"Vitus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... distressing. Supposing the attack to be only temporary, I paused and, much to my relief, she soon showed signs of recovery; and in the course of time she came to a standstill looking up into my face in an inquiring sort of way, apparently wondering why St. Vitus had not paid his respects to me also. A second attempt to follow the music met with results similar to the first, and during the third attempt, which seemed to be trembling on the verge of a failure, St. Vitus ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... perturbation; commotion, turmoil, disquiet; tumult, tumultuation^; hubbub, rout, bustle, fuss, racket, subsultus^, staggers, megrims, epilepsy, fits; carphology^, chorea, floccillation^, the jerks, St. Vitus's dance, tilmus^. spasm, throe, throb, palpitation, convulsion. disturbance, chaos &c (disorder) 59; restlessness &c (changeableness) 149. ferment, fermentation; ebullition, effervescence, hurly-burly, cahotage^; tempest, storm, ground swell, heavy sea, whirlpool, vortex ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... from Mazzara in Sicily, whither they still carry, to his lonely shrine, epileptics and others distraught in mind. And were I in a discursive mood, I would endeavour to trace some connection between his establishment here and the tarantella—between St. Vitus' dance and that other one which cured, they say, the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... egregiously so to him, who, being no ready penman, cannot sign so much as his name without strange contortions of the face (his nose, even, being essential to complete success) and painfully suppressed Saint-Vitus-dance of every muscle in his body. This, with his having been put in the Commission of the Peace by our excellent Governour (O, si sic omnes!) immediately on his accession to office, keeps him continually employed. Haud ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... with a species of dance—not that of Saint Vitus, but a sort of double-shuffle, with a stamp of the right foot at the end—in which he was prone to indulge, consciously and unconsciously, at all times, and the tendency to which he sometimes found it difficult to resist. He was beginning to hum the sharply-defined air to ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men, you will yet see that—Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner. Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, were't not thou St. Vitus' imp—away, thou ague! ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... known as Alaska was first explored by the Russian officers Captain Vitus Bering and Chirikov in I 741 They visited parts of the coast between Dixon Entrance and Cape St Elias, and returned along the line of the Aleutians. Their expedition was followed by many private vessels manned by traders and trappers. Kodiak was discovered in 1763 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the fulness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... twitter, flicker, flutter. turbulence, perturbation; commotion, turmoil, disquiet; tumult, tumultuation|; hubbub, rout, bustle, fuss, racket, subsultus[obs3], staggers, megrims, epilepsy, fits; carphology[obs3], chorea, floccillation[obs3], the jerks, St. Vitus's dance, tilmus[obs3]. spasm, throe, throb, palpitation, convulsion. disturbance, chaos &c. (disorder) 59; restlessness &c. (changeableness) 149. ferment, fermentation; ebullition, effervescence, hurly-burly, cahotage[obs3]; tempest, storm, ground swell, heavy sea, whirlpool, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... loss of balance in walking and standing are due to St. Vitus' Dance will be treated under that head. Other cases, where loss of power in the motor nerves causes this unsteadiness, are treated of here. As these cases differ totally from St. Vitus' Dance in cause and treatment, it is well carefully to distinguish ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... party: the other always joins the strongest side. The one will not conform to any common practice: the other will subscribe to any thriving system. The one is the slave of habit: the other is the sport of caprice. The first is like a man obstinately bed-rid: the last is troubled with St. Vitus's dance. He cannot stand still, he cannot rest upon any conclusion. 'He never is—but always ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... magic circle of hellish superstition. It was a convulsion which in the most extraordinary manner infuriated the human frame, and excited the astonishment of contemporaries for more than two centuries, since which time it has never reappeared. It was called the dance of St. John or of St. Vitus, on account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it was characterised, and which gave to those affected, whilst performing their wild dance, and screaming and foaming with fury, all the appearance of persons possessed. It did not remain confined to particular ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... if her attention had not been forcibly diverted from her misery for a moment, after which she stood for some time silent, with her mouth wide open; and then, posting off to the bed on which the baby lay asleep, danced in a weird, Saint Vitus manner, on the floor, and at the same time rummaged with her face and head among the bedclothes, apparently deriving much ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... good luck it was not safe to loiter near the place after dark, if you wished to keep your senses. And if you took so much as a fallen apple belonging to Miss Betty, you might look out for palsy or St. Vitus' dance, or be carried off ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... great table in a room large enough for a marriage feast, ill-lighted by an oil-lamp, whose flame appears to be afflicted with St. Vitus's dance—a room quite free from ornament, with furniture responding exclusively to the purposes of resting, eating, and drinking, with curtainless windows looking out upon the moonless night that is ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... head, and sometimes also his body shook with a kind of motion like the effect of a palsy: he appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps, or convulsive contractions[29], of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus's dance. He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair-buttons[30] of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings, and silver buckles. Upon this tour, when journeying, he wore boots, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... more vaulting ambition than his brother, he was looked upon as the head of the family. In appearance he was prematurely old and withered up, with a pallid face and palsied frame, with great restless, staring eyes. He perpetually tossed his head about from side to side, as though afflicted with St Vitus' dance. Giacopo was unmarried, a libertine, notorious as a gambler and a blasphemer, a spendthrift, and jealous—beyond bounds—of the popularity and pre-eminence of Piero and Lorenzo de' Medici. He ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... "defender" of those afflicted with throat diseases), Catharine (cf. St. Catharine's flower), Christopher (cf. St. Christopher's herb), Cyriacus, Dionysius, Erasmus (Italian: San Elmo; cf. St. Elmo's fire), Eustachius, George the Martyr (cf. St. George's herb), Margaret, Pantaleon, and Vitus (cf. St. Vitus's dance). Luther's Sermons on the First Commandment (1516) may be compared lot references to some of these ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... would say 'No!' after reading his subsequent confession, found in his room after his death by suicide. This was brought about by his too intimate relations with the rector's son who contracted St. Vitus's dance and in the delirium of a fever that followed from nervous exhaustion told of him and his doings. A thorough investigation took place and M. fled, a broken-hearted and disgraced man, who, as the result of remorse, relentless persecution, and exposure through several ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... his kingdom. Among these were many Norse and Danes. The acquaintance may have dated from the apprenticeship on the docks of the East India Company; but at any rate, among the foreign navigators was one Vitus Ivanovich Bering, a Dane of humble origin from Horsens,[4] who had been an East India Company sailor till he joined the Russian fleet as sub-lieutenant at the age of twenty-two, and fought his way ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... colored female, age 32 on admission to the Government Hospital for the Insane, on June 18, 1909. Father died of dropsy; one brother was killed in a railroad accident; one sister suffered from St. Vitus' dance; another died of tuberculosis. Patient was born in Jamestown, Virginia, was healthy as a child. Does not remember having had the usual diseases of childhood; had a severe attack of typhoid fever when quite young. Attended school until fourteen years of age, having reached the third ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... and ninety-five died from convulsions in infancy, twenty-seven died in infancy from other causes, seventy-eight were epileptics, eleven were insane, thirty-nine were paralyzed, forty-five were hysterical, six had St. Vitus's dance, one hundred and five were ordinarily healthy. That variations in the nervous system which produce more or less unusual mental peculiarities and which do not take the form of nervous disease are inherited, the most superficial consideration shows. A child in its mental ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... all its resources of science and art—its music and painting and costumes, its poets and composers, its actors, singers, orchestra, and audience—had all at once fallen victims to an attack of St. Vitus' dance. He sat and listened, while the theatre full of people roared and howled its applause; while the family beside him—mother and father and daughters—laughed over jokes that made him ashamed to turn and look at them. In the end the realization of what ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... flaw, or St.-Vitus' tic, manifests itself ere long in another way. In the year 1157, he went with his Standard to attend King Henry, our blessed Sovereign (whom we saw afterwards at Waltham), in his War with the Welsh. A somewhat disastrous ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... had been in bad health for a long time. We called our home doctor, but he got no better. Finally he had the St. Vitus's Dance, and our doctor did not know what to do. So I wrote to you and did as you told me; I got two bottles of your "Favorite Prescription," and one bottle and a half did the work all right. At that time, eighteen months ago, his weight was ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... appearance repulsive, ran the risk of being defamed as a witch. If in her neighbourhood a murrain seized the cattle, or a disease entered a family which baffled the little knowledge of the country practitioners—such as epilepsy, St. Vitus' dance, or St. Anthony's fire—it was ascribed to witchcraft, and vengeance was wreaked upon any reputed witch. In many parts of England she was tried by a kind of Lynch law, in a very summary manner. Her hands and feet being bound together, she ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan |
