What happened
In July 1518, in Strasbourg, then a free city of the Holy Roman Empire and now part of France, a woman recorded as Frau Troffea stepped into the street and started dancing. She kept going until she collapsed. After resting, she got up and started again. She kept this up for days.
Within a week more than 30 people had joined her. Nobody was having fun. Witnesses described dancers in pain, screaming for help, unable to stop.
People at the time blamed everything from demonic possession to overheated blood. The city’s leaders settled on a cure: more dancing. They opened guildhalls to the dancers, built a stage in the middle of the city, and hired musicians and professional dancers to keep them moving day and night.
It made things worse. Putting the dancers on public display seems to have spread the panic, and as many as 400 people were eventually caught up in it. One chronicle says that for a short time it killed around 15 people a day; Britannica puts it more cautiously and says a number of the dancers died. The outbreak faded in early September.
The most widely accepted explanation comes from historian John Waller, who argues it was a mass psychogenic illness. Strasbourg had just been through terrible harvests, the highest grain prices in a generation, and outbreaks of syphilis, leprosy and plague. People in the region also believed that St. Vitus could curse you with a compulsion to dance. Fear plus that belief, Waller argues, was enough. An older theory blames ergot, a fungus on rye that causes spasms, but Waller points out that ergot poisoning would not let people dance for days on end.
The twist
The city’s official cure for the dancing was more dancing.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Dancing plague of 1518
- The Lancet, A forgotten plague: making sense of dancing mania. John Waller, vol. 373, pp. 624–625, February 2009
- Icon Books, A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518. John Waller, 2008 (book)