oh gosh chef Fatima Portugal in the year 1917 it all started with three Shepherd children ages ten nine and seven respectively they were like greetings fellow Portuguese Yeats we've been seeing visions of the Virgin Mary and she told us to tell you that some real crazy shits gonna go down in the sky on October 13th now if the random farm children started spouting out prophecies to the public today you'd say huh what tomfoolery go playing some dirty dirty little dirt baby but keep in mind the past is a different country and Portugal is a different country so that's like different countries squirty got to think about Plus this was during World War one time where a lot of people were holding out for a miracle to begin with so the kids story was actually picked up and even spread by local newspapers to the point where what one would have the so the kids story porch of geese found people who think they're funny everywhere vanished mysteriously they yield a fine thing to happen in sky pretty soon yeah that happens with so many of those prophet ik things right it's just hey something's gonna happen at some time in some place right people latch onto it it was actually picked up and even spread by local newspapers to the point where when the day finally came at least 30,000 people gathered in Fatima to witness the alleged miracle lo and behold on that day the Sun began zooming around careening towards Earth and sending rays of multicolored light cascading across the sky creating a light show like nobody's ever seen keep in mind this happened in the 20th century way after the era where belief in divine jiggery and/or poker he was considered mandatory but naturally there are political skeptics to non-believers present and even they saw it all happen or so they thought how do we know the Sun didn't really whiz around half late that day well number one use your freaking brain and number two accounts differed wildly from person to person while some say the sun's zigged hither others say it's zagged thither and others said it shined a brilliant yellow and stayed perfectly still as such it was eventually concluded that the event was just a combination of MPI and weird eye stuff from too much Sun staring although I'd like to believe it was real just that Jesus's illusion skill was way higher than his alteration at the time Oh Skyrim that's it Sam's going to hell why for blasphemy trust me that was the least offensive part of that joke our next tale took place in 1962 in Tanganyika which was basically just the beta version of Tanzania the nation had just declared its independence from Britain the previous year and with the future so uncertain tensions were naturally running high around this time one little girl in atanga Nick in school ended up handling the stress and a bit of an unusual way rather than overeating or staring at her ceiling for hours like a normal person she just started laughing and laughing and laughing pretty soon her classmates at the all-girls school she attended began to join in to all hysterical laughing is a totally real thing oh yeah it's stress induced right I've seen it happen all the time yeah like it's it's a it's a I don't know if it's some kind of a psychological defense mechanism of when it's overly stressed situation and your your brains like trying to compensate your stress with some kind of release of humor I don't know exactly how that works but that's totally a thing but again getting a whole bunch of people we all know laughter is kind of contagious anyways okay this is so far actually kind of believable right but I'm sure it gets weirder right the point where 95 that the 159 students called the galleys which lasted anywhere from a few hours to 16 days straight beyond just the unprovoked cackling other odd behavior included aimless running and occasional violence the problem got so severe that the school was closed down temporarily leading to the chortle roaming the streets spreading the affliction further thousands of people from all strata came to be affected with 13 additional schools being shut down in the progress over the course of the hysteria several others do we dare look at the school names and stuff with 13 additional schools elementary 3 and knuckles sonic the hedghog reference hype university doe we're just kidding engineers aren't allowed to laugh it's being shut down in the progress over the course of the hysteria several other symptoms began to present themselves as well ranging from obvious ones such as breathing problems fainting random screaming to more anomalous things like rashes despite all this no physical cause could be found leaving MPI is the only explanation the epidemic finally died down after between 6 and 18 months of day-in day-out laughter depending on the village well this whole thing likely sucked for most people involved it probably could have been worse a lot of the time when I'm alone I'll think to myself man if I ever go full schizo I hope I'm one of the laughs ones now one of the screamy ones with this story yeah just maybe if I put my mind to it and believe hard enough I can be both flashback to the year laughing and bringing the city of Strasbourg at the time part of the HRE a woman named mrs. trophy began fervently dancing in the streets for no discernible reason for hours then days all without music of course her only breaks consisted of occasional food intake and passing out from exhaustion when night came if you saw that today you just be like huh drugs but apparently people found a pretty inspiring because within a week 34 others had joined in and after a month there around 400 this wasn't your casual bobbing up and down neither this [ __ ] made zumba look like Tai Chi here's the best modern-day simulation I could find now imagine that both of those people were the same person and you got the dancing plague this would take a toll in any healthy person let alone a medieval city dweller but despite bleeding feet and aching bones they just kept going and well they say four hundred people all of a sudden joining in and dancing in the Holy Roman Empire Oh wonder they collapsed back they went so hard for so long that a good portion straight up [ __ ] died from cardiac arrest it got to the point where around 15 dancers were kicking the bucket every day before the city decided they had to do something about it they managed to rule out any divine or supernatural causes which was necessary just cuz yeah back in medieval times as [ __ ] stupid they have interest sir that was their answer to all psychological issues in history right so many cultures if you had any kind of we have so many diagnoses for this type of hysteria or schizophrenia all those things but back then you know different cultures usually inserted some kind of religious explanation right I've come a long way with psychological analysis but yeah that was common in history not just Christian communities basically any religious community actually surmised that it was a natural disease caused by too much hot blood as per that whole four humors thing that was popular at the time as medieval doctor era yeah mages dr. Renaissance almost air plague era actually before that we were actually looking at some of these in my class the other day doc talking about doctors like plague doctors and like the masks these doctors aware of people were asking me what were those for actually in real life have you seen those what they would do is put spices and stuff and and different fragrances and stuff like this that they thought could help protect the doctor so it was all stuffed in there but it also made it look really horrifying these masks so doctors you're laying there almost dying you see this thing demonic looking thing coming up but yeah that was the practical use of it at least so they thought it was practical he's caused by too much hot blood as per that whole four humours thing that was popular at the time as for a cure their prescription was get this more dancing I can see where they were coming from it seems legit logic if you got a song stuck in your head you play it till you're sick of it same kind of thing but here's where they goofed the authorities actually went out of their way to facilitate the dancing setting up a big stage area and even hiring musicians to keep the afflicted moving do you think they all dance the same dance like a giant choreographed dance see that would be impressive if they just all did that for hours but I'm sure there's just people spazzing out right all this achieved was attracting more passerby who are like men mass psychogenic illness looks freakin epic let's get in on that causing the contagion to become even more widespread seeing that their solution backfired the city then went the other way and completely banned any public dancing those who still showed signs of the mania were subsequently carted off to the shrine of Saint Vitas where an exorcism like ritual was performed on them this ended up being highly effective presumably for no other reason than that the dancers believed it would work and you wonder if in these these mass hysteria things how many people are actually like being hysterical I guess and how many people are just faking it copying it that people ask that about like French or look what they're not ventriloquist's what do you got hypnotist vain joke hypnotists when you know you have this whole line of people and how many are just playing along and how many are actually like being affected and in these mass hysteria things you wonder what ratio of people are really into it and who's just kind of faking it just to go along with it or what I call it being a po right where you can't really tell if someone's legit or not yeah after nearly two months the plague was quelled well this whole thing was most likely a case of good old-fashioned mpi some historians believe it might have been egged on in part by argot ISM a state of psychosis brought on by eating tainted bread which I talked a little bit about in this video ding and hey while I'm chilling from my channel I might as well give a shout-out to another as well today's video was sponsored by cheddar a network focused on producing fascinating content covering topics like technology products businesses and the like through the lens of innovation here's one about desire paths you know like those lines of dead grass from people taking more convenient rousu places it's one of those things that plenty of us have thought about but never actually explored in a way I should go video chair is full of intriguing stuff like that I highly recommend giving them a look if you're more science oriented they still got you covered with their cheddar Explorer series this one's all about how we can be sure if a species is really extinct or not they talk a bit about animals we thought were gone that suddenly reappeared out of nowhere super interesting go check it out anyway that's all for today until next time I'm salmonella and thank you for watching [Music] cool all right so yeah we saw just some interesting yeah mass hysteria things I've always found those types of things pretty interesting mostly just from the psychological perspective of what you know you can explain away usually well some what's that explain us explain away something like a single hysterical person right there's so many things about our brain and psychology that we still don't understand Buono weak people can absolutely be prone to hysterical moments but when you have mass hysteria right a bunch of people that said they saw the Sun doing weird things you know but were they already prone to maybe that being happened as it was a prophecy first and then they show up and just get a you get the confirmation bias is that what that's called in psychology of that happening but then like the people laughing in the village first and I get if it's alright and you're you know during your class period everyone's laughing but the hearest said that people were there were some people that were consistent laughing for like 16 days that's when you it's getting to the yeah definitely the unhealthy mass hysteria level it was gone Holy Roman Empire yeah with with yes of the dancing and again they I'm glad he inserted that in history hysterical episodes really often diagnosed as some kind of demonic possession or something similar that's something supernatural right and doing that unfortunately a lot of people were probably you know they try to do these exorcisms or shoot they just think they're demonic and maybe they leads to executions or something like that when today we have so many medical medical explanations and treatable things for that so usually and stuff like that happens people don't chalk it up to the supernatural these days right but interesting how that how that kind of is when you look at like Salem witch trials or something are when they think there's supernatural events happening and attributed to demonic possession you know or something like that so the only one I think I'd heard of that the one with the moving sons son or whatever I swear I had heard that one before but having all these different accounts obviously just credits some of it but always interesting right when you when you hear about those it's almost like when you hear about like alien abduction stories or something throughout history the more you talk about that stuff the more it seems to happen because people have had kind of implanted in their mind right and you see those things throughout history and they change it always interesting how science will overcome what was done in history right that that's that's been a big thing with scientific progressions accounts for things in history that may have seen unexplainable when we find out more and more natural explanations right of things what do you a good Priti called those some kind of crazy stuff pretty light-hearted little little moments of history there from Sam so that was great yeah always good to kind of take a break with Sam right and get that funny bone going so I'm not sure if I was able to add much historical context too much there but I know it's just kind of interesting makes for an interesting point of topic if you know of other mass hysteria events like throughout history shehram share them in the comments or better yet if you have not joined our discord server there'll be a link down below definitely join we have a currently as this is posted we have over 3,000 members very active community of just history fans and love to talk about anything like that of topics I needed topic you could think of so definitely do that it's a great way to interact with the community interact with yeah but you like-minded people they're also a great place for video suggestions I get a lot of video suggestions happening there and there's a specific channel in the discord for video suggestions a little bit easier to keep track of that way um also if you would like to support the channel definitely unplug the patreon go down to the description I have a link to there right now all tier levels basically starting at a dollar are able to participate in a weekly poll for videos that get on this channel this day today if you are watching this today I posted a new poll with three new videos so if you'd like to have a little more influence check that out it's a great way to support the channel as well alright with that make sure if again if you like the original video gonna have the description below and give them a like and subscribe over there to Sam and I think we'll go ahead and call it here alright have a good day bye

Channel: Mr. Terry History

Views: 563,803

Keywords: react, history, mass hysteria

Id: MFYVBr6EBzk

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 02 2019