7. The Dumb Belief That Trains Made People Crazy
An armed train passenger on a train to Liverpool went crazy and began to attack windows in order to get at passengers in other compartments. When the train slowed down and stopped at its next station, the lunatic calmed down. When the train got underway again, he went nuts once more, only to calm down once more when the train stopped at the next station. The pattern of going wild while the train was in motion, then calming down when it slowed down and stopped, was repeated until the train reached Liverpool.
Newspapers and mental health professionals of the day linked his bouts of madness to train travel. However, instead of reasoning that he was a mentally disturbed individual, for whom train travel was a trigger, they concluded that train travel was the cause of his mental illness. The belief persisted, well into the twentieth century, that something about the speed or motion of trains drove people mad. That pattern of flawed analysis, which confused correlation with causation, kept repeating itself. Somebody would act crazy or in a socially unacceptable way in a moving train, and the train’s speed or motion would be blamed as the cause of the craziness.
