Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to

explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Our world is full of mysteries, but few fields of study remain as baffling as the human mind.

One oddity that has puzzled brain researchers for years is the fact that some psychiatric illnesses

seem to be tied to specific periods of history, like the condition known as glass delusion. While rare today,

this condition was strangely common in medieval Europe. Those who suffered from it harbored the

all-consuming belief that they were literally made of glass. Some people believed it was their

whole body that was affected. One man was certain that it was just his head,

while another thought the same about his heart. In most cases, though, the delusion was

accompanied by a heightened fear that made day-to-day life almost impossible. Take, for example,

the man who refused to ever sit down out of fear that his buttocks would shatter. It's difficult to say

why this particular delusion was so widespread in the past, although it could be connected to the

way that glass was viewed during the Middle Ages. Clear glass was a relatively recent invention

and was sometimes associated with magic and alchemy. But while this helps explain why it was on

people's minds, it doesn't give us much insight into what it was like to suffer from the illness.

For that, we can turn to the few documentary instances. The most famous one comes from medieval

France toward the end of the 100-year-s war. In 1392, physicians were summoned to the

estate of a 23-year-old man named Charles. They found him moaning and tossing in bed,

in the throes of an intense fear. Whenever he regained consciousness, he would shout at his

servants, ordering them to keep their distance. He seemed convinced that if anyone touched him, he would explode into shards of glass.

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