🚂 Railway Madness

If it seems like there are more people being dragged off planes for unruly behaviour than there used to be, you're not the only one who's noticed. The Sawbones Podcast — which discusses the odd, misguided and dangerous ways we've dealt with medical issues through the ages — wondered whether 'plane madness' might be a kind of mass psychogenic illness for our times, so they did an episode on railway madness, an odd period in the 1800s when men kept going wild on trains and it was blamed on the vibrations. Puts me in mind of Ian Hacking's Mad Travellers, on a brief epidemic of people who suddenly left home to walk obsessively, often not knowing who they were or where they were going.