User:Aidanmjordan/Dancing plague of 1518

= Dancing plague of 1518 = The Dancing Plague of 1518, or Dance Epidemic of 1518, was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (modern-day France), in the Holy Roman Empire from July 1518 to September 1518. Somewhere between 34 and 400 people took to dancing for weeks.

Events
The outbreak began on July 14th, 1518 when a woman by the name of Frau Troffea (or Lady Troffea) began to dance fervently in a street in Strasbourg. By early September, the outbreak began to subside.

Historical documents, including "physician notes, cathedral sermons, local and regional chronicles, and even notes issued by the Strasbourg city council" are clear that the victims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.

By July 17th, many onlookers and townsfolk had also started dancing without stopping. For days the people of Strasbourg would dance, neglecting food and collapsing only when they were too exhausted to dance any longer.

By August 1518, the dancing mania may have claimed as many as 400 victims. It lasted for such a long time that it even attracted the attention of the Strasbourg magistrate and bishop, and some number of doctors ultimately intervened, putting the afflicted in a hospital. According to historical documents local physicians thought that the cause of this plague was due to hot blood The plague continued to spread to other parts of the country to parts of Switzerland, Germany and Holland.

Officials in Strasbourg believed that the afflicted just needed “to dance it out”. They began telling individuals that if you continue to dance that you will overheat your blood, causing the bad blood to go away. Officials provided the people with dancing halls, pipers, and drummers. They also hired other people to dance with the afflicted. The town council went as far as arrange for the dancers to be tied to carts and taken to the shrine of Saint Vitus, the patron saint of dance. There they had their feet put into red shoes. This may be a folk memory that inspired the original version of Snow White, where the witch is forced to wear red-hot iron slippers and dance until she dies. In Hans Christian Andersen's particularly horrific fairy tale, The Red Shoes, the afflicted were blessed with holy oil and water before being walked around a shrine of Saint Vitus, believing if they did this they would be cured.

Veracity of Deaths
Controversy exists over whether people ultimately danced to their deaths. Some sources claim that for a period the plague killed around fifteen people per day, but 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. There do not appear to be any sources contemporaneous to the events that make note of any fatalities.

The main source for the claim is John Waller, who has written several journal articles on the subject, and the book A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518. The sources cited by Waller that mention deaths were all from later accounts of the events. There is also uncertainty around the identity of the initial dancer (either an unnamed woman or "Frau Troffea") and the number of dancers involved (somewhere between 50 and 400). Of the six chronicle accounts, four support Lady Troffea as the first dancer.

Food poisoning
Some believe the dancing could have been brought on by food poisoning caused by the toxic and psychoactive chemical products of ergot fungi (ergotism), which grows commonly on grains (such as rye) 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.

In The Lancet, John Waller 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.

Stress-induced Mass Psychogenic Illness
This could have been a florid example of psychogenic movement disorder happening in mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness, which involves many individuals suddenly exhibiting the same bizarre behavior. The behavior spreads rapidly and broadly in an epidemic pattern. This kind of comportment could have been caused by elevated levels of psychological stress, caused by the ruthless years (even by the rough standards of the early modern period) the people of Alsace were suffering.

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.

Possible Stressors to Induce Mass Hysteria
As stated by John Waller in  A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518, The dancing outbreak of 1518 could’ve been due to mass public hysteria. Waller cited a series of famines and the prominence of diseases such as smallpox and syphilis in Strasbourg. These diseases persisted, especially within the peasants of Strasbourg. Abnormal weather conditions leading to famine earlier in the year, accompanied by devastating natural disasters could also be to blame.

Sydenham Chorea
This psychogenic illness could have created a chorea (from the Greek khoreia meaning "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, and 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. Saint Vitus’ Dance was diagnosed in the 17th century as Sydenham chorea, which is an autoimmune disorder that can develop after a streptococcus infection. Sydenham Chorea causes ‘dancing’ type symptoms. Including twitching, arm and leg movements, gyrations and facial distortions.

Trance State
Closely linked to the Mass Hysteria theory and Sydenham chorea is the Trance-State Theory. The Trance-State theory provides another explanation as to why the people took to dancing.

People are more likely to experience a trance-state when under extreme amounts of psychological distress and when they believe in the possibility that they could be possessed. This was true of the people of Strasbourg in 1518. The people of Strasbourg believed in Saint Vitus, a supernatural power who had the ability to take over people’s minds and make them compulsively dance. Most of Strasbourg was consisted of peasants due so the people were very poor, suffering from severe famine, and diseases. In 1517, syphilis and smallpox swept into the city and later the same year the "English Sweat" or Sweating Sickness reached the city. These diseases took hold over Strasbourg by 1518 and peasants turned to the Church and to the Saints to help them. All of these factors lead to people wildly dancing for days at a time as a result of desperation and pious fear. As Strasbourg became Protestant in the Reformation, the people stopped worshiping saints and thus the dancing slowly died out.

Tarantism
An older theory first seen in the eleventh century then again in the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries in Southern Italy is Tarantism. Tarantism is defined as a disorder characterized by incessant dancing caused by the bite of a spider and is only cured by music. It is another form of hysteria, but is important because it provides an explanation for the dancing: the bite of a spider. Tarantism is also a direct refutation of ergotism, because spiders are more likely to bite in the summer months which could explain why the people were dancing in the summertime. Although it has never been directly linked to the dancing in Strasbourg, it could provide a different and new explanation as to why the people took to dancing.

Voodoo
Another theory that may explain the 1518 dancing plague is Vodou. There have been 3 different accounts of uncontrollable dancing prior to the 1518 dancing plague that took place in Germany. 1021 in the German town of Kölbigk on Christmas Eve, where 18 individuals were dancing uncontrollably, the German town of Erfurt in 1247 and another German town in 1374 between those 2 events it is estimated over 100 people died from dancing. When a person is under the influence of Vodou they are seen to have various personalities and are told to do uncontrollable things like in this case dancing which might explain this uncontrollable dancing.