Legends about vampires go back to Greek antiquity and even beyond, the fear of beings returning from death to suck our blood seems to be one of our original terrors, which partially explains the fascination that a good part feels of humanity for figures like Count Dracula and for all his literary, cinematographic and television incarnations.
However, until well into the nineteenth century in many regions of the world, these beings were firmly believed in and fought for against them, and one of these cases that has been documented and studied has been the fight against vampires in New England , which was partly due to an ignorance of how a characteristic deadly disease developed of the time: tuberculosis.
A vampire tale
In June 1892, a 19-year-old girl named Mercy Brown, a Rhode Island resident , died of a disease that included cough, loss out of weight and strength, and of which even then little was known.Shortly after his sick brother and began to suffer the same symptoms.
The conclusion could not be more logical: Mercy had become a vampire and was returning from the grave to suck the blood of his brother.Consequently, and to prevent the boy's death, Mercy's body was exhumed, his heart was removed and he was burned in a stone.Something that surely did not prevent the death of the brother.
This family was not the only one to believe in vampirism as a cause of death in the region, there are at least twelve documents on cases of vampirism between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in New England, although this story was eventually enveloped by an aura of legend.
A bioarchaeological study
To clear this aura in the decade of the nineties of the last century two researchers, Paul S.Sledzik and Nicholas Bellantoni, reviewed documents of the time and exhumed and analyzed 29 corpses of an old cemetery of New England .The results of this research were published in 1994, in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and the article is entitled “Bioarcheological and Biocultural Evidence for the New England Vampire Folk Belief ”(" Bioarchaeological and biocultural evidence for the popular belief of the New England vampire ").
First, they found that the bones had been moved: the skulls were separated of the neck and were placed between the vertebrae, and the femurs were removed and placed in the shape of a cross.The vertebrae were also disordered.On the other hand, the study of the remains showed evidence of lung and bone infection symptom ace of a primary pulmonary tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis thrives among the inhabitants of New England thanks to the combination of a hostile climate and the poverty of the inhabitants, who lived in overcrowded conditions and fed badly.And although Robert Koch discovered the agent that caused this disease in 1880, it is natural that these inhabitants of Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut, believed that it was a epidemic of vampirism .
Knowledge did not spread then as fast as now, instead fear and superstition have always had wings.If you liked the article, you can not miss Lampreys, water vampires, not suitable for fearful!
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