The Dancing Plague of 1518
One of History’s Weirdest Mysteries
It was in July of the year 1518 that such a bizarre incident had befallen the city of Strasbourg, which would be an event repeating through annals of history as one of the most perplexing phenomenon of the pre-modern era. It would later to be known as the Dancing Plague, which would see inhabitants across town seized by an almost uncontrollable desire to dance.
The outbreak was apparently started by a lone woman, Frau Troffea, who stepped out on the street and started to dance for reasons not known. Within days, dozens of others had joined her, and by the end of August, some 400 people had been consumed by this compulsion to dance.
This was not some light-hearted dance that one could do at a festival or party; this was a punishing marathon with dire consequences. Participants simply danced until they dropped from exhaustion, and reports from that time suggest people fell victim to a stroke, heart attack, and even death from too much ‘jive’ on the dance floor. It’s a stark reminder of how deeply unpredictable human behavior can be, especially when influenced by the unknown.
The Dancing Plague of 1518, however, was not a lone case. Reports about similar events came from throughout Europeᅳfrom Switzerland to Germanyᅳand over the time that ran into several centuries. Of course, this gave rise to much speculation and inquiry, both within the times they occurred and in historical retrospectives.
Modern-day scholars and contemporary observers have over the years come up with quite a number of theories in a bid to explain the incidents. Medical men of the day simply blamed their unstoppable dancing on their blood being too hot. Partial explanations relating to superstitious and religious ones suggested that the people afflicted were victims of a curse from St. Vitus, condemned to dance as punishment for his or her sins. This belief led to yet another in which people thought that the cure lay in praying to the shrine of St. Vitus.
Modern theories pinpoint more to the direction of psychology and sociology for an answer. It is postulated that these dancing plagues were some sort of mass psychogenic illness, where the psychological stress and hard times of the time got vented in this extreme physical expression. Others think the cause was ergot poisoning, which happens due to consuming rye infected with a toxic fungus. The fungus produces substances similar to LSD, which may cause hallucinations and convulsions, but this will not explain how the dancers withstood the long hours of unending dance, or even the contagiousness of the phenomenon, unless, of course, they were eating the contaminated bread through their dance.
Another angle often brought up would be the social and economic pressures of the time, but to this author, it is quite unlikely. Nevertheless, more often than not, the affected regions would be those where famine, disease, deep spiritual and social unrest would originate. The dancing could be an unconscious protest, an indication of despair and suffering, a cry from society because it was not able to help itself against the impossible. The dance has baffled historians and scientists for centuries.
While the sway of social and economic turmoil cannot be underrated, the new scientific study does, in fact, open up new vistas for understanding such events. Modern neurological research may be able to trace such behavior to its wide and unconstrained causes, which may be lying deep within the chemistry of our brains and controlled by pathogenic elements that we are just now beginning to understand. With each new development in medical science and in psychology, we seem to get nearer to perhaps explaining something like the Dancing Plague through the study of brain diseases or infectious diseases that uniquely afflict the neurological functions. It will be interesting to see where the science takes us, but for now, I believe it was all about the moldy bread.
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