On Moral Panics

“There is not the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads to weakness of mind, general lunacy, and homicidal mania,” says The New York Times article titled “Lunacy in England” published in 1894. Moral panics are a recurring feature. They are bursts of exaggerated fear that some new thing will wreck society’s core values. The history of mankind is riddled with ideas that were once considered indisputable truths but now sound like a silly joke. With bicycles, doctors cataloged entire diseases like “kyphosis bicyclistarum” (cyclist’s hump), and attributed conditions like tachycardia, anemia, and eyestrain to bicycle riding. People were “rendered mute” by heavy breathing while riding, and dancers “were crippled by overdeveloped leg muscles”! And there was a “bicycle face” — a scary permanent disfigurement of clenched jaw and bulging eyes (haven’t seen much of that in the Netherlands). When locomotives started getting widespread, The Lancet — still a very reputable…