Ross Bullen follows the French-Canadian lumberjacks whose involuntary responses to sudden stimuli fascinated nineteenth-century journalists and neurologist George M. Beard. The story is not just a medical curiosity: employers, visitors, and investigators repeatedly turned marginalized workers’ distress into a spectacle.
- Accounts described sudden jumping, striking, throwing, and repetition of unfamiliar words. Some workers pleaded not to be startled; incidents could cause serious injuries.
- An 1861 newspaper account preceded the widely reprinted 1878 story that brought the phenomenon to national attention.
- Beard distinguished these physically resilient rural laborers from sufferers of supposedly modern “American nervousness,” casting the workers instead as relics of the Middle Ages.
- His 1880 experiments included startling a worker with Greek and Latin verse, eliciting repetition of only a word or two—not knowledge of those languages.
- Beard’s work later informed Gilles de la Tourette’s research. That historical connection does not make the two syndromes interchangeable.
Bullen shows how class, language, and ethnic prejudice shaped the explanation of unusual behavior. Symptoms that earned some patients recognition as exhausted modern Americans made other patients appear primitive and fit for ridicule.
The cause remains uncertain. Discrimination and traumatic working conditions are possible contributors, not established diagnoses. The firmer lesson is ethical: noticing an involuntary response is very different from treating the person who experiences it with care.