The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7177 p830
8 December 2001

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Touch of the spider [more]
Health and violence [more]
Education, education [more]

Touch of the spider

The tarantella is a Neapolitan dance, performed with great rapidity and energy to rousing music in 6/8 time. It is reputed to be based on the dance carried out by harvesters who had been bitten by the tarantula spider, in the hope of overcoming the evil effects of its venom.

The spider was called after the town of Tarenton in Apulla, but the wolf-spider concerned (Lycosa) is not the same as the genuine tarantula, which is indigenous to the south-west United States and tropical South America, and which is a far more fearsome beast. Nevertheless, in the 15th to 17th centuries in southern Europe the story of the spider bite that made you dance with pain and delirium was current.

Samuel Pepys in 1662 relates having met a well-travelled man who told him that during the summer harvest in southern Europe groups of fiddlers paraded through the fields hoping to be hired by the peasants who suffered from spider bites, to play them lively music to alleviate their distress. Indeed, three centuries ago musicians could reckon to make a profit from the tarantula scares, and this enhanced the popularity of the tarantella as a musical form. Auber, Weber, Liszt, Chopin, Rossini, Heller and many other composers wrote their 6/8 tarantellas, which certainly stimulated rapid and vigorous dancing to the point of exhaustion.

In The Lancet for 9 November, Dr Bynum of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London has discussed the former diagnosis of tarantism, which was made on the basis of breathlessness, palpitations, thirst, emotional lability and bizarre sexual impulses. Sufferers were irresistibly driven to dance for hours in the hope of experiencing relief. Young adults, more often women, were affected most commonly, but children and the aged were not exempt. The craze even extended to monks and nuns in religious establishments. Vigorous dancing proved contagious in places, leading rural populations to neglect their harvesting, to their later distress. Many remedies were tried for the disorder, but music alone seems to have proved to exert any beneficial effect.

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Health and violence

An editorial comment in The Lancet for 3 November makes the point that violence is one of the prominent causes of death and disability, and therefore the proper concern of doctors. It is not sufficient to concentrate medical interests upon the healing process alone. To try to reduce the enormous harm and associated costs involved in violent behaviour some sort of political activity is called for, and the World Health Organization has recognised the situation by setting up a Department of Injury and Violence Prevention to address it.

One of the social forces that implicate violence and call for political intervention is the depiction of violent scenes on film and television screens, which is possibly an encouragement for persons bent on violence to follow a pattern. Fictional environments that have aggression as a basis have shown some correlation with violent acts committed by an observer.

There are larger forces also. Sexual violence, and particularly rape, is regularly used in warfare situations as a weapon for terrorising communities. Moreover, it is believed that abuse in childhood may increase the likelihood of future criminal and violent behaviour patterns in women. It is regrettable that the brutal repression of women, which has come to light from the activities of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan since 1996, failed to elicit a response from more civilised countries despite adverse publicity promoted by human rights organisations. There should be wider interdisciplinary studies made of the possibilities of violence prevention.

The concept of globalisation and the widening of commercial competition are contributing factors to violence worldwide. Western democracies cannot afford to allow themselves the failure openly to admit the consequences of poverty, famine, disease, corruption and violence in their political strategies. These factors that contribute to violent behaviour have hitherto been neglected when programmes of research into the nature of the roots of violence are planned. The wider development of health services is an integral part of any concerted attempt to counteract the evil forces behind social violence.

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Education, education

In these days of approaching every problem in a narrowly reductionist spirit, so that a broader perspective becomes impossible, we seem to have lost sight of the true meaning of education, a word which our political leaders pronounce ad nauseam but are careful never to define.

The true nature of education, as the etymological origin of the word demonstrates, is the drawing out of natural, latent, intellectual capabilities of an individual, not the pushing into a child of high-sounding mantras and sociopolitical ideas that someone else has thought up and thinks are clever. As Mary Warnock remarked (in ‘The Oxford companion to the mind’, 1987): "All children are legally entitled to education, not merely that they may get better jobs (for some of them may get no jobs at all) but that their lives may be of a decent quality."

Indeed, education should increase both the depth and scope of understanding, independence, and pleasure in the environment. And the same philosopher (in ‘The intelligent person’s guide to ethics’, 1998) asserts that many children emerge from school cynical and depressed because they have never been instructed in ethical considerations. As a natural reaction to this failure they may turn to violent fanatical fundamentalism in their political and religious views.

We already have more than enough of such antisocial thinking and violent acting. Teachers, Baroness Warnock insists, must from their earliest contact with children, tell them unequivocally that certain things are wrong, cruel or dishonest and others brave, kind or good.

It is not enough to teach children the principles and methods of computing, administration, business management and wealth creation so that they may play a future part in a greedy and foolish global culture whose goal is more material possessions and a downplaying of the sterling virtues of sympathy, well-wishing and understanding and support of others. Undoubtedly, the prospect of having to teach so broad a range of human concerns as well as reading, writing and arithmetic is daunting for any instructor. Yet unless it is squarely faced and resolved, our future lies in more and more violence and cheating, bred of ignorance and unconcern.

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