3 Unsolved Medical Mysteries

If you were a sailor before the mid-1700s, the likelihood was good that you’d come down with scurvy—which led to spongy gums, joint pain, and spontaneous bleeding—during your time at sea. And no one would know why. That sort of changed in the 1740s, when a Scottish doctor set up the first-ever clinical trial to discover a treatment for scurvy. He gave six pairs of sailors various substances, like vinegar or citrus fruit. Over time, the pair getting oranges and lemons improved far more dramatically than the others.

Mystery solved? Not quite yet. It wouldn’t be until the 1920s that scientists found the real cause of the disease: Vitamin C deficiency. It turned out that the scorbutic sailors had eaten only processed food that didn’t contain Vitamin C, and once they replenished it with fresh fruit, they were cured. 

But a lot of other medical mysteries remain unsolved. We’re looking at a few of them in the latest episode of The List Show, from the mechanisms of migraines to the very real issues behind “mass hysteria.”

You can read about a few of them below, and find out about them all by watching the video above—and don’t forget to subscribe to Mental Floss on YouTube for more fascinating videos.

1. What Causes Migraines?
2. What’s Behind Schizophrenia?
3. Why Does Mass Psychogenic Illness Occur?

What Causes Migraines?

People have been suffering from migraines for thousands of years, and strange cures for the condition have been around just as long. One Roman physician recommended shocks from an electric fish to zap away headaches, and migraines were likely included in that. The Swiss doctor who first distinguished migraines in medical literature suggested good ol’ bloodletting to relieve the pain.

Doctors were clearly willing to try anything to treat migraine sufferers, but one thing they couldn’t do is pinpoint the cause of the disease. Migraines aren’t just bad headaches; the excruciating head pain comes with additional symptoms like nausea, visual disturbances, sensitivity to light and sound, and even temporary loss of motor function. 

The medical consensus now is that migraines are a result of abnormal brain activity—but what that really means is still vague. Migraines usually appear between age 10 and 45, and people often report something triggering their onset, such as stress, exercise, loud noises, or other stimulants. Researchers think that these triggers may launch disruptive signals in the brain that affect blood flow to the organ and surrounding muscles, resulting in the characteristic pain and sensory distortions. The reasons why certain triggers have that ability, and how the brain reacts to them on a molecular level, are still being intensively studied. For now, people who experience migraines can take prescription medicines that either prevent them or stop them once they start.

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What’s Behind Schizophrenia?

The causes of neurological illnesses can be hard to parse. We don’t know what causes schizophrenia, for example. This complex disease presents a constellation of symptoms ranging from paranoia, sensory hallucinations, and delusions to physical tremors and movement disorders.

Researchers think that a combination of genetic and environmental factors increases a person’s chances for developing schizophrenia. More than 100 genes are linked to schizophrenia risk, but it’s not a situation in which a single gene can cause or prevent it. Instead, these genes probably exhibit tiny mutations that add up to a higher risk of the disease, and the mutations can occur at different times during a person’s brain development. Those tweaks can also interact with other health experiences, like prenatal infections or severe stress at a young age that are thought to increase one’s risk. That makes it exceedingly hard to pinpoint one cause or stage of growth that would lead to schizophrenia.

The connections between all of these dots are not yet clear. While we don’t know its cause or have a cure, there are medicines and treatment strategies that can help people manage the condition.

Why Does Mass Psychogenic Illness Occur?

Mass psychogenic illness is somewhat of a medical mystery. The history books are filled with incidents in which a group of people begins to act the same bizarre way, or says they saw the same imaginary thing, or manifests the same idiopathic symptoms. Some people refer to the phenomenon as conversion disorder or mass hysteria, while others argue those are different.

One of the strangest examples is the Dancing Plague of 1518. A villager in Strasbourg, France, suddenly started dancing in the town square and couldn’t stop. Hundreds of people started experiencing the same unconscious urge to dance. Some danced until they dropped dead of a heart attack or sheer exhaustion. The “plague” lasted for months. 

Many historians also consider the “witch trials” in Europe and colonial America to be mass psychogenic events. Typically, the incidents started with a group of people who began acting erratically and/or accused someone of causing the attacks. In the infamous Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts in 1692, some pre-teen girls began writhing and screaming and accused three women of bewitching them. The alarming situation snowballed: husbands and wives accused each other of witchcraft, neighbors informed on neighbors, and children condemned their parents. Eventually, 19 people were hanged.

These days, mass psychogenic events are generally not witchcraft-related, but they still occur. They happen most often during times of high stress in the immediate community. As recently as 2011, more than a dozen girls at a high school in Le Roy, New York, came down with unexplained tics and twitches, and in 2016, social media was rife with posts about creepy clowns committing violent acts in random towns (with little actual evidence). Both incidents exhibited characteristics of mass psychogenic illness.