Chronic poisoning, or ergotism, used frequently to occur amongst the poor fed on rye infected with the Claviceps.
As it is practically impossible to reproduce the symptoms of ergotism nowadays, whether experimentally in the lower animals, or when the drug is being administered to a human being for some therapeutic purpose, it is believed that the symptoms of ergotism were rendered possible only by the semi-starvation which must have ensued from the use of such rye-bread; for the grain disappears as the fungus develops.
The last-known "epidemic" of ergotism occurred in Lorraine and Burgundy in the year 1816.
