German physicians even diagnosed a strange malady that swept the country, which they named “cipher stroke.” Those afflicted were apparently normal in every respect except, according to the New York Times, “for a desire to write endless rows of ciphers and engage in computations more involved than the most difficult problems in logarithms.” Perfectly sensible people would say they were ten billion years old or had forty trillion children. Apparently cashiers, bookkeepers, and bankers were particularly prone to this bizarre disease. Most people simply turned to barter or to using foreign
...more
