| In medieval Europe, Saint Anthony was the patron saint of those
stricken with ergotism, an affliction with symptoms including
burning pain and gangrene in the
extremities, hallucinations, psychosis and even death.
In William Ellis' The Country Housewife's Family Companion, published in 1750, he
states that St. Anthony's Fire "generally proceeds from excessive heat in
the blood occasioned after surfeits, or by too free a use of spiritous or other
strong liquors, and commonly causes great pain in the part it comes out in."
Although
the link wasn't well-known until later, ergotism is in fact
caused by eating bread made from rye infected with
Claviceps purpurea, a fungus that produces ergot -- a mix
of toxic alkaloids.
Damp grain storage conditions caused the fungus to flourish, and often
entire villages would be stricken. Mass ergotism didn't begin to appear until
the Middle Ages, probably because rye wasn't widely cultivated for food
until that time.
Among the mix of alkaloids in ergot are neurotoxins and peripheral
vasoconstrictors. Vasoconstriction in the extremities was the cause of
the burning pains and gangrene; some cases were so severe that fingers and toes
or even hands and feet were lost. This quality of ergot alkaloids was
exploited as early as the Middle Ages, when midwives would use a
small quantity to speed up labor and reduce bleeding. In modern times,
derivatives of ergot such as ergotamine were extracted and synthesized, and
used to stop hemorrhage and relieve migraine. The work of Sandoz chemists,
including Albert Hoffman and others, with
ergot derivatives led to the synthesis of LSD (most famously), but also of
dihydroergotamine (a migraine medication), Methergine (used for postpartum
bleeding), Hydergine (developed as a treatment for dementia), and Sansert (another
migraine drug).
The most recent outbreak of St. Anthony's Fire occurred in 1951 in
Pont-St. Esprit, in Provence, France. Patients began turning up
in the hospital complaining of abdominal pain, pain in extremities
and cold fingertips. Babbling and hallucinations ensued. After two days,
70 homes were used as emergency wards, and straitjackets had to be
called in from surrounding areas because the patients that escaped would
soon be running frantically through the streets. All in all, 200 people were
made ill and 4 died. As it turns out, all those
stricken had eaten bread from the same bakery, which had obtained tainted
grain from an unethical farmer.
http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/wong/BOT135/LECT12.HTM
http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/mdd/99/marapr/forged.html | 
