 I was going to do some really cool makeup, but then I got pink eye. And we're back. Yep, your girl's got pink eye. So if my eyes look a little extra chewable today, that's why. On top of the pink eye, I also got a cold at the same time. My entire immune system just decided to give up on me all at once, so this might be the last time you see me alive. Anyway, welcome back to Dapper History, where we talk about the interesting parts of history your teachers probably didn't tell you. And today we will be discussing one of the more peculiar psychological afflictions in human history, the glass delusion. At one point, during the Middle Ages and early modern period, a prickly sensation was sweeping the nation, where multiple people believed that they were made of glass and it was ruining their lives. But then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the glass delusion vanished, and there have been zero cases of it ever since. Now, let me be clear. The point of this video is not to mock people who suffered with this delusion or people who struggle with delusions in general. I'm a mental health advocate, or what I try to be, and I know from firsthand experience that people who are experiencing hallucinations and delusions are going through enough without being made into a joke. My goal is to take a closer look at this phenomenon and understand how it works. Where did the glass delusion come from? Where did it go? And what can it teach us about our modern-day understanding of mental illness? Luckily, I, as usual, have all the answers. So, clear your schedules, because today we will be getting to the bottom of the glass delusion. Before we get into the specifics of the glass delusion, I want to establish what a delusion is. A person is experiencing delusions when they believe something that is not and cannot be true about reality. Additionally, no amount of proof can convince a delusional person of the truth of reality. Common delusions include persecution, grandeur, and believing he's going to text you back. The glass delusion was characterized by the belief that either your whole body or parts of your body were made of glass, and therefore they could break. Now, the glass delusion isn't notable for its content. Like, yes, it's an illogical claim, but most delusions are illogical in some way. So, what is notable about the glass delusion? I'm so glad you asked. You see, humans have been experiencing mental illnesses like delusions for, like, all of recorded history. In every country, every language, every time period, every demographic, mental illness is universal. And while certain disorders are more prevalent in certain cultures or demographics, there has never been a mental illness that only exists within one demographic. Until now, bitch! You see, the glass delusion was a very exclusive mental disorder. Not just anyone could wake up with the crippling fear that their feet would break when they hit the floor, you know? Bitch, you needed money to get this delusion, okay? You have probably never met anyone with the glass delusion, and this is for a few reasons. One, you're broke! And two, you're not currently alive between the Middle Ages and modern period. You see, we only have records of the glass delusion existing for a couple centuries in a handful of countries in Europe. It is very unusual for a disorder to be that specific in its demographics. Like I said, it's not unheard of for certain cultures to have higher rates of a disorder, but the fact that it is never seen in any other country or in any other time period is unheard of. And, like I said earlier, the glass delusion only seemed to plague one tax bracket, the rich, the royals, the nobles, the academics, also known as the important people. I think it's about time we met some of the people who suffered from this fragile, fancy affliction. King Charles VI was one of the first and most well-known victims of this terror. At the time, he was a successful and well-liked king. Which makes sense, I mean, you have a lot of time to get good at what you do when you start your job at 11 years old. But at the ripe old age of 24, Charles suffered a massive psychotic break that would continue for the rest of his life. With the power of hindsight and our knowledge of modern medicine, and a degree in psychology, which I am not in fact using, we can tell based on his actions that he was suffering from schizophrenia or psychosis of some kind. Though we'll never know for sure what he had, as it's pretty hard to diagnose a dead person. Unfortunately, Charles's condition went completely untreated. I mean, remember, this is the 1300s. These people didn't even know who damn Daniel was. And of course, one of his most notable symptoms was his belief that his entire body was made out of glass, and if he moved too much, he would shatter. Because of this crippling fear, Charles would spend hours at a day bed rotting, surrounded by only soft things and refusing to move. For when he did have to get up, Charles had special clothing made that had strips of metal running throughout it that would protect his body from falling apart. He didn't let any of his friends or advisors come near him, for fear that if they touched him, they would break his body. His declining mental health interfered with his personal and political life. And he went from being known as Charles the Beloved to Charles the Mad. But believing he was breakable was not the only symptom of psychosis that Charles was displaying. His mental illness, left completely untreated, caused Charles to make a lot of very questionable decisions. And it didn't help that he was, you know, the king, so it's not like anyone could say shit to him. His actions included, but are not limited to, refusing to bathe or change his clothes for months at a time, attacking his own army after being startled by a loud noise, killing at least one of his own knights, getting into wars he couldn't finish, and oh no, oh no, oh. I don't want to talk about Charles anymore. Another well-known royal who suffered from this fear of fragilness was Princess Alexandra of Bavaria. She is one of the most well-known cases of the glass delusion because of how extreme her claim was. She believed not that she was made of glass, but that as a child she had swallowed a glass piano. She insisted that the piano was still intact inside her, and so she was terrified not just of being touched, but of walking through narrow corridors or hallways. It is speculated that Alexandra had OCD, as she had several other compulsive tendencies, such as allegedly only wearing the color white and being obsessed with cleanliness. Okay, scratch that part about her only wearing the color white, because of course after I filmed this, I found a painting of her wearing colors other than white, and even a real-ass photograph of her later in life not wearing white. So I don't know where that bum-ass fact came from. Maybe she wore white often, but not all the time. So yeah, I just wanted to do a correction. Sorry about that. In fact, completely putting the glass piano aside, many sources describe Alexandra as being a fragile person in general. She was never married, which was very unusual for a young noblewoman. In fact, her father, King Ludwig I, turned down a prince who asked for her hand in marriage, citing her delicate health as an excuse. Okay, Ludwig, kind of a baller move, not forcing your daughter to marry an older man. Clearly, they call him king for a reason. But enough about these royals. Let's hear what doctors at the time were saying about the glass delusion. The physician Levenus Lumnius published a book, The Touchstone of Complexions, in 1576. That's a huge bitch! It was basically a textbook, listing and describing different afflictions and disorders. In a surprisingly progressive move for the time, Levenus had a chapter in the book dedicated to mental afflictions. One of the mental illnesses he talked about was, of course, the glass delusion. He wrote about his personal experience working with patients who suffered from it. Apparently, one of his patients believed, and I quote, His buttocks were made of glass in so much that he- Okay, okay, settle down, everyone. Hey, knock it off! His buttocks were made of glass in so much as he dares not do anything not standing. For fear that should he sit, he should break his rump and the glass might fly into pieces. This included the business of sitting down privies forward to relieve himself, the commission of which caused him great peril. In normal people speak that translates to, his patient believed that his butt was glassed so he never sat or laid down, even to go to the bathroom. I know it's easy to laugh at this because, you know, butt stuff. But I don't find it that funny. This is a man who is suffering from psychosis so severe that it made living his day to day life impossible. Even if the delusion itself sounds absurd, the distress of the person experiencing it is real. Like jokes aside, really think about it. This man couldn't bring himself to sit on the toilet, causing him to soil himself every day. Like, could you imagine how embarrassed, scared, stressed, ashamed this man was? Could you imagine how tired he was? He couldn't lay down to sleep. He must have been exhausted and in so much pain. Now these are just three examples of people who have the glass delusion, but I think there's a very important pattern to note here. In each case, the glass delusion itself doesn't just show up on its own. All of these people were already experiencing psychosis. The glass delusion was just one specific symptom of that psychosis. Also, since we're talking so much about rich people, I would like to note it's not like poor people during this time were just not experiencing psychosis or other mental illnesses, because they were. And it's not even that the glass delusion was a more debilitating or more extreme type of delusion. It wasn't. The reason why we have so many records of the glass delusion is specifically because it only affected rich people. This was a population of people who, one, could afford to see a doctor, and two, were considered important enough to be concerned about. The common folk and their non-glass-themed delusions were completely irrelevant to the royals and the nobles, you know? And it just so happens that the royals and nobles were a lot more likely to get recorded. They break, they shake, they get way back. Now that we've met some of the people who struggle with this delicate disorder, let's get a better understanding for the circumstances surrounding it. Because, like a lot of other things in history, understanding the context of the events that happen will really help answer some of the questions we have about them. So why did the glass delusion only exist during a certain period of time? And why did it only affect rich people? The short answer is simply that at this time, in this area, glass was the hot new thing. Though it had humble and opaque beginnings, around the 14th century, the quality of glass making had clearly improved. As glass improved in its quality and transparency, it grew in demand. But the process of glass blowing was a tedious and expensive one that could only really produce small amounts of glass at a time. This meant glass was a really expensive commodity that only the wealthiest of the wealthy could afford to buy. It became a coveted luxury item among the opulent. Having glass ornaments or even better glass windows in your home was a status symbol. Glass wouldn't be affordable or available to lower class people for another few centuries. That right there is the piece we need to solve this puzzle. Why did the glass delusion only affect rich people? Because rich people were the only ones really familiar with glass. It's the same reason why pilgrims who had psychosis weren't saying things like, Aye, the bishop is tormenting me with radio waves. They didn't know what a radio was. Your brain can only conjure up delusions or hallucinations about things that you're familiar with. And in the Middle Ages, an early modern period, poor people were not familiar with glass in its properties. So now we know why lower class people weren't experiencing the glass delusion, but why were upper class people experiencing it? Why was glass in the fear of it breaking so on the mind for these people? The short answer is that despite being so eager to buy it, a lot of these wealthy people were terrified of glass. I can hear you asking, but why would rich people be scared of glass? Is glass really that scary? And the short answer to that is, yeah, it kinda is. Glass was a new and unfamiliar material, and if there's one thing that universally scares human beings across history, it's new and unfamiliar things. It was also just a little weird for a lot of reasons. If you're alive and watching this video, I'm assuming you were born sometime in the past couple centuries, meaning that you grew up around glass, whether it be in windows, spectacles, bottles, jars, plates, cups, you have probably seen glass every day of your life. And from the time we were young, we had adults telling us the key properties of glass. It's fragile, it can break, it's sharp, don't touch it. Oh, and if you were my dad, you would add in that glass is expensive, and if you break a window, I'm gonna sell you to the Mickey Mouse Circus. But getting back on track, imagine if you will, that you had never seen glass before. If you were some middle ages aristocrat and you heard of this new contraption from a far off land called glass, of course you'd be interested in it. Your not at all humble abode had only ever had fabric curtains or wooden shutters to cover the windows. The idea of letting in sunlight without letting in bugs or the smell of poor people was very appealing. So you order several dozen window panes to sufficiently flex on your haters. But when they arrive, they're nothing like you expected. You see, during this time, a lot of people actually believed that glass was magical or alchemical. And when you really think about it, it's easy to understand how they came to that conclusion. Glass was like no other material in the natural world they had ever seen. It doesn't grow, it's not formed, it has to be made by human hands. Okay, you can stop typing that comment. I have a correction to make. I forgot that there are, in fact, naturally forming types of glass that are not man-made. Such as volcanic glass or obsidian. So, ha ha, everybody point and laugh at the fucking idiot who forgot that obsidian exists. Like, you've never made a mistake. The idea of melting rocks into another substance sounds like a magical process. Also, have you ever seen the process of glass making? It looks like an alchemical process. It looks like something magical is happening. And on top of that, you'd be completely unprepared to see glass when it breaks. Oh my god, could you imagine being a middle-ages motherfucker and seeing glass break for the first time? I would shit my pants. Because again, when damaged, glass doesn't react like any other material in the natural world. It doesn't splinter like wood. It doesn't rip like fabric. It doesn't twist and break like metal. When it gets damaged, glass either forms this sprawling spider web pattern that stretches across the whole pane or it just fucking explodes. And once it's done breaking, it leaves millions of little glittering shards across your finest Bavarian rug. Remember, you're still pretending to be a rich person. When we're talking about these people seeing glass break for the first time, I remember back to the patient who believed that his butt was made of glass. Remember? He specifically cites being afraid that his butt would shatter and fly into pieces. This patient probably saw glass shatter for the first time and was just traumatized by it. And the cherry on top of all of this, these people didn't know how to clean up glass. You all probably know that cleaning up glass is a very tedious process because even after you've swept, there's all these little shards you can't see. Let me repeat that. There's these little shards you can't see that can still cut you. Again, imagine you were a person who had never even seen damn Daniel before. You just watched a solid object blow up into pieces. You've barely recovered as your maid finishes sweeping it up. And then you put your hand on the table where it was and you look at your hand and you're bleeding again because there were microscopic pieces of the glass left over that you couldn't even see, that your maid couldn't even sweep up. They were so small they went through the bristles. Not only would I believe that it was witchcraft, I would believe that I was cursed. When you realize that the glass delusion wasn't some anomaly of a disorder, it was people being afraid of something they had never seen before. It becomes a lot more understandable. And it also starts to make sense why after a certain point the glass delusion went away. Like I said, after a few centuries, glass went from being this exclusive luxury item to something that common people could afford. By the time glass made its way to the lower classes, it was no longer this strange unfamiliar material. People were starting to get a hang of the rules of glass. They understood that it breaks and you have to be careful about it. It stopped being noteworthy and therefore it stopped appearing in people's nightmares and delusions. Or did it? When you stop thinking about the glass delusion as the fear that your body is made of glass and start thinking about it as the fear of new unfamiliar technology, you realize the glass delusion never actually went away. It just continues to change with the times. As new technology continues to be introduced to us, there is always going to be a period of fear around it, you know? When radio communication was first introduced, it scared a lot of people. Like what do you mean you're communicating through the air and I can't see it and I can't hear it but you can, certain people can. What else don't I see? It's been a very common delusion in more recent decades where a person believes that someone or some organization put a microchip under their skin. This likely was caused by the newer practice of microchipping dogs, GPS trackers, using air tags, etc. I mean, just this past year, a person underwent surgery to get a neurolink computer chip implanted into their brain permanently, I think. And even more recently, there is an increasing number of people who suffer with delusions, who believe that their thoughts and memories are being tracked and recorded by someone outside of their control. And though this fear is not based in reality, is it really such a strange thing to be afraid of? When we know for a fact that our data is being tracked everywhere we go, when it's a common joke that you'll think about something and then you see an ad for it, like someone was reading your thoughts, bringing this all back to glass. My point is, the glass delusion was not a unique disorder, but rather a unique symptom of the time, place, and demographic of the people who suffered with it. Mental illnesses are absolutely impacted by the culture and context that they appear in. And even though it's easy for us to look back at these people and scoff and say, pfft, this silly guy, his butt wasn't made of glass, what was he thinking? People from the future will probably look back at our time period today, and the way that our mental illness is manifest, and they'll scoff and make some comment about how silly and primitive our understanding of our own brains were. My quest for understanding the glass delusion was a simple one that ended up leading me down a dark path into existential dread of the future. But that's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for watching, subscribe if you want to, don't if you don't, and I will see you next whenever I upload. Bye! But wait, there's more! I'm not done yet! So I am obviously pretty interested in history, and therefore I'm fascinated by the ways that history is shaped and changed by insufficient records, people's biases and opinions, and just plain forgetfulness. Well, when doing research for the glass delusion, I found a really good example of this. On the Wikipedia page for the glass delusion, you'll see it mentions one of the famous figures who suffered with this condition was... Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. What? I can't keep up with that, what the fuck? Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Slow down. Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Piotr Ilyich? Piotr, I'll call him Piotr. He was the Russian guy who composed such pieces as Swan Lake and the Nutcracker. On Wikipedia and many other sources, it says that Piotr believed that his head was made of glass and he was afraid that it would fall off and shatter. So every time he was conducting, he would hold onto his chin to keep his head in place. Now, if I were a dummy, I would have taken that at face value and included that in my YouTube video essay. But I'm not. I'm Jules fucking Dapper. And this is Dapper fucking history, bitch, and I checked my sources. Doing research, I found literally no evidence that Piotr believed that his head was made of glass. There's evidence that this fact was actually based on a comment one of his critics made about his awkward body language while conducting. Piotr was really anxious about conducting, especially early in his career, and this led to a lot of people criticizing him for his unconfident body language. He had a nervous habit of cocking his head to the side while conducting. And so possibly to keep his head up, possibly as a method of self-soothing, he would keep his left hand under his chin and conduct with his right hand. This unusual posture led one of his critics to joke that it looked like Piotr was afraid his head would fall off when conducting. This joke was then repeated enough times that it became a fact. Piotr believes that his head is going to fall off when conducting, which then over time transformed into Piotr believes his head is made of glass and that's why he thinks it'll fall off when he's conducting. This was then passed through a multi-century game of telephone where today it is accepted as fact because there are so many sources repeating it. The Wikipedia page for the Glass Delusion had one source about Piotr allegedly having the glass delusion. But when I looked it up, sure enough, it doesn't fucking mention glass anywhere. It only says that he struggled to keep his head upright while conducting. It doesn't even mention him holding onto his chin. It's easy to see and it's fascinating to me how a piece of information can get skewed and altered over the decades and centuries by people who had no malicious intent. None of them were trying to spread misinformation. They just didn't know any better. Now, do I genuinely believe this is important? Yes. Am I also going after Wikipedia because one time I tried to vandalize a Wikipedia page and they caught me right away and banned me from ever editing a Wikipedia page again? Yes! Anyway, mini dapper history over. I'll let you go for real now. I just wanted to remind you all to do your own research and always ask questions because information is valuable. Bye!