The Discovery of Ergotism (Saint Anthony's Fire?)

The final part focuses on the discovery of ergotism in the late 17th century and the consequent considerations made in eighteenth-century European medical and botanical texts. These sources feature a variety of interpretations, suggesting that it was not always straightforward to distinguish ergotism from other diseases such as scurvy. One debated topic is the description of the characteristic convulsive symptoms of ergotism that only seem to have been documented by German scientists in the early modern period. The collected sources covering a broad time span highlight that while we still have scarce knowledge of real epidemics of ergotism in the past, the various meanings of Saint Anthony's Fire offer an illustration of the potential pitfalls of medical semantics