MrBallen’s Medical Mysteries - Ep. 2 | Tigers on the Ceiling

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

In 1951, dozens of people in the small French town of Pont St. Esprit fall ill with nausea, chills, and stomach pains. At first, the local doctor suspects food poisoning, but when the symptoms turn into hallucinations, violence, and even suicide, he realizes that something much more sinister is at play.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey Prime members, you can binge episodes 49 to 56 right now and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. One summer afternoon, a French farmer stood at his kitchen door watching in fear as his dog ran in manic circles around his barnyard. The normally gentle animal had gone insane. Every time the farmer tried to grab him by the collar, the dog snapped at him and then went back to running in its crazy circles. But suddenly, the dog stopped running.

He sniffed at the ground, then bit down on a rock and chewed on it so hard his mouth started to bleed. Nothing the farmer did could get him to stop. The dog just kept chewing on more and more rocks until blood was running down his mouth and his teeth were starting to fall out. What the farmer couldn't know as he watched his beloved dog go crazy was that only two days later, he, the farmer, would be the one running around that same yard screaming incoherently like a madman. It was an inexplicable horror that would spread throughout the entire village, and no one would know how to stop it.

I'm Marsha Clark, host of Informant's Lawyer X. Join me as we tell the shocking true story of a lawyer who wasn't just representing some of Australia's most dangerous gangland criminals. She was informing on them to the police. Informance Lawyer X is available exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus for access to this and more Exhibit C true crime podcasts. Hey, this is Nick. And this is Jack. And we just launched a brand new podcast called The Best Idea Yet. You may have heard of it.

It's all about the untold origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Ballin Studios and Wondery, I'm Mr. Ballin, and this is Mr. Balan's Medical Mysteries, where every week we will explore a new baffling mystery originating from the one place we all can't escape, our own bodies. If you liked today's story, please sign the follow button up for karaoke in the Philippines and put them down for the song My Way by Frank Sinatra. This week's story is called Tigers on the Ceiling. On a hot Friday afternoon in August of 1951,

Dr. Albert Gabay drove his car through the narrow streets of a village in the south of France. He had just spent a relaxing week with his family in the Pyrenees, which is a mountain range that runs along the border between France and Spain. His wife and four kids were still at their mountain cabin enjoying their vacation, but Dr. Gabay had to reopen his office and return to work. Now, after a long drive, he was finally back in his hometown of Pont Saint-Esprit. His route took him along a street that had been heavily bombed during World War II. He drove past grey stone buildings that stood next to piles of stone rubble. In the distance, he could see the Rhone River sparkling in the afternoon sun.

He turned a corner and spotted his friend, the grocer, who stood in the doorway of his store greeting customers. Dr. Gabay waved hello through his car window and continued on his way. Further into town, he slowed to a stop so that the baker could carry sacks of flour across the street. Dr. Gabay loved this town, where he had lived his entire life. Pons Saint-Esprit was small enough that there were only two other doctors besides him who worked there. It was a friendly place where everyone seemed to know each other. Not long ago, Dr. Gabay had wondered if he'd be forced to leave Pont Saint-Esprit. During World War II, the village was occupied by the German army, then Allied forces sent in warplanes to bomb the German troops.

It was a terrifying ordeal and the recovery had been slow, but the doctor was optimistic that the village would one day be fully restored to its former glory. The sun was low in the sky when Dr. Gabai turned into a small courtyard and parked his car. His home and medical office shared a stone building in the center of the village. As he carried his suitcase towards the front door, Dr. Gabai was looking forward to eating a simple dinner and getting to bed early. But when he opened the door, his housekeeper, who had arrived earlier to tidy up, rushed to greet him with a concerned look on her face. Before she could say anything, Dr. Gabai stopped in surprise. The waiting room of his first floor office was jammed full of people. The small room had a dozen wood office was jammed full of people.

The small room had a dozen wood chairs pushed up against the walls, and every seat was filled. Old men leaned their heads back against the wall with their eyes closed. Some mothers held children in their laps, and other children were sprawled on the floor. Dr. Gabai recognized one entire family. Everyone looked clammy and pale. He took a breath and frowned. The room had a sharp and unpleasant odor. His housekeeper explained that over the last few hours, sick people kept showing up asking to see him. She told them that she wasn't sure what time he would return, but they decided to wait for him anyway. There was clearly something going around in the village,

and Dr. Kabai wanted to be sure he wasn't dealing with a serious outbreak. Dinner would have to wait. Dr. Gabai headed for the exam room and told his housekeeper to send in the first patient. Over the next several hours, Dr. Gabai examined them one by one. Their complaints were identical, upset stomach, nausea, and chills. And so it seemed very likely that they all had mild cases of food poisoning. Dr. Gabay thought it was odd that so many people got hit with it at once, but he was sure there was a reasonable explanation for that. There had been a lot of problems with the food supply as France struggled to recover from the war, so it wasn't unusual for

people to come down with food poisoning every once in a while. The treatment for it was simple. Most people just needed a few days rest to make a full recovery. Dr. Gabay gave the patients some medicine to settle their stomachs and assured them that they would feel better soon. It would take several hours to get to every single patient, but when the last one had left his office, Dr. Gabai slowly made his way up the stairs to finally eat his dinner. He called his wife to explain what was going on, and after he was done reassuring her, he climbed right into bed and fell asleep. At 11 o'clock the next morning, Dr. Gabai was standing in the kitchen of a farmhouse with the family who lived there. Half of the family had been sick in his waiting room the evening before. Dr. Gabai didn't usually work on Saturdays, but he thought it would be good to check in on some of the patients he had seen.

This was his second house call of the morning. He had looked over the family members one by one and he was now examining a skinny boy dressed in a nightshirt. The boy said he felt better today and Dr. Gabay smiled. He was glad that most of his patients seemed to be doing better. But something didn't feel quite right to Dr. Gabay. Even before he stopped in to see this boy and his family, he had started to wonder if something other than food poisoning was troubling the residents of Pont Saint-Esprit. For one thing, he had questioned all of the patients, but he still hadn't figured out what they had all eaten that could have made them all sick. But there was another thing Dr. Gabay noticed that was even stranger. The farmhouse's kitchen

had an incredibly unpleasant odor. It was the same one that had filled his waiting room the day before. It took a while before the doctor could put his finger on where he had smelled it before. It was years ago, in his own house. Some mice had been living inside his bedroom wall, but then the mice died, and it took several days for the smell of decay to go away. That dead mouse odor, like a mixture of rotten cabbage and sulfur, was what he was smelling when he was around some of his patients.

This farmhouse, like all of the houses he visited that morning, was clean. Its windows were open, and the smell of warm bread from the nearby bakery was coming in with the summer breeze. There was no evidence of mice anywhere. But for the moment, Dr. Gabai didn't have time to think about it too much.

Just before noon, after finishing his house calls, the weary doctor returned to his office and his waiting room was full again. All the patients were again showing signs of food poisoning and all had that same horrible smell. Whatever had happened was clearly not an isolated event. Dr. Gabai had to get to the bottom of it before things got out of hand. At 11 o'clock that night, Dr. Kabai was still in his office doing paperwork when there was a knock on his door. He opened it to find one of the other doctors in the village standing there. His name was Dr. Vue Vu and he looked completely exhausted,

with dark circles under his eyes. Dr. Vu told him that he had also seen a lot of patients with symptoms of food poisoning while Dr. Gabai was away on vacation and that the number of patients had begun to rise the day before Dr. Gabai came back to town. Dr. Gabai sighed and rubbed his temples. Unfortunately, the third doctor in the village was sick with the illness going around town and couldn't get out of bed. And so it was up to Dr. Vue and Dr. Gabai to handle whatever was happening. The two doctors could only handle so much. If more people got sick, they might not be able to take care of them all. The two doctors started to compare notes. Dr. Vue had also noticed that a lot of his patients were emitting the same awful odor of dead mice

that Dr. Gabbai had smelled, and Dr. Vu was just as mystified. On top of that, over the course of the day, both doctors had noted that some of their patients had symptoms that were so bizarre, they didn't know how to start treating them. Their skin was growing pale, their pupils were dilated, and they struggled to keep their minds focused. It was so bad that several of them said they were no longer able to read. Whatever this disease was, it wasn't normal food poisoning. As the doctors wrapped up their meeting, they realized that between them, they had seen

at least 230 patients in the last few days. In a town with a population of just 4,000, that was a huge number. They agreed that it was time to notify the authorities since the situation could stretch the town's resources. Before leaving, Dr. View stopped in the doorway and made a confession. He wasn't feeling well himself and wondered if he was coming down with the same illness as everyone else. As Dr. Gabay closed the door, he tried to stay calm and keep focused on the facts. He was relieved that he didn't feel sick, he just felt tired. But a medical crisis was clearly emerging in Pont Saint-Esprit

and now it looked like Dr. Gabay might be the only doctor healthy enough to handle it. With those heavy thoughts weighing on him, at two in the morning, Dr. Gabay sat back down at his desk to catch up on his notes. Not long after, the phone rang. It was the wife of a local farmer named Felix Meissen. Dr. Gabay had made a visit to their home earlier on Saturday when he was making house calls. Felix's condition seemed to be improving, but now he could hear panic in the voice of Felix's wife. She said that Felix could hardly breathe or talk, and that he was acting like a madman. Within minutes, Dr. Gabay was in his car, speeding through dark country roads towards the farmhouse. Felix's wife met him at the door.

She said that shortly after Dr. Gabay left their house on Saturday, Felix suddenly jumped up out of bed and ran out into the yard. Then he burst back in and rolled back and forth on his bed, screaming at the top of his lungs. Now, 12 hours later, he was curled up in a ball on the mattress, struggling to breathe. Dr. Gabay went immediately to the bedside to examine him. Felix was lying motionless, his breathing loud and ragged. He seemed barely conscious and didn't respond when Dr. Gabay spoke to him. His pupils were dilated and his temperature was low. Dr. Gabay

worried that Felix's heart was going to give out if he didn't get treatment as soon as possible. The closest hospital that could handle this kind of emergency was an hour's drive south in a city called Nîmes. Dr. Gabay called for an ambulance and then tended to Felix while they waited for it to arrive. The doctor was grasping for any clue he could find, so he asked Felix's wife what they had eaten in the past few days. Just what they always ate, she said, summer stew, bread, cheese, and wine. But then she recalled that something terrible had happened at their house two days ago. They found their dog running in circles outside. Before they knew it, the dog was chewing on rocks until blood began pouring

out of its mouth. Minutes later, their beloved pet went into convulsions and died. Dr. Gabai thought it was very possible that the dog's death was connected to the same illness that Felix and the others were all suffering from. If that was the case, the situation was even more serious than he thought. If the dog died, then people could die as well. The leaders of Pont Saint-Esprit needed to be alerted to the danger as soon as possible. That evening, Dr. Gabay sat in a crowded and stuffy room in the town hall where a heated discussion was underway. It was Sunday now, and earlier that day, he had convinced the mayor to call an emergency meeting about this strange medical crisis with the municipal council, the police chief, and other city officials. But so far, everyone was just arguing.

Dr. Gabai was frustrated. There were now at least 280 people affected with this bizarre and now potentially lethal illness, and he was at his limit. Dr. Gabai had been working almost non-stop with very little sleep since he returned from his vacation over 48 hours ago. His eyes burned with fatigue and his temper rose, so he stood up and made sure his voice was strong and he told everyone they needed to alert the town to the danger. The mayor placed a hand on his shoulder. He was just as concerned as Dr. Gabay, but scientists and medical experts from nearby universities had been summoned to study the

problem and the remains of Felix Meissen's dog would be sent to the lab to be analyzed. The mayor felt the best course was to gather that data and then figure out what to tell the townspeople. Anything else would make everyone more panicked. Dr. Gabay grew even more impatient. He insisted that their analysis would take too much time. The danger was already here and people needed to be warned now so they could protect themselves. But the mayor held his ground. What would they warn people about exactly?

They still didn't even know what was causing the trouble. At this point, the mayor thought the so-called crisis consisted of a dead dog and multiple people with a stomach flu. And there was no proof that the two were even related. But there was one precaution that the mayor did want to take right away. Before adjourning the meeting, the mayor turned to the police chief. Given the number of people afflicted with the illness, they couldn't rule out the possibility that someone was deliberately poisoning the village. The police chief agreed to launch a criminal investigation right away,

but he would need assistance from law enforcement officials in neighboring cities. The meeting ended at 1 a.m., and Dr. Gabai started walking home, exhausted and frustrated. A criminal investigation seemed like a total waste of time to him. After all, why would anyone be launching such a vicious attack on their tiny and somewhat insignificant town. But then, the more he thought about it, the doctor supposed that a criminal motive could not really be ruled out. All he knew was that he needed to get home and sleep

if he was going to be of any help to his patients the next day. But just as he entered the courtyard in front of his home, he heard high-pitched shrieks coming from the nearby grocery store. Dr. Gabay ran down the street to the store and pounded on the door. The grocer's wife was relieved to see him and brought him up the stairs to the family's apartment and into her daughter's room. There, on her bed, five-year-old Marie Joseph Carl was writhing in agony. Her arms and legs were jerking, her fingers and toes clenched so tightly that they were white and bloodless. The doctor hurried to the child's side and tried to pry her toes open.

In their rigid position, it was impossible for blood to flow properly, and her feet could be permanently damaged. Suddenly, Marie Joseph sat upright, her eyes wide with terror. She pointed at the air in front of her and screamed that tigers were coming to eat her. Dr. Gabai enlisted the mother's help to restrain the child and then he gave Marie Joseph a shot of a sedative that he hoped would calm her down. The doctor rubbed his eyes and told the weeping mother that Marie Joseph had to be treated in a hospital and that he needed to call an ambulance. Dr. Gabai then walked down the hallway towards the kitchen where the phone was located, but as he stepped past the parents' bedroom, he stopped. There inside the room was the grocer, Mr. Carl, sitting up on his elbows in bed as he stared out the window. The doctor was confused as to why Mr. Carl wasn't tending to his daughter. The grocer seemed strangely preoccupied

and disturbed. When Dr. Gabai stepped closer to him, he realized the grocer wasn't staring out the window. He was just staring at it. As if in a trance, Mr. Carl held up his finger and softly counted the six panes embedded in the window. He repeated the numbers over and over and over again. Dr. Gabai sniffed the air and detected that familiar smell of dead mice. It could only mean one thing, that Mr. Carl had fallen ill as well. After making sure Mr. Carl was comfortable, Dr. Gabai returned to Marie Joseph's bedroom. He expected her to be groggy from the sedative, maybe even asleep. Instead, he found the child alert and happy, as if she had been fully cured. The child

looked at the doctor and smiled and told him that the tigers must have been a dream. The doctor checked her temperature and her pulse. She was totally back to normal. Instead of putting Marie Joseph to sleep, the sedative appeared to have completely cured her. Dr. Gabay shook his head. None of this made any sense. He decided to hold off calling the ambulance, thinking Marie Joseph could now fully recover at home. It was nearly dawn when Dr. Gabay said goodnight to the Carl family and staggered back to his house. As he opened his door, the phone was ringing.

It was the hospital in Nîmes. Felix Meissen, the farmer, was dead. Whatever illness was attacking the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit, it was dead. Whatever illness was attacking the town of Pont Saint-Esprit, it was fatal. This had officially turned into a full-blown medical catastrophe. Now streaming. Welcome to Buy It Now, the show where aspiring entrepreneurs get the opportunity of a lifetime. I wouldn't be chasing it if I didn't believe that the world needs this product. In each episode, the entrepreneurs

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Are we excited for this moment? Ah! I cannot believe it. Woo! Buy It Now. Stream free on Freeview and Prime Video. Later that morning, a wave of law enforcement officers swept into Pont Saint-Esprit. They stopped people on the street to ask questions, they interrogated shopkeepers, and closed some shops entirely. The presence of so many police officers alarmed people, and gossip began to fly around the village. Every person knew someone who was sick.

Some people speculated that perhaps the rumors were true and a madman or killer was poisoning the village. Maybe he poisoned the water or perhaps the salt or the meat or some other food. Some people quietly packed and left town. By the end of the day, the once bustling center of the village was growing empty and quiet. Dr. Gabai watched families leaving from the door of his house. He thought of his own wife and kids who were still on vacation in the mountains. He'd spoken to them briefly at the start of this sickness, but he wanted to check in on them again.

So he placed a phone call to the vacation house. His wife was shocked when he updated her about the terrifying events unfolding in their town. She worried that her husband would wear himself out or get the awful illness himself. Dr. Gabai told his wife that he was fine and he believed that she and their kids were safe since they were out of town. However, he had a duty to continue to treat the people of his village. Dr. Gabai hung up the phone. The next day was Tuesday, four days since he had come home from vacation. By mid-morning, the delegation of university doctors and scientists had arrived.

They collected food scraps and sent them out to be analyzed by a scientific laboratory to test for poison. And then they ordered an autopsy to be performed on Felix Meissen. Dr. Gabai tried to reassure his patients that they'd have answers soon, but in private, he worried about how long it was taking. It would be several days at least before the test results came back and the autopsy was complete. He couldn't stand the thought of more people dying as they waited. Not only that, but Dr. Gabay didn't know how long he could continue to work without rest, and there was still the possibility that he would get sick himself.

As the weeks wore on with still no news about the tests or the autopsy, Dr. Gabai saw dozens of patients in his office and crisscrossed the streets to visit the sicker patients at home. His phone rang every night with news of more strange symptoms emerging. Now, many of his patients seemed irrationally happy. They talked so quickly that it was impossible to understand them. But then, just as fast as the euphoria emerged, it would come crashing down, leaving the patients overcome with anguish. And then there were the patients who just couldn't sleep.

Instead, they would gather in the street in the middle of the night. Dr. Gabay could hear them from his window, chatting and laughing with a strange frenetic energy. Others he could see wandering aimlessly through the dark streets, silent and lost. It was as if Pons Saint-Estrée had become haunted and cursed. The village priest prayed to saints to lift the curse from the town. Dr. Gabay wasn't superstitious, but it made him remember a disease he had read about many years before. It was called St. Anthony's Fire, a sickness that happened back in the Middle Ages and caused entire villages to go mad, just like he was seeing in Pont Saint-Esprit.

Back then, many people believed that it was a curse from the devil. Dr. Gabay was a man of science, but he wondered if there could be a connection. At this point, a supernatural explanation from the 15th century was as good as any other. Dr. Gabay shook his head. This was modern France and medicine didn't operate on hunches. The most pressing thing right now was for the toxicology lab to finish its work. In the meantime, he would continue to treat his patients as well as he could, and he would look up old diseases once he had some free time. He hoped this would be soon. Once the lab had an answer, he would know how to treat the disease, everyone would get better, and he would have

enough time to pursue his hunches. Instead, he'd find out things could still get much, much worse. It was Friday evening, just one week since Dr. Gabai had returned from his vacation. He was in his car following an ambulance that carried little Marie Joseph Carl. Her delirious visions of tigers had returned, and she had become so violent that her mother had to tie her to the bed. Dr. Gabay had watched helplessly as the five-year-old was loaded into an ambulance, kicking and screaming. As he parked his car in front of the old hospital in Pont Saint-Esprit, he noticed that every light in the building was blazing.

As he walked to the entrance, Dr. Gabay saw a man appear in a second floor window, waving his arms wildly. And then, to Dr. Gabai's horror, the man climbed out the window and stood on the ledge. Two nurses quickly crept up behind him, begging him to get back in the room, but every time they reached out,

the man smacked their hands away. Then the man stretched out his arms and proclaimed that he was an airplane and that he could fly. And then he jumped. He landed with his feet on the pavement and immediately there was this deafening crack as both of his legs snapped in half.

The man screamed in agony as he lay on his back. But suddenly the man's energy shifted. It was as if he pushed the pain right out of his body and replaced it with intense anger. Somehow, the man with the two broken legs rose up and then took off running full speed down the boulevard. Dr. Gabai couldn't believe what he was seeing. How could anyone run on two totally broken legs?

And this was only the beginning of the night that seemed to Dr. Gabai like an apocalypse. He entered the hospital to find the wards packed full of screaming, struggling patients. His patients, who had seemed to be getting better, were now totally psychotic. Many screamed that their hands and feet were on fire. Some fought desperately against imaginary enemies in the air. The odor of dead mice was now overwhelming. Dr. Gabai was on the brink of collapse. He started to wonder if he himself had gotten sick.

Was he hallucinating or going crazy? Dr. Gabai considered whether he should just give up and finally get the sleep he so desperately needed. But ultimately, he knew that quitting was a violation of his oath as a doctor, and the residents of Pont Saint-Esprit were counting on him, so he chose to soldier on. He put out an order that Marie Joseph be sent to another hospital 30 miles away in Abignon, where he hoped it would be calmer. Then he tried injecting some of the victims with sedatives, hoping to quiet them since it had worked before with Marie Joseph. But the sedatives had absolutely no effect

on their ferocious behavior. The strength and violence of the patients was beyond belief. They were dangerous to themselves and to everyone around them. One patient sprung up from his bed, punching and kicking at everyone around him. It took 14 men to hold him down. While that was happening, several other patients broke away from their rooms and tried to jump out windows or run through walls. Dr. Gabai saw no option but to immobilize patients in straitjackets and send them to be locked up in a psychiatric hospital. But then the hospital ran out of straitjackets.

Nurses tied patients to their beds with ropes and twine, where they lay screaming in horror. When they ran out of rope, the nurses used horse's reins. But the restraints didn't hold. One by one, victims broke away and ran back out into the hospital garden, where they uprooted tomato steaks and wielded them like swords against each other.

Dr. Gabai worked through the night trying to treat the injuries that patients had inflicted on themselves. One of these patients was the man who had leapt out of the window and broken both of his legs. It took eight men to hold him down as Dr. Gabai set his fractures. As he worked, Dr. Gabai noticed that the man's toes were rigid and bluish green. Over the course of this long and horrible night, it seemed like every patient he had seen had toes and fingers that were stiff and lifeless. Dr. Gabay paused as the screaming and mayhem continued all around him.

He thought of Marie Joseph's rigid hands and feet. He thought of the terrible smell that reminded him of dead mice. He thought again of the Middle Ages and the curse of St. Anthony's fire. And then a picture started to come into focus in his mind. He would need the lab results to prove it, but he believed he had just figured out what was causing this horrific sickness. And it tied all the way back to the medieval plague of St. Anthony's Fire. It took several days for Dr. Gabay and the medical investigators to fully uncover the truth, but they discovered that it had all started in an unassuming shop in the center of Pont Saint-Esprit.

At noon on Thursday, August 16th, the day before Dr. Gabay returned from vacation, the village baker, Roche Brion, completed the third and last batch of bread of the day. Roche had been a baker in Pont Saint-Esprit for 30 years. Every household in the village bought at least one fresh loaf of bread every day and many thought that Roche's bread was the best in town. However, on that day, August 16th, Roche was not pleased with the quality of his product. As he kneaded the dough, he noticed that the color was slightly gray. There had been complaints about the bread recently. He blamed the flour, which had been delivered to him by the government agency that supplied flour to bakeries all over France.

Ever since the war, the flour had been of bad quality. It was usually wheat flour mixed with flour made from rye grain and dried beans. Sometimes it even contained dust and insects. That day he was making the bread, the baker knew that the dough just seemed a little off. Still, every time he tasted it, he thought it tasted fine. So he baked the bread, put it out for sale, and decided he'd lodge a protest with the flour suppliers the next morning. All day Thursday, people streamed into his shop for their bread, and again all day Friday and Saturday. Before dawn on Sunday, Roche and his wife were feeling a little nauseous,

but they decided to take an overnight trip to see their kids, who were spending the summer out of town. When Roche and his wife returned to Pont Saint-Esprit on Monday, the epidemic was in full swing, his bakery had been closed by the police, and Roche's wife was now so ill that she went straight to bed. When the police concluded their investigations, they confirmed that everyone who got sick had bought bread from Roche's bakery. What Roche didn't know was that a portion of the rye grain that was used by the government to dilute the flour was bad. It had gotten damp in the field and a fungus had grown on it. That fungus had been ground up with the rest of the grain as it was

turned into flour, and this flour ended up in a sack that was delivered to Roche's bakery to use for making his bread. This fungus was incredibly resilient. It not only survived being ground into flour, it also survived the high heat of Roche's bakery oven. It laid dormant in the crusty brown loaves Roche sold to his customers. And then when Roche's customers ate their bread, this fungus entered their bodies. The fungus caused their stomachs to cramp, made it impossible to sleep, and caused people

to feel like their hands and feet were burning. It also triggered hallucinations of tigers and airplanes and flying. It even made dogs turn on their owners and think that rocks were food. In fact, it had affected all sorts of animals including pigs, ducks, and cats. All of these bizarre responses were triggered by chemicals in the fungus. One of these chemicals was lysergic acid from which lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, is made. LSD is a very powerful hallucinogen. On top of all of this, when people ate the fungus, it set off a response in their bodies that cut off circulation to their limbs. The terrible stink that reminded Dr. Gabai of dead mice was actually the smell of his patient's fingers and toes slowly rotting with gangrene. This gangrene was well known in

the Middle Ages when it was a symptom of the plague known as St. Anthony's Fire. Now, hundreds of years later, in 1951, this same plague was running rampant through the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit long after the disease had passed out of memory. The fungus was known as ergot and the illness it caused was known to modern medicine as ergotism. Ultimately, seven people died and nearly 300 people were sickened in the ergotism outbreak in Pont Saint-Esprit. It took several months for the disease to run its course. Most patients slowly got better and were able to resume their normal lives. The baker, Roche, was at first suspected of intentionally poisoning the village, but was later found to be blameless. The memory of the 1951 poisoning still haunts the village. The official investigations went on for years. Finally,

it was agreed that the people of Pons Saint-Esprit had indeed been under the influence of some kind of hallucinatory substance contained in the flower. How the substance got into the flower remains under debate to this day. From Ballin Studios and Wondery, this is Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, hosted by me, Mr. Ballin. A quick reminder, the content in this episode is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. This episode was written by Heather Dundas and edited by Alex Benidon. Sound design is by Andre Pluss. Coordinating producer is Sophia Martins. Our senior producer is Alex Benidon.

Our associate producers and researchers are Sarah Vytak and Natalie Bettendorf. Fact-checking was done by Jacqueline Colletti. For Ballin Studios, our producer is Alyssa Tominang. Our head of production is Zach Levitt. Executive producers are myself, Mr. Ballin, and Nick Witters. For Wondery, senior managing producer is Ryan Lohr. Our head of sound is Marcelino Villapondo. Our producer is Julie Magruder. Senior producers are Laura Donna Pallivota, Dave Schilling, and Matt Olmos.

Our executive producers are Aaron O'Flaherty and Marshall Louis for Wondery. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reached the age of 10 that would still have heard it. It just happens to all of us.

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