In 1518, hundreds of people in Strasbourg couldn't stop dancing.
One July day, a woman began dancing in a Strasbourg street and didn't stop for about a week. Within days dozens had joined her; by August, somewhere between 50 and 400 people were dancing uncontrollably. The city's cure was more dancing, with musicians hired. Five centuries on, nobody is sure why it happened.
Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire and now in France, recorded the outbreak in physicians' notes, sermons, chronicles and city council documents. Most chronicle accounts name the first dancer as Frau Troffea, who began on or around 14 July 1518. Others, her husband among them, started to copy her, and within days more than thirty people were dancing. The dancers were described as convulsing, sweating and exhausted, with swollen and bleeding feet, some crying out for help.
The authorities were baffled. Physicians of the time blamed 'overheated blood' and prescribed dancing it out, so the council reportedly opened guild halls, hired musicians and paid strong people to hold dancers upright. It backfired: more people joined, and the council eventually banned public dancing and even music. Many feared the dancing was a punishment from Saint Vitus, and the afflicted were sent to his shrine, wearing red shoes marked with crosses and sprinkled with holy water. By early September the outbreak faded.
The dramatic claim that people danced themselves to death, perhaps fifteen a day, is shaky. Strasbourg's own records from the time do not mention any deaths, and the accounts that do were written later. The historian John Waller, whose book popularised the event, is the main source for the death toll, and the number of dancers, 50 to 400, is uncertain too.
Why did it happen? One suggestion is ergot poisoning, from a fungus on rye that produces chemicals related to LSD. Waller finds that unconvincing: ergot poisoning would hardly let people dance for days, and it doesn't explain why such outbreaks clustered along the Rhine and Moselle. He favours a stress-induced mass psychogenic illness. The people of Alsace had endured years of famine and disease, and the region believed in Saint Vitus's curse. Similar outbreaks had been recorded in the area before, as far back as the 11th century in Saxony.
Source: Wikipedia — Dancing plague of 1518 · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
