Excerpted from

The New Book of Lists

by David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAURA PARK

ART ATTACK

Fine art can really make you sick. Or so says Dr. Graziella Magherini, author of

The Stendhal Syndrome

. She has studied more than a hundred tourists in Florence, Italy, who became ill in the presence of great works. The symptoms include heart palpitations, dizziness, and stomach pains. The typical sufferer is a single person between the ages of 26 and 40 who rarely leaves home. Dr. Magherini believes the syndrome is a result of jet lag, travel stress, and the shock of an overwhelming sense of the past. “Very often,” she says, “there’s the anguish of death.” The disorder was named after the 19th-century French novelist, who became overwhelmed by the frescoes in Florence’s Santa Croce Basilica. Particularly upsetting works of art include Michelangelo’s statue of David, Caravaggio’s painting of Bacchus, and the concentric circles of the Duomo cupola.

DR. STRANGELOVE SYNDROME

Alien hand syndrome is caused by damage to certain parts of the brain and afflicts thousands of people. This bizarre neurological disorder causes one of a person’s hands to act independently of the other and of its owner’s wishes. For example, the misbehaving hand may do the opposite of what the normal one is doing: If a person is trying to button a shirt with one hand, the other will follow along and undo the buttons. If one hand pulls up trousers, the other will pull them down. Sometimes the hand may become aggressive—pinching, slapping, or punching the patient: In at least one case, it tried to strangle its owner. Says neurologist Rachelle Doody, “Often a patient will sit on the hand, but eventually it gets loose and starts doing everything again.”

MUD WRESTLER’S RASH

Within 36 hours after 24 men and women wrestled in calf-deep mud at the University of Washington, seven wrestlers were covered with patches of “pus-filled red bumps similar to pimples,” and the rest succumbed later. Bumps were on areas not covered by bathing suits—one unlucky victim had wrestled in the nude. The dermatitis palaestrae limosae, or “muddy wrestling rash,” may have been caused by manure-tainted mud.

CUTLERY CRAVING

The desire to eat metal objects is comparatively common. Occasionally, there is an extreme case, however, such as that of 47-year-old Englishman Allison Johnson. An alcoholic burglar with a compulsion to eat silverware, Johnson has had 30 operations to remove strange things from his stomach. As of 1992, he had eight forks and the metal sections of a mop head lodged in his body. He has repeatedly been jailed and then released, each time going immediately to a restaurant and ordering lavishly. Unable to pay, he would then tell the owners to call the police and eat cutlery until they arrived. Johnson’s lawyer said of his client, “He finds it hard to eat and obviously has difficulty going to the lavatory.” ELECTRIC PEOPLE
According to British paranormalist Hilary Evans, some people are “upright human [electric] eels, capable of generating charges strong enough to knock out streetlights and electronic equipment.” Cases of “electric people” date back to 1786; the most famous is that of 14-year-old Angelique Cottin, whose presence caused compass needles to gyrate wildly. To further investigate this phenomenon, Evans founded SLIDE, the Street Lamp Interference Data Exchange.

HULA HOOP INTESTINE
On February 26, 1992, Beijing worker Xu Denghai was hospitalized with a “twisted intestine” after playing excessively with a hula hoop. His was the third such case in the several weeks since a hula-hoop craze had swept China. The Beijing Evening News advised people to warm up properly and avoid hula-hooping immediately after eating.

UNCOMBABLE HAIR SYNDROME
Also known as “hair felting,” this condition causes hair to form a tangled mass. In a case reported in 1993 in the Archives of Dermatology, a 39-year-old woman’s hair fell out and was replaced by dry, coarse, curly hair so tangled that it was impossible to comb. It lacked knots, kinks, or twists that would explain the tangling. The hairs themselves were strangely shaped: The cross-sections were triangular, grooved, or shaped like kidneys instead of circular. The usual solution to this problem is to cut off the solidified mass of hair. In one case, a woman from Indiana wanted to keep her hair, having spent 24 years growing it. After two and a half months of lubricating her hair with olive oil and separating the strands with knitting needles, the hair became normal. FOREIGN ACCENT SYNDROME
There are about 50 recorded cases of foreign accent syndrome, in which people who have suffered strokes or other injuries adopt a new accent. For example, Tiffany Roberts of Florida suffered a stroke and then began speaking with an English accent. She even adopted such Anglicisms as “bloody” and “loo.” Roberts had never been to Great Britain and was not a fan of British television shows. Perhaps the oddest case concerned a Norwegian woman who fell into a coma after being hit on the head by shrapnel during an air raid in 1941. When she woke up, she spoke with a thick German accent and was ostracized by her neighbors.