"It was not until the close of the middle ages that lycanthropy was recognised as a disease" wrote Baring-Gould, by which he meant it was natural misfortune, free from Satanic influence. He is correct that it was ignored during the Great Witch Hunts. But if the Witch Hunters had cited Greek medical records with the wild abandon they saved for Greek myths, they would have found evidence that lycanthropic-type disorders had been recognised as natural since very early times.

Paolos Aigina included lycanthropy in his medical encyclopaedia. He attributed the disease to malfunction of the brain, upsets in the humoural balances and the use of hallucinogenic drugs. His list of symptoms included pallor, feeble vision, absence of tears and saliva (with resultant dry tongue and eyes), excessive thirst, severe ulcerations on legs from travelling on all fours and an obsessive compulsion to wander at night in cemeteries. He recommended that the patient undertook baths, purging and a controlled diet. Their veins should be opened (to drain the excess of humour) and their nostrils should be rubbed with opium at night to enforce sleep in the place of nocturnal wandering. What luck to be deranged in seventh century Alexandria rather than fifteenth century France!

In the mid-sixteeth century, Johann Weyer argued that lycanthropy should be regarded as an illness rather than diabolic work, but he was vigorously resisted by the extremist Jean Bodin less than two decades later. In his Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, Robert Burton categorised lycanthropy as a form of madness, distinguished from melancholy by its vehemence and anger. Reginald Scot later that same century also insisted that the condition was nothing more than a natural disease, which he termed Lupina Melancholia or Lupina Insania.

Robert Burton's "noxious herbs" emerge time and time again in the history of lycanthropy. Aigina cited hallucinogenic drugs as one of the causes of the wolf delusion, and the accounts frequently mention the use of a salve or ointment.

Modern definitions of the lycanthropy disorder tend to collect around the delusional, loss of ego boundaries, alienation, anxiety collection of symptoms which is collected under the highly generalised term "schizophrenia". The disorder may be a protective mechanism to save them from the ultimate disintegration - suicide.

Although more marginal in relation to the main body of lycanthropic history, there is one more disease which it has been claimed as an influence on werewolf lore - rabies. Rabies is characterised by a period of restlessness and irritability followed by fits of fear and violence. This is accompanied by the victim's inability to swallow, which led to the term "hydrophobia" (fear of water) being used. As it progresses, rabies causes spasms of the respiratory muscles which can lead to a persistent dry cough, sometimes taken in the past to be the bark of the dog that had bitten the victim. The connection between hydrophobia and rabies in dogs was recognised as early as the forth century BC by Aristotle; it is probably no coincidence that some werewolf lore said that werewolves were afraid of water, and that one could become a werewolf by eating the flesh of a rabid wolf. Burton made pains to reassign lycanthropy as a madness rather than a melancholy, putting it in the same category of disorder as hydrophobia. It is worth remembering that most people believed that running water had the power to break spells, so a fear of water would have involved a metaphysical significance to our ancestors which is not immediately apparent to us.

The role of psychiatric and physical illness in lycanthropy is discussed fully in the book of Unnatural Predators. Join our mailing list for more info. about the book, site, events and merchandise.