Unthinkable by Helen Thomson

Author:Helen Thomson [Helen Thomson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2017-11-25T05:00:00+00:00

6

Matar

Turning into a Tiger

THROUGHOUT HISTORY THERE have been legends of men who could turn into animals and then back into human form. The most feared of all is the werewolf, a bloodthirsty creature beset by murderous urges, devouring both the living and the dead.

This man-to-beast story has appeared in almost every period of human history – from our earliest popular fiction Satyricon to the Roman tales of Lycaon, the cruel leader of Arcadia, who was transformed into a wolf as punishment for trying to kill Jupiter, god of the sky. Today, we only have to turn the pages of Harry Potter and the Twilight Saga to see that the werewolf’s tale has lost none of its gory appeal.

You may wonder where werewolves fit into my quest to meet people with the world’s strangest brains. But the extraordinary truth of it is, werewolves aren’t restricted to popular fiction and folklore – there are references to people turning into animals in some of our earliest medical texts. Paulus Aegineta, an Alexandrian physician in the seventh century, described the affliction as something suffered by people with melancholy or an excess of black bile. Increasingly over the medieval period, it was interpreted as the work of magic and the devil. The result was a person who was said to be prone to beast-like howls, who would seek out raw meat and attack other humans.

What could have caused such an affliction? One possibility is that ointments prescribed at the time for other illnesses could have led to side effects akin to chronic pins and needles. This may have been interpreted as the feeling of hair growing inside the skin and ‘proof’ of a person turning into an animal.

Historians have also suggested that ingestion of medicinal plants, such as poppies or henbane – a plant similar to toxic belladonna – might have been to blame. Seventeenth-century herbalists used henbane as a sedative, and as a cure for rheumatic pain and toothache. We now know that these treatments can produce vivid hallucinations. There are extensive accounts of people feeling like they’ve been temporarily transformed into leopards, snakes and mythological animals after ingesting such plants.

Over time, several cures were considered, including drinking vinegar, purging the body of blood and, most drastic of all, being shot with a silver bullet.

One of the most famous werewolf accounts is that of fourteen-year-old Jean Grenier, from Les Landes, France. In the early seventeenth century, Grenier boasted of having eaten more than fifty children. He said he preferred to run around on all fours and felt cravings for raw flesh, ‘especially for that of little girls’, which, he claimed ‘is delicious’.1 Grenier was sentenced to be hanged and his body burned. However, before this could happen, the local council sent two doctors to examine him. They decided he was suffering from ‘a malady called lycanthropy – induced by an evil spirit, which deceived men’s eye into imagining such things’.2 Rather than face execution, Grenier was sent to a monastery.

It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth

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