Dancing Plagues: The Forgotten Crisis of 1518
In 1518, hundreds in Strasbourg were gripped by a mysterious plague that compelled them to dance for days, baffling authorities and resulting in dozens of deaths.
During the summer of 1518 in the then-Holy Roman Empire city of Strasbourg, now part of France, a bizarre phenomenon descended upon its citizens. It began when a woman known as Frau Troffea stepped onto a narrow street and began to dance uncontrollably. She showed no signs of joy or celebration but moved frenetically, seemingly unable to stop herself. Witnesses at first thought it was simple exuberance or a strange act of protest. But over the course of days, others began joining her, and as the week went on, the number of compulsive dancers grew into the hundreds.
What has become known as the 1518 dancing plague is a little-known crisis in world history. Reports from the time, including those compiled by local physicians and magistrates, suggest as many as 400 people were affected during the July outbreak. People from all segments of society—young and old, men and women—danced ceaselessly in the city’s heat, moving until their feet bled, collapsing from exhaustion, or in some cases, falling dead from stroke or heart attack.
Authorities and townsfolk were confounded. Physicians could find no physical explanation for the dancing and dismissed supernatural causes, believing the affliction was a “natural disease” borne of overheated blood. Their solution was unusual: they encouraged more dancing. Public spaces were cleared and musicians hired, in hope that joining the dancers would exhaust the mania out of the population. Instead, the situation worsened, the number of afflicted growing, and the city saw deaths attributed directly to the exhaustion and strain of the involuntary dance.
Modern historians have tried to make sense of the incident, often referred to as choreomania. Some early medical explanations considered ergot poisoning—a toxic mold grown on damp rye that could cause hallucinations and convulsions—but the consistency and scale of the dancing make this unlikely. Other analyses point to mass psychogenic illness, a kind of communal psychological distress manifesting as physical symptoms, triggered by the rampant stress, famine, and disease in 16th-century Europe. Strasbourg itself had faced repeated hardship, from bouts of famine to the outbreak of new diseases and economic strains. Chronic fear and anxiety may have erupted in this extraordinary form—a collective loss of bodily control and agency.
The Strasbourg episode wasn’t the only recorded outbreak of choreomania in Europe, but it remains the largest and best documented. What makes it so astonishing is both the scale and how authorities responded, inadvertently exacerbating the crisis. After the public dancing areas failed to quell the outbreak, those suffering were eventually taken to a shrine outside the city, dedicated to Saint Vitus, the patron saint associated with dancing and epilepsy. There, victims were prayed over and given holy water, after which the dancing mania slowly subsided.
The dancing plague faded from public memory as centuries passed and medical science advanced, though local chronicles and church records have preserved the details. Today it is largely unknown to the vast majority of Americans, a footnote in medical and social history. Yet its story hints at the profound effects of stress and collective psychology amid crisis, and how entire populations can be swept up in mysterious phenomena. It stands as a reminder of the limits of our understanding and the strange edges of human experience that have, at times, quite literally danced through history.
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