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    Dancing Plague

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    Michael Contreras
    The dancing plague of 1518 began in July of that year when a woman in Strasbourg, France began dancing fervently in the streets for days. Within a week, 34 others had joined in and within a month around 400 people, predominantly women, were dancing without rest. Some collapsed or died of heart attacks, exhaustion, or strokes. While the cause is unknown, theories include ergot poisoning from contaminated grains or a case of mass hysteria brought on by the psychological stress of the time. The local authorities' strategy of encouraging more public dancing made the situation worse as the "contagion" spread.

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    Dancing Plague

    Uploaded by

    Michael Contreras
    61 views2 pages
    The dancing plague of 1518 began in July of that year when a woman in Strasbourg, France began dancing fervently in the streets for days. Within a week, 34 others had joined in and within a month around 400 people, predominantly women, were dancing without rest. Some collapsed or died of heart attacks, exhaustion, or strokes. While the cause is unknown, theories include ergot poisoning from contaminated grains or a case of mass hysteria brought on by the psychological stress of the time. The local authorities' strategy of encouraging more public dancing made the situation worse as the "contagion" spread.

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    Dancing plague

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    The dancing plague of 1518 began in July of that year when a woman in Strasbourg, France began dancing fervently in the streets for days. Within a week, 34 others had joined in and within a month around 400 people, predominantly women, were dancing without rest. Some collapsed or died of heart attacks, exhaustion, or strokes. While the cause is unknown, theories include ergot poisoning from contaminated grains or a case of mass hysteria brought on by the psychological stress of the time. The local authorities' strategy of encouraging more public dancing made the situation worse as the "contagion" spread.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    61 views2 pages

    Dancing Plague

    Uploaded by

    Michael Contreras
    The dancing plague of 1518 began in July of that year when a woman in Strasbourg, France began dancing fervently in the streets for days. Within a week, 34 others had joined in and within a month around 400 people, predominantly women, were dancing without rest. Some collapsed or died of heart attacks, exhaustion, or strokes. While the cause is unknown, theories include ergot poisoning from contaminated grains or a case of mass hysteria brought on by the psychological stress of the time. The local authorities' strategy of encouraging more public dancing made the situation worse as the "contagion" spread.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    Dancing plague of 1518

    The dancing plague (or dance epidemic) of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in
    Strasbourg, Alsace, (now modern day France) in the Holy Roman Empire in July 1518. Around
    400 people took to dancing for days without rest and, over the period of about one month,
    some of those affected collapsed or even died of heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

    Events

    The outbreak began in July 1518 when a woman, Frau Troffea, began to dance fervently in a
    street in Strasbourg. This lasted somewhere between four and six days. Within a week, 34
    others had joined, and within a month, there were around 400 dancers, predominantly female.
    Some of these people died from heart attacks, strokes, or exhaustion. One report indicates
    that, for a period, the plague killed around fifteen people per day. However, the sources of the
    city of Strasbourg at the time of the events did not mention the number of deaths, or even if
    there were fatalities.

    Historical documents, including "physician notes, cathedral sermons, local and regional
    chronicles, and even notes issued by the Strasbourg city council" are clear that the victims
    danced. It is not known why these people danced, some even to their deaths.

    As the dancing plague worsened, concerned nobles sought the advice of local physicians, who
    ruled out astrological and supernatural causes, instead, announcing that the plague was a
    "natural disease" caused by "hot blood". However, instead of prescribing bleeding, authorities
    encouraged more dancing, in part by opening two guildhalls and a grain market, and even
    constructing a wooden stage. The authorities did this because they believed that the dancers
    would recover only if they danced continuously night and day. To increase the effectiveness of
    the cure, authorities even paid for musicians to keep the afflicted moving.The strategy was a
    disaster; after those policies were applied the illness underwent a dramatic growth.
    Performing dances in more public spaces facilitated the spread of the psychic "contagion".

    Historian John Waller stated that a marathon runner could not have lasted the intense
    workout that these men and women did hundreds of years ago.

    Theories

    Modern theories include food-poisoning caused by the toxic and psychoactive chemical
    products of ergot fungi, which grows commonly on grains in the wheat family (such as rye)
    that was used for baking bread. Ergotamine is the main psychoactive product of ergot fungi; it
    is structurally related to the drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25), and is the substance
    from which LSD-25 was originally synthesized. The same fungus has also been implicated in
    other major historical anomalies, including the Salem witch trials. However, John Waller in The
    Lancet argues that "this theory does not seem tenable, since it is unlikely that those poisoned
    by ergot could have danced for days at a time. Nor would so many people have reacted to its
    psychotropic chemicals in the same way. The ergotism theory also fails to explain why virtually
    every outbreak occurred somewhere along the Rhine and Moselle Rivers, areas linked by
    water but with quite different climates and crops".Waller speculates that the dancing was
    "stress-induced psychosis" on a mass level, since the region where the people danced was
    riddled with starvation and disease, and the inhabitants tended to be superstitious. Seven
    other cases of dancing plague were reported in the same region during the medieval era.

    This could have been a florid example of psychogenic movement disorder happening in mass
    hysteria or mass psychogenic illness, which involves many individuals – small groups to almost
    1000 people – suddenly exhibiting the same bizarre behavior. The behavior spreads rapidly
    and broadly in an epidemic pattern. The sufferers are primarily adolescent females.This kind of
    comportment could have been caused by the elevated levels of psychological stress, i.e. the
    despair caused by the ruthless years (even by the rough standards of the Middle Ages) the
    people of Alsace were suffering.

    This psychogenic illness could have created a chorea (Greek khoreia or "to dance"), a situation
    comprising random and intricate unintentional movements that flit from body part to body
    part. Diverse choreas (St. Vitus' dance, St. John's dance, tarantism) were labeled in the Middle
    Ages referring to the independent epidemics of "dancing mania" that happened in central
    Europe, particularly at the time of the plague.

    Cultural references

    The Cornwall-based band 3 Daft Monkeys described this dancing plague in their 2010 song
    "Days of the Dance".

    The plague is featured as one of the different disease outbreaks that can be encountered in
    the world of the game Crusader Kings II as a part of The Reaper's Due expansion.[12]

    Season 2 Episode 3 of Legion (TV series) references the plague in a list of strange occurrences
    as examples of "conversion disorders".

    Season 1 Episode 10 of Evil (TV series) talks about the plague.

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