The Dancing Plague of 1518: A Historical Oddity
In the sweltering summer of 1518, the streets of Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) became the stage for one of history’s most bizarre events. A woman named Frau Troffea stepped into the street and began to dance. Not for a few minutes or even hours, but for days on end. Within a week, dozens of others had joined her in this involuntary dance marathon. By month’s end, up to 400 people were dancing themselves to exhaustion, some allegedly dancing until they collapsed or even died. This strange phenomenon, now known as the Dancing Plague of 1518, remains one of the most peculiar and perplexing mass psychogenic illnesses ever documented.
Chronicled in medical notes, local council records, and religious sermons of the time, this wasn’t a festive celebration gone wild but something far more troubling – a compulsive, unstoppable urge to dance that gripped hundreds of people. What drove these people to dance until they dropped? How did this strange “plague” spread through a community? And why has nothing quite like it happened since?
The Outbreak: How the Dancing Fever Began
According to historical accounts, it all started with one woman. On a hot July day in 1518, Frau Troffea began to dance in the streets of Strasbourg. Her movements weren’t joyful or celebratory but appeared more like a trance-like state. She continued dancing for somewhere between four and six days. Instead of being an isolated incident, her strange behavior spread. Within a week, approximately 34 others had joined her, dancing day and night. By August, the number had swelled to as many as 400 participants.
Local physicians of the time, baffled by this phenomenon, attributed it to “hot blood” and, strangely enough, suggested that the cure was more dancing. The city council opened guildhalls and a grain market and even constructed a wooden stage for the afflicted. They also hired musicians to provide accompaniment, believing the dancers would recover once they had danced out their mania. This approach tragically backfired, as the music seemed to encourage more people to join and dance until they physically collapsed from exhaustion.
Contemporary accounts describe dancers continuing for days without rest, dancing until their feet became bloody, some even reportedly dying from heart attacks, strokes, or exhaustion. The city authorities eventually realized their mistake and banned public dancing, instead transferring the afflicted to a shrine where they prayed for divine intervention.
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Did You Know? The Dancing Plague of 1518 wasn’t the only such event in European history. Similar “dancing manias” were recorded in the 14th and 15th centuries along the Rhine and Moselle rivers, including a major outbreak in Aachen, Germany in 1374. These incidents often coincided with periods of extreme hardship like famine or disease.
Explanations and Theories: Understanding the Inexplicable
Over the centuries, numerous explanations have been proposed for the Dancing Plague. Early theories ranged from demonic possession and religious ecstasy to curses and the wrath of Saint Vitus (hence the later association with “St. Vitus’ Dance”). However, modern researchers have developed more scientific explanations.
One of the most compelling theories involves ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungus that can grow on rye and related plants, producing alkaloids that, when consumed, can cause hallucinations, spasms, and psychotic delusions. Ergotism (ergot poisoning) was common in medieval Europe when people unknowingly consumed contaminated grain. The symptoms of ergotism, including nervous spasms, convulsions, and hallucinations, bear some resemblance to the behavior exhibited during the dancing plague.
However, ergot poisoning typically causes muscle contractions, not the coordinated movements described in accounts of the dancing plague. It also causes gangrene and burning sensations, which weren’t reported among the dancers in Strasbourg.
The most widely accepted modern explanation is that the Dancing Plague was a case of mass psychogenic illness (previously called mass hysteria). This occurs when physical symptoms without an organic cause spread among a group of people who share beliefs about those symptoms. In the highly superstitious world of 16th-century Europe, where people lived under the constant shadow of disease and hardship, such phenomena could spread rapidly.
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Did You Know? The term “choreomania” – from the Greek words for “dance” and “madness” – was later coined to describe these dancing outbreaks. During medieval times, some sufferers reported visions of being attacked by demons or visited by saints who commanded them to dance.
The Historical Context: Why Strasbourg?
To understand the Dancing Plague fully, we must examine the social and historical context of Strasbourg in 1518. This wasn’t just any time or place – it was a perfect storm of conditions that made a mass psychogenic event not just possible, but perhaps even likely.
The early 16th century was an incredibly difficult period for the region. Strasbourg had suffered from a series of misfortunes including widespread famine, disease outbreaks, and unusually high temperatures. The years preceding 1518 saw failed harvests that led to malnutrition and starvation. Diseases like syphilis, leprosy, and “sweating sickness” were rampant. People were literally starving in the streets.
This extreme physical hardship was accompanied by intense psychological distress. Medieval Europeans interpreted disasters as divine punishment or the work of malevolent forces. The Catholic Church’s emphasis on sin, guilt, and supernatural intervention created a population primed to experience and interpret strange phenomena through a lens of religious anxiety.
Historian John Waller, who has extensively researched the Dancing Plague, suggests that the dancers were experiencing a trance state brought on by extreme psychological distress. In his view, the people of Strasbourg, suffering from severe stress and malnourishment, fell into a collective trance that took the form of uncontrollable dancing.
Importantly, cultural beliefs of the time included the legend of St. Vitus, who could allegedly curse people with a dancing mania. This existing belief framework provided a ready-made explanation for the strange compulsions people were feeling, potentially facilitating the spread of the phenomenon.
The Legacy and Similar Historical Events
The Dancing Plague of 1518 wasn’t entirely unique. Europe had witnessed similar outbreaks of dancing mania before, particularly during the medieval period. However, the Strasbourg incident stands out for its scale, duration, and the quality of its documentation.
Similar phenomena have occurred throughout history across cultures. In Italy, between the 13th and 17th centuries, tarantism involved people who believed they had been bitten by a tarantula and could only be cured by frenzied dancing to specific music. In Malaysia, periodic outbreaks of “running amok” involved individuals (usually males) engaging in violent, indiscriminate attacks followed by amnesia.
More recent examples include the “laughing epidemic” that struck a girls’ school in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in 1962, affecting up to 1,000 people with uncontrollable laughter, and the “twitching epidemic” in Le Roy, New York in 2011-2012, where several high school students developed mysterious tics and spasms.
What these events share is their apparent psychogenic nature and their occurrence during periods of social stress or within groups with shared beliefs about symptoms and their causes. They remind us that the human mind’s influence over the body can be profound and that psychological conditions can manifest in surprising physical ways.
The Dancing Plague has inspired numerous artistic works, including novels, plays, and music. It continues to fascinate medical historians, psychologists, and the general public as an example of the complex interplay between mind, body, culture, and social circumstance.
Conclusion: Dancing at the Edge of Understanding
The Dancing Plague of 1518 sits at an uncomfortable intersection of history, psychology, and medicine – fascinating yet disturbing, well-documented yet ultimately mysterious. While modern science offers plausible explanations centered around mass psychogenic illness, we cannot know with absolute certainty what drove hundreds of people to dance until they collapsed more than 500 years ago.
Perhaps what makes this historical oddity so compelling is that it challenges our understanding of human behavior and the power of the mind. It reminds us that extraordinary circumstances can produce extraordinary behaviors, and that the line between individual and collective psychology can sometimes blur in unexpected ways.
The Dancing Plague also serves as a stark reminder of how profoundly cultural context shapes human experience. In our modern world, stress and trauma might manifest differently, but the fundamental human capacity for suggestion and psychosomatic symptoms remains. Whether we’re discussing medieval dancing manias or modern mass psychogenic events, these phenomena reveal something profound about human psychology and our capacity for collective experience.
As we look back at the dancers of Strasbourg, we might wonder not just what afflicted them, but what their strange ordeal reveals about ourselves and the societies we build – how shared stress, beliefs, and suggestion can literally move bodies in ways that defy simple explanation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was the Dancing Plague actually fatal?
According to contemporary accounts, some of the afflicted individuals did die from exhaustion, heart attacks, or strokes after days of non-stop dancing. Historical records suggest dozens may have died, though exact numbers are difficult to verify. The combination of continuous exertion, lack of rest, and malnutrition (which was already prevalent due to famine) created conditions where dancing could indeed prove fatal.
Could the Dancing Plague happen again today?
While mass psychogenic illnesses still occur in modern times, the specific form of the Dancing Plague was likely shaped by the cultural and religious beliefs of 16th-century Europe. Today’s mass psychogenic events tend to reflect contemporary anxieties and beliefs. That said, phenomena involving unusual collective behaviors continue to emerge, just in different forms that reflect our current cultural context.
Were there any treatments that successfully stopped the dancing?
After the initial misguided attempt to “cure” the dancers by encouraging more dancing, authorities eventually took a different approach. The afflicted were taken to the shrine of St. Vitus, a saint associated with dance, where they were given crosses and red shoes, and a special mass was held. Prayer interventions, combined with the natural course of the phenomenon, eventually led to the subsiding of the epidemic after several months. However, there’s no evidence that any specific medical intervention was effective.