Dan Conway’s Corner – Riddle of the Jumping Men

 

George Miller Beard was a pioneering American neurologist. He is best remembered for his research into what is known in medical terms as The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Disorder. He’s also remembered for popularizing the term “neurasthenia”. That’s a medical condition characterized by lassitude, fatigue, headache and irritability, associated chiefly with emotional disturbance.

When he learned of seemingly bizarre incidents in northern New England, along the northern fringe of Maine and New Hampshire and in the adjacent province of Quebec, stories of the phenomenon of the “Jumping Frenchmen of Maine”, Beard decided to go to Maine. He would undertake field research at first hand.

In 1880 he travelled to the Moosehead Lake area with a view to observing French-Canadian loggers in lumber camps. The lumberjacks were confined to these camps in the Northern woods from autumn to Spring each year. There were long months of isolation and boredom. Games and distractions had to be invented. And jumping became part of the local folklore and tradition.
The loggers’ job was to fell trees and cut them into logs or lengths, or transport them by floating them down to the sawmills. It was tough, hard, dangerous work, and required a food consumption of at least 5,000 calories a day each.

BEARD FOUND what he had hoped to find — he saw jumping French-Canadians with his own eyes, men who responded super dramatically when startled.
“When told to strike, he strikes,” Beard wrote. “When told to throw it, he throws it, whatever he has in his hands.”
He couldn’t figure out what caused the Frenchmen to jump. And the Frenchmen were often the victims of practical jokes.
“If a jumper was shaving, or whistling, or just sitting on a riverbank,” Robert Pike, an author who wrote about life in the lumber camps, wrote, “and someone came up behind him suddenly and shouted, ‘Jump into the river’ (or ‘into the fire’ if there was a fire), in he’d jump.”

PIKE, IN his book Tall Trees, Tough Men, ascribed the Jumping Frenchman syndrome to inbreeding among French-Canadians who, he held, seldom married outside their small villages.
“If someone stepped up behind a jumper and tickled him lightly,” Pike said, “he’d jump through the roof. Strangely, the victims of such mean practical jokes never got mad about them.
“If a line of loggers were sitting on the deacon seat — a bench running the length of the bunkhouse — and a lumberjack pretended to strike his neighbour, every jumper in the line, if he saw the motion, would turn and strike his neighbour. If a man took his pipe from his mouth and pretended to throw it on the floor, the jumpers would dash down their own pipes.”
“Echolalia” was what Beard called the meaningless repetition of words just spoken by another person. He quoted a Latin phrase, a line from Virgil’s Aeneid, to a French-Canadian logger, “and he repeated or echoed the sound of the words as they came to him — in a quick, sharp voice. At the same time he jumped…”

BEARD FOUND the jumping Frenchman syndrome started in childhood, and rarely occurred in women. He didn’t conclude the syndrome was genetic, but speculated it was a temporary degeneration that resulted from life in the isolated lumber camps.

His research spread around the world. Misunderstandings and mistakes in translation were common. One article, involving a translation from English into Russian, identified the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine as a group of gymnasts!

A search for global variations uncovered latah in Malaysia, miryachit in Russia, ramenajana in Madagascar, and imu in Japan.
Gilles de la Tourette concluded that Jumping Frenchman Syndrome was a convulsive tic illness. Sufferers are sometimes teased mercilessly by people who find the reaction amusing, and trigger it repeatedly.
Some researchers believe that the disorder is psychological rather than neurological, and the debate is still open. But it is always fascinating to see what happens when the human brain experiences the equivalent of a short circuit. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.
“Jumping” remains controversial in the fields of neurology and cross-cultural psychiatry. The phenomenon of jumping is still shrouded in mystery, myth, and speculation.

The riddle eludes a concrete medical explanation. ÷