Tulipomania
Stephen Usherwood describes how, in 1544, reports of a marvellous new flower, the tulip, first reached Western Europe, where it soon aroused a ‘fever of excited speculation’.
‘That distemper which Hippocrates calls Tulipomania could,’ said Joseph Addison in The Tatler in 1710, ‘cause a very plain honest man, and a person of good sense to value a bed of flowers not above twenty yards in length and two in breadth more than he would the best hundred acres in England.’ His readers were obviously already familiar with the tulipomaniac.
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