By Shannon Horning
Imagine this: you are dancing. It could be to techno music in a club, to your favorite Spotify playlist in the solitude of your room, or with your friends in a frenzied moment of pure joy. Then, the track stops. The music fades. But you can’t stop dancing. Your arms swing wildly, your feet tap to the sound of nothing except your beating heart. Days pass, weeks. You’re hungry, thirsty, exhausted. But the tempo in your head continues to race. You cannot stop dancing.
This compulsory, unceasing instinct to dance is what many people of Strasbourg – in what is today France – experienced in the year 1518. It all started with one housewife named Frau (Mrs.) Troffea who, on one summer day, stepped into the city square and began to dance. The people walking on the streets stopped to stare, confused. There was no reason for her dancing — no music, no beat, not even one lone street musician banging it out on the pipes. Yet still, she twirled and hopped until she collapsed from exhaustion, only to get up once more and continue her feverish dance.
She stopped only briefly to rest and within a week, nearly three dozen other people joined her compulsive dance. By the end of the month, that number would jump to 400 people affected by the same mysterious affliction. The city square of Strasbourg became crowded with these dancing zombies, who continued their erratic behavior through rain and shine, hunger and thirst.
Physicians and city officials could only watch this epidemic with horror and alarm. After some deliberating and speculation, the main working theory was that the people had “hot blood” and the only cure was to continue dancing. So, the Strasbourg city council built stages and halls for the dancers to gather in, and even hired musicians to accompany the dancing. However, only some would snap themselves out of their mania. Many others danced themselves to exhaustion, even injury. An unlucky few died of heart attacks.
The affliction only abate in early September when the worst offenders were taken to a shrine. After they were forced to pray for absolution, their dancing ended, as abruptly as it began. The last of the Strasbourg dancers stopped tapping and twirling and were able to end their incessant dance. Finally, Strasbourg was back to normal, and the dancing plague of 1518 reached its resolution.
This, however, was not the only time in which large numbers of people were infected by a mysterious dancing illness. The dancing plague of 1518 is simply the most well-documented case, but there were numerous outbreaks in Europe between the 10th and 16th centuries. One such outbreak occurred along the Rhine River, where thousands of villagers were seized by a similar compulsion. But what exactly caused this dancing mania?
Many contemporary theories were proposed to explain these phenomena, some more outrageous than others. One possible explanation was that the dancers may have consumed rye contaminated with ergot, a mold known to cause convulsions. Another was that they were members of a religious cult, and dancing was a part of their divine customs and rituals. However, the more widely accepted theory is that these dancing plagues were a result of mass psychogenic illness.
Mass psychogenic illness, also known as mass hysteria, is a social phenomenon that starts with a “trigger” amongst a group of people and eventually develops into symptoms without an identifiable cause. In the case of the dancing plague of 1518, medical historian John Waller proposed that the beliefs and situation of Strasbourg at the time resulted in this mass, dancing hysteria. First, there were a series of famines and outbreaks of diseases such as smallpox that plagued the minds of Strasbourg residents. Then, there was the belief that those who failed to worship Saint Vitus, the patron saint of epileptics and entertainers, would be cursed to dance. These stressors eventually accumulated into the symptoms experienced by the afflicted dancers of Strasbourg, and could be used to explain the other outbreaks as well. After all, during the Middle Ages, many villagers were facing acute distress, whether because of famine or disease.
However, this phenomenon is not simply a bygone product of the Middle Ages. Mass psychogenic illness has occurred throughout history, even if not in the form of dancing plagues. In one instance in 1962, thousands of people in Tanzania started to laugh and cry and were unable to stop for a little over a year.
It is hard to pinpoint what exactly causes mass hysteria, as examples of the illness occur too rarely to conduct field research on. And, since it can take on many different forms, it is difficult to come up with one definitive answer. The exact scientific and social workings of this phenomenon largely remain a mystery, but they work to emphasize just how strangely the human body and mind can operate
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