Saturday, January 22, 2011

Porphyria: The Vampire Disease

While many find the vampire legend both fascinating and strangely compelling when it inhabits the written page or silver screen, it's one that can easily be dismissed in these modern times. Our enlightened sensibilities recognize this belief as the result of silly superstition and vivid imagination.  But during the 18th century when folklore and myth dominated eastern European perception, reports of vampires (as well as werewolves) were rampant, with hundreds of eye-witness sightings.  In fact, so prevalent was the common belief in the existence of vampires that the Austrians, who were occupying Serbia during the 1730s, sent a team of medical officers to the Serbian countryside to investigate reported weekly "exhumations and killing of the undead."  Read more . . .