Knee-jerkers vs knee-tremblers

A little joke by Paddy, Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, turned upon something to be shunned. Conservative ministers, he said, had ‘indulged in a spasm of knee-jerking which would have made even St Vitus feel concerned’. He has, I think, got his spasms in a twist.

Apart from saying ‘Aaah’, the cartoon task for a patient at the doctor’s is to cross a leg for it to be hit with a little hammer. ‘Striking the tendon below the patella gives rise to a sudden extension of the leg, known as the knee-jerk,’ wrote the physiologist Sir Michael Foster in 1890. He was a busy man, sitting on committees to rid Victorian England of evils linked to malaria, sewage, tuberculosis and the University of London. But he didn’t object to knee-jerks.

When Lord Ashdown spoke out, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, had already remarked, about the murder of James Foley, that it was ‘not a time for a knee-jerk reaction’. Lord Ashdown’s jerking, in St Vitus’s department, is of a different kind. ‘I have seen all denominations of religion exercised by the jerks,’ claimed Herbert Mayo, another physiologist, in a book in 1849 on popular superstitions. An example comes in a forgotten novel from 1872, Circuit Rider, by Edward Eggleston, an American former Methodist minister. In it, an old man complains of the ‘Methodis’ driving people ‘crazy with the jerks’. It is true that early Methodists experienced phenomena of enthusiasm: glossolalia, falling down and twitching of the limbs. This sort of thing is said to have happened in German-speaking lands to 17th-century devotees who, on his feast day, danced before the image of St Vitus, a blameless saint from Sicily, martyred about AD 303. He was not known to have favoured jerks, whatever Lord Ashdown thinks.