In high school, some friends in art class were sure they’d been reincarnated. Incredibly, they all knew they’d been Renaissance princesses. I didn’t have the self esteem; I was a lady-in-waiting, at best. To be fair, in art class the Renaissance was all knowledge and paintings. That’s what we actually wanted: art.
Oh, and corsets.
We weren’t thinking too much about things like smallpox, dying in childbirth, or the plagues that made you dance to death.
Today’s Moment of Science… the Dancing Plague of 1518.
In the late middle ages, people were ready for a brand new beat. Unfortunately that beat was all in their heads, which made it even weirder when groups of people started dancing in the streets.
(I accept your groaning).
There were several of these outbreaks across Europe in the middle ages. The first of these ‘dancing plagues’ broke out in 1021, the last being the 1518 Strasbourg plague.
A woman remembered to history as Frau Troffea just started dancing one day. Everywhere she went in the town, she danced a vigorous little jig. As the story goes, within a week she had a thirty member strong dance crew. After a month, there were 400 in the mosh pit of yore.
Though there are reports that up to fifteen people danced themselves to death some days, the validity of that claim is iffy. Fatalities or not, it’s unsurprising that many people would have collapsed from exhaustion, heat stroke, or pain. With their blistered toes and aching backs, they were in great agony from the boogie. For the life of them, they could not stop dancing.
For three goddamn months.
One diagnosis was “hot blood,” because their humors were unbalanced, obviously. Bloodletting was the clear answer to any forward thinking 16th century physician, but on a logistical level though? It seemed a tad dangerous to try bleeding hundreds of people who couldn’t stop jitterbugging.
Then they thought, “maybe the cure is more dancing.”
(It was not.)
They set up a band to play some swinging tunes, hoping the vigorous dancing would wear out the afflicted. But how do you wear out people who are already exhausted and still dancing, seemingly against their will? Perhaps they should have tried a waltz.
Then they figured where there’s butt shaking, there’s Satan. This was a punishment for their wickedness in Strasbourg, and they had to repent. They went full Footloose and, amongst other things, banned music and dancing.
The dancing continued.
They had good reasons for thinking “maybe skydaddy’s mad.” They called 1517 “the bad year,” and that was after a string of doozies. Five famines since the 1490s increased food prices. Simultaneous smallpox and leprosy outbreaks weren’t exactly morale boosters either.
Last, they tried the old standby: metric assloads of prayer.
They packed everyone with dancing fever into wagons for a trip to a mountaintop shrine to St. Vitus, the patron saint of dancing. They put red shoes blessed and soaked with holy water on the dancers, prayed, and went home hoping they’d please the Gods.
Y’all… the mother fucking power of prayer worked.
I think I speak for most of us when I say… what the fuck?
There have been several theories on what happened, some more scientific than others. Ergotamine poisoning seems possible, but the swift recovery seems to rule that out. “Group epilepsy” has been proposed, but that comes with the problem of epilepsy not being contagious. “Freaky Heretical Dance Cult” is my favorite common theory that technically hasn’t been ruled out.
Paracelsus- the toxicology guy- called it a “forced involuntary physical response,” He thought Frau Troffea started dancing to avoid doing her chores.
Look.
If that’s what she did, she’s a goddamn legend.
The likeliest cause is one amazing case of mass hysteria. With everything that happened in the previous few years in Strasbourg, the locals were primed for thinking that God could and would smite them. So when so many loved ones started dancing to the point of pain, after living through so much suffering, why wouldn’t this be just another day under God’s thumb?
This has been your daily Moment of Science, getting the oddest temptation to start a flash mob.
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