"The extraordinary ways the brain can misfire

The King of France – thinking he was made of glass – was terrified he might shatter…and he wasn’t alone.
After the Emperor met his end at Waterloo, an epidemic of Napoleons piled into France’s asylums.
Throughout the nineteenth century, dozens of middle-aged women tried to convince their physicians that they were, in fact, dead.
For centuries we’ve dismissed delusions as something for doctors to sort out behind locked doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks – they hold the key to collective anxieties and traumas.
In this groundbreaking history, Victoria Shepherd uncovers stories of delusions from medieval times to the present day and implores us to identify reason in apparent madness."

Excerpt

The 1340s, Rouen, northern France, behind a wonky timbered building near the river Seine, at the back of the rear courtyard, a furnace glows fierce orange. A gaffer stokes; he needs it as hot as it can get. He is working on something completely new. It will make his family rich. He is having one last go and he wipes his sweaty brow across the crook of his arm, then shovels out another measure of sand from the bucket into the crucible, and then a measure of ash. He mixes the batch together and pushes it into

the roaring furnace. Now he waits for the mixture to heat. The batch turns pale. The temperature’s high enough for the reaction. He takes his blowpipe to the furnace. Then he begins gathering up the molten substance like toffee, layer upon layer, until he has an orange globe on the end of the pipe. He puts his mouth to the pipe and blows hard. The globe inflates. He thrusts it back in the fire and starts to spin, watching as centrifugal forces push it out into a flat disk bullion. Now he carefully detaches the bullion

from the blowpipe. In the middle of the disc, a ‘bullseye’ marks the point where the pipe joined the gather. Around the bullseye the material is thinner and can be cut into diamonds for use in windows. That’s the stuff he’s interested in. It looks good so far, but he’s had his hopes up before. He watches it cool. The sand begins to lose its crystalline structure and gain an entirely new one – on a molecular level somewhere between a liquid and a solid. It will be hard like the more primitive version, but, if he can

perfect it, there will be a key difference… He steadies his hand and lifts it up to inspect. There’s the workshops’ crooked roofline clean against the sky; the workbench; his shoes. No need to squint, there’s no milky blur. It’s clear. It will bring a breathtaking new sharpness to windows. People may even want it to magnify objects. The gentry will love it. They will flock to Rouen and buy as much of it as he can make. He pauses. It’s struck him that this will change more than the weight of his purse. It will transform the way people see the world.

The introduction of this innovative product, manufactured from what seemed an almost alchemical process – sand transformed through fire into something fragile and transparent – did have a profound impact on some parts of French society. The wealthy and noble classes enjoyed this new ‘crown’ glass in their own homes and they carried it carefully, tapped it gingerly, looked through it with wonder, saw what happened if dropped.

There’s a twist. The effect was stranger than the Rouen glassmaker could possibly have imagined. Crown glass did indeed alter the way people saw the world, but it wasn’t by virtue of the clarity of the view through the new windows. The transformative power of this material, its alchemy, was continuing to work on the people who had brought it into their homes. It was infiltrating them, influencing them at a deeper level. It was changing how they saw themselves. A few started to believe the chemical reaction was at work within their own body. Something was happening to their legs, their arms, their feet… They were turning into glass. Bits of them were now made out of it; translucent, brittle, fragile. Here was a startling example of how external processes might affect inner processes and create a delusion to moderate a person’s relationship with the world.

A fifteenth-century French king, Charles VI, made the phenomenon famous. He underwent his own glassy metamorphosis in front of alarmed courtiers. Pope Pius II recorded in his chronicles that Charles had iron rods sewn into his clothes to prevent his glass bones breaking if he touched someone, and he is reported to have wrapped himself in blankets to protect against the danger of shattered buttocks. We can picture him locked in the attrition of the Hundred Years War, yet privately consumed with anxiety about any hard surfaces which might come into contact with his rear end and frantically sourcing prophylactic soft furnishings. News of his belief leaked out and he offered the courts of Europe a good laugh, but it was nervous laughter. He had set off a chain reaction of Glass Men across the continent.

‘Glass delusion’, as the condition became known, is just one of the strange and compelling psychological phenomena that the history of delusions offers up to us.

The content and context of delusions change, era to era, person to person, over the centuries but common features remain. Delusions carry painfully insistent demands, and, for the person experiencing the delusion, the stakes are invariably high. They are often life and death. Charles VI orders his associates to back off – he will smash into pieces if they touch him. It’s an absurd premise, but beneath the absurdity the perceived jeopardy is painfully real. If you pay closer attention to each of these historical accounts, you can pick up a series of urgent communiqués. Each story then takes on a quality of a psychological thriller for the audience. What does this person need us to know? Can we understand?

Cases of delusion often have the quality of a parable or fairy tale; of ‘Once upon a time…’ They are peculiar, cryptic, their meanings encoded. As with fairy tales, the themes inside these little stories are perennial: God, money, love, power, the reversal of fortune, death. Delusions are an imaginative space and people experiencing them appear to go through the looking glass into alternative universes, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice climbing into Wonderland. When you pay closer attention to accounts of delusion from the past, however, you sense that there is something else at work. A delusion begins to seem more everyday and pragmatic – a psychological survival technique in action. Delusions may look like a retreat into the fantastical but in a key sense the opposite is true. These are not flights of fancy away from reality; they are a strategy to deal with reality. Unlike fairy tales, delusions are for grown-ups.

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About the Author

Victoria Shepherd conceived and produced the ten-part series A History of Delusions for BBC Radio 4. She has produced scores of documentaries and major strands for BBC Radio 4. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia.