CHAPTER 2 When You Smile, the World Smiles with You

A strange thing happened in Tanzania in 1962. At a mission boarding school for girls near Lake Victoria in the Bukoba District, there was an epidemic of laughter. And this was not just a few schoolgirls sharing a joke. An irresistible desire to laugh broke out and spread from person to person until more than one thousand people were affected.

The affliction had an abrupt onset, and the initial bout of laughter lasted between a few minutes and a few hours in those affected. This was followed by a period of normal behavior, then typically a few relapses over the course of up to sixteen days. In what was to be a clue about the real nature of this epidemic, the victims often described feeling restless and fearful, despite their laughter.

The physicians who first investigated and reported on the out-break—Dr. Rankin, a faculty member at Makerere University, and Dr. Philip, the medical officer of the Bukoba District—were extremely thorough.¹ They found that each new patient had recent contact with another person suffering from the malady. They were able to observe that the incubation period between contact and onset of symptoms ranged from a few hours to a few days. Thankfully, as they intoned without irony, “no fatal cases have been reported.” Afflicted persons recovered fully.

The epidemic began on January 30, 1962, when three girls aged twelve to eighteen started laughing uncontrollably. It spread rapidly, and soon most people at the school had a serious case of the giggles. By March 18, ninety-five of the 159 pupils were affected, and the school was forced to close. The pupils went home to their villages and towns. Ten days later, the uncontrollable laughter broke out in the village of Nshamba, fifty-five miles away, where some of the students had gone. A total of 217 people were affected. Other girls returned to their village near the Ramanshenye Girls’ Middle School, and the epidemic spread to this school in mid-June. It too was forced to close when forty-eight of 154 students were stricken with uncontrollable laughter. Another outbreak occurred in the village of Kanyangereka on June 18, again when a girl went home. The outbreak started with her immediate family and spread to two nearby boys’ schools, and those schools were also forced to close. After a few months, the epidemic petered out.

Rankin and Philip looked hard for biological causes for the epidemic. They performed physical examinations and lab studies on the patients, did spinal taps, examined the food supply for toxins, and ascertained that there was no prior record of a similar epidemic in the region. The villagers themselves did not know what to make of it. In Bukoba, where the illness aroused great interest, there was the “belief that the atmosphere had been poisoned as a result of the atom bomb explosions.” Others described it as a kind of “spreading madness” or “endwara yokusheka,” which means simply, “the illness of laughing.”

As the villagers and the scientists investigating this outbreak realized, the epidemic was no laughing matter. It did not involve the spread of real happiness and joy—though this can happen too, albeit not in quite the same way. Rather, the outbreak was a case of epidemic hysteria, a condition that takes advantage of a deep-rooted tendency of human beings to exhibit emotional contagion. Emotions of all sorts, joyful or otherwise, can spread between pairs of people and among larger groups. Consequently, emotions have a collective and not just an individual origin. How you feel depends on how those to whom you are closely and distantly connected feel.

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