The Fires of Saint An­thony – A Snip­pet

by Roberto

Just re­cently, af­ter giv­ing a very gen­eral pub­lic lec­ture on mi­crobes, the dis­cus­sion went – not sur­prisingly – in the di­rec­tion of hu­mans and our re­la­tion­ships to our mi­cro­biota. "Would you tell us about our in­ter­ac­tions with our mi­cro­biome?" "What would you rec­om­mend to some­one try­ing to fix their in­testi­nal mi­cro­biota?" There was also in­ter­est in dis­cussing the ef­fects that mi­crobes might have on our in­di­vid­ual psy­cho­log­i­cal at­trib­utes, re­mind­ing me of the spir­ited re­ac­tion to our re­cent Tal­mu­dic Ques­tion #161: "Can you imag­ine a way in which the mi­cro­biome is di­rectly in­volved in hu­man in­tel­li­gence and/or con­scious­ness?" It's in air, as it were, a great in­ter­est in the recog­ni­tion of the ef­fects that our mi­cro­bial com­pan­ions have on our par­tic­u­lar in­di­vid­u­al­ity.

But then came a re­lated ques­tion with a most in­ter­est­ing twist. "This might be get­ting into the realm of sci­ence fic­tion… but can you imag­ine us some time dis­cov­er­ing that mi­crobes have an ef­fect on our be­hav­iors at the pop­u­la­tion level, af­fect­ing the way en­tire com­mu­ni­ties be­have?" In my mind I con­jured vi­sions of au­to­cratic gov­ern­ments in­ten­tion­ally feed­ing their peo­ples be­hav­ior-al­ter­ing mi­crobes… but I made no men­tion of such bleak mus­ings. Then, quickly, an an­swer arose in my mind:

Tryp­tich of the Temp­ta­tion of Saint An­thony by Hie­ro­nymus Bosch. © Paul Her­mans/WikiCommons. Fron­ti­spiece: De­tail from the left panel.

"You know, it al­ready hap­pened,  "I said. "I can think of one ex­am­ple, the com­mu­nal mad­ness that was not all that rare in me­dieval Eu­rope, the episodes knows as Saint An­thony's Fires." There are many al­le­gor­i­cal de­pic­tions of these in­stances in me­dieval and re­nais­sance art. But, be­ing par­tic­u­larly at­tracted to the art of Hi­erony­mus Bosch, I chose his Trip­tych of the Temp­ta­tion of St. An­thony to ac­company this Thurs­day snip­pet.

There is a fun­gus, Clav­i­ceps pur­purea, that can grow on the ears of grains. Not be­ing able to rec­og­nize the fun­gus as a prob­lem, the in­hab­i­tants of Eu­ro­pean towns dur­ing the Mid­dle ages would some­times con­sume rye in­fested with the fun­gus. The fun­gus pro­duces er­got al­ka­loids which, when in­gested, pro­duce hal­lu­ci­na­tions, burn­ing sen­sa­tions and can lead to gan­grene and even death. Er­got al­ka­loids are struc­turally re­lated to ly­ser­gic acid di­ethy­lamide (LSD), so imag­ine the ef­fects on whole towns in­gest­ing rye con­tain­ing the fun­gal er­got al­ka­loids. Mad­ness abounded and few knew how to deal with the sit­u­a­tion. But the The Hos­pi­tal Broth­ers of Saint An­thony es­tab­lished hos­pi­tals to help the vic­tims. That, along with the burn­ing sen­sa­tions that vic­tims felt led to these out­breaks be­ing known as Saint Anthony's Fires. An ex­treme case of mi­crobes af­fect­ing hu­man be­hav­ior at the level of en­tire com­mu­ni­ties. It made me won­der, though, whether to­day there may be much more sub­tle ef­fects on mass hu­man be­hav­ior that mi­crobes might have that we still do not rec­og­nize. Or do we?