Albert Dadas, patient zero of the strange epidemic of “mad travelers” in the 19th century

“This is how it happens. I have bad headaches, I get bored, I feel the need to walk and I go away, I always go straight, and when I come back to myself, I am far away. Since the age of 12, Albert Dadas has been on the run. A sober, hardworking, mild and melancholic gas worker has a great sin: from time to time he is seized by the fixed thought of walking, collects money, drinks three glasses of orgeat and goes to a more or less distant city; At the end of the 19th^e century, travel is certainly fashionable, but Albert is neither an English aristocrat on his Grand Tour, nor a bourgeois beachgoer, nor a poet in search of a muse. He is a worker. And the worker works, gives birth, but does not travel, he wanders…

Then Albert Dadas became “patient zero” of a strange epidemic that had been raging in Europe for nearly twenty years; “mad travelers”the subject of a doctoral thesis in medicine defended in February 1887 by Philip…