Did symptoms of tuberculosis encourage stories about vampires?
TB patients had very pale skin, red rimmed eyes, and coughed up blood.
Mythology & Folklore - 4 Answers
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1 :
No,it started with Vlad the Impaler in Romania for what he did to his enemies in battle.His army put them on stakes and you could watch them slide down on them.Tons of blood were shed from his battles back in the 1400's.He built a castle so large that it was impossible to distroy.One woman 150 years before Bram Stoker wrote his novel,a woman who's name I can't remember her name,took her ideas from Vlad,and came out with,Varnnie the Vampire in your weekly Penny Dreadful news paper.And then came Bram.
2 :
Yes. Before the Industrial Revolution, tuberculosis may sometimes have been regarded as vampirism. When one member of a family died from it, the other members that were infected would lose their health slowly. People believed that this was caused by the original victim draining the life from the other family members. Furthermore, people who had TB exhibited symptoms similar to what people considered to be vampire traits. People with TB often have symptoms such as red, swollen eyes (which also creates a sensitivity to bright light), pale skin, extremely low body heat, a weak heart and coughing blood, suggesting the idea that the only way for the afflicted to replenish this loss of blood was by sucking blood.[116] Another folk belief told that the affected individual was being forced, nightly, to attend fairy revels, so that the victim wasted away owing to lack of rest; this belief was most common when a strong connection was seen between the fairies and the dead.[117] Similarly, but less commonly, it was attributed to the victims being "hagridden"รข€”being transformed into horses by witches (hags) to travel to their nightly meetings, again resulting in a lack of rest.[117] TB was romanticized in the nineteenth century. Many people believed TB produced feelings of euphoria referred to as Spes phthisica ("hope of the consumptive"). It was believed that TB sufferers who were artists had bursts of creativity as the disease progressed. It was also believed that TB sufferers acquired a final burst of energy just before they died that made women more beautiful and men more creative.[118] In the early 20th century, some believed TB to be caused by masturbation.
3 :
mostly it was 2 things, sleep paralysis on sudden waking and the observation of continued hair and nail growth after death. Sleep paralysis is when one wakes suddenly and the brain chemistry has not switched from sleep to waking and the persons body is still paralyzed by REM sleep, this was often accompanied by the feeling of something or someone pushing, lying or sitting on the chest, it is often called "The Old Hag", the vampire idea came from folks brains trying frantically to "make sense" of the situation so often bizarre perceptions and dream fragments were confabulated to become an Incubus or Succubus. The hair and nail growth is true, metabolism does not stop abruptly at death, so there is hair and nail growth for up to 2 weeks.
4 :
I think also misunderstood conditions(at the time) such as Albinism and Haemophilia added weight to such stories
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