Family Dance

One day last winter a young textile worker went to Manhattan's Neurological Institute. He complained of "spells." Whenever he took a nip of alcohol, coffee, tea or cola drinks, said he, the result was startling: he would lose control of his muscles and leap like a jitterbug. His cavorting was invariable: he curved his fingers like claws, walked on the outside of his feet and jerked his legs in the air. Sometimes he twisted his head to one side, curled his lips in a sneer, and rolled his eyes upward, mumbling and clucking to himself. The only way to stop an attack was to lie down and go to sleep.

Drs. Lester Adran Mount and Samuel Reback examined him, found him "pleasant, placid and cooperative." Aside from his spells, he was in perfect health, showed "high average general intelligence." Nobody in the Institute had ever seen or read or heard tell of anything like it.

Last week in the Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, Drs. Mount and Reback described the dance, christened it "paroxysmal choreoathetosis" (from the Greek choreia, meaning dance, and athetos, not still). Their patient told them that his great-grandfather had spells over 100 years ago, had passed them on to 27 descendants, now spread all over the U. S.

In an effort to discover the cause of his attacks, the doctors gave the young man a dozen different drugs, from common salt to pituitary extract, doused him in tubs of hot and cold water, sent him running up & down 15 flights of stairs. Still whiskey, etc. would send him into his dance. Nothing would cure him. He finally packed up and went home, resolved never to touch a drop again. One thing that consoled him: his leaping great-grandfather had lived to the ripe age of 87; his great-aunt, 72, and great-uncle, 81, were still dancing around the old homestead in the South.

The doctors chalked up another name for something they had no answer for.

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