Dance Plague of 1518
We all get a jingle or tune stuck in our heads every now and then, and end up humming and mumbling it nonstop or on and off for hours or days on end. That is bad enough, but what about taking that up a notch: how about a dance move that one can’t stop? Almost everyone loves a good shimmy but what happens if the shimmy is so good that you just can’t quit, and end up dancing yourself to death?
That is what the people of Strasbourg, Alsace, in what is now France, discovered in July of 1518, when their town fell into the grip of a dancing mania. Hundreds of people started dancing nonstop, for days on end. By the time the dance fever finally broke, many of the good people of Strasbourg had literally danced themselves to death from heart attacks, strokes, or plain exhaustion.
It began innocently enough one sunny July morning, when a Frau Troffea started dancing in the street. Onlookers clapped, laughed, and cheered her high spirits and joie de vivre as she danced. And danced. And danced some more. Frau Troffea danced without rest or respite for 6 days, and within a week, she had been joined by dozens in her marathon dance, mostly women.
Alarmed, authorities consulted local physicians, who opined that the cause was “hot blood”. On the theory that the dancers would recover only if they got it out of their system by dancing continuously, musicians were hired, a wooden stage was erected, and additional dancing space was made by opening up guildhalls and clearing out a marketplace to make more room. Those measures backfired, and simply ended up encouraging even more people to join the hysteria. Within a month, the number of nonstop dancers had ballooned into the hundreds, and at the height of the craze, 15 dancers were dying each day from exhaustion and heart attacks.
The Strasbourg dance plague was not an isolated incident, and between the 14th and 17th centuries, there were enough similar outbreaks for contemporaries to coin a term for the phenomena: Saint Vitus’ Dance, or Saint John’s Dance. There is no modern consensus on the cause, so it is simply categorized as an unusual social phenomenon – a mass public hysteria, or a mass psychogenic illness of unknown provenance.