NEWSLETTER

Excerpted from The New Book of Lists by David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAURA PARK

REALLY UNUSUAL MEDICAL CONDITIONS

ART ATTACK
Fine art can really make you sick. Or so says Dr. Graziella Magherini, author of The Stendhal Syndrome. She has studied more than a hundred tourists in Florence, Italy, who became ill in the presence of great works. The symptoms include heart palpitations, dizziness, and stomach pains. The typical sufferer is a single person between the ages of 26 and 40 who rarely leaves home. Dr. Magherini believes the syndrome is a result of jet lag, travel stress, and the shock of an overwhelming sense of the past. “Very often,” she says, “there’s the anguish of death.” The disorder was named after the 19th-century French novelist, who became overwhelmed by the frescoes in Florence’s Santa Croce Basilica. Particularly upsetting works of art include Michelangelo’s statue of David, Caravaggio’s painting of Bacchus, and the concentric circles of the Duomo cupola.




DR. STRANGELOVE SYNDROME
Alien hand syndrome is caused by damage to certain parts of the brain and afflicts thousands of people. This bizarre neurological disorder causes one of a person’s hands to act independently of the other and of its owner’s wishes. For example, the misbehaving hand may do the opposite of what the normal one is doing: If a person is trying to button a shirt with one hand, the other will follow along and undo the buttons. If one hand pulls up trousers, the other will pull them down. Sometimes the hand may become aggressive—pinching, slapping, or punching the patient: In at least one case, it tried to strangle its owner. Says neurologist Rachelle Doody, “Often a patient will sit on the hand, but eventually it gets loose and starts doing everything again.”


MUD WRESTLER’S RASH
Within 36 hours after 24 men and women wrestled in calf-deep mud at the University of Washington, seven wrestlers were covered with patches of “pus-filled red bumps similar to pimples,” and the rest succumbed later. Bumps were on areas not covered by bathing suits—one unlucky victim had wrestled in the nude. The dermatitis palaestrae limosae, or “muddy wrestling rash,” may have been caused by manure-tainted mud.



CUTLERY CRAVING

The desire to eat metal objects is comparatively common. Occasionally, there is an extreme case, however, such as that of 47-year-old Englishman Allison Johnson. An alcoholic burglar with a compulsion to eat silverware, Johnson has had 30 operations to remove strange things from his stomach. As of 1992, he had eight forks and the metal sections of a mop head lodged in his body. He has repeatedly been jailed and then released, each time going immediately to a restaurant and ordering lavishly. Unable to pay, he would then tell the owners to call the police and eat cutlery until they arrived. Johnson’s lawyer said of his client, “He finds it hard to eat and obviously has difficulty going to the lavatory.”


ELECTRIC PEOPLE
According to British paranormalist Hilary Evans, some people are “upright human [electric] eels, capable of generating charges strong enough to knock out streetlights and electronic equipment.” Cases of “electric people” date back to 1786; the most famous is that of 14-year-old Angelique Cottin, whose presence caused compass needles to gyrate wildly. To further investigate this phenomenon, Evans founded SLIDE, the Street Lamp Interference Data Exchange.


TO BE CONTINUED
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