How the Dancing Plague of 1518 Worked

In the summer of 1518, a woman in Strasbourg, France started dancing -- and didn't stop. By the end of the week, the compulsion to dance had spread to hundreds of people. Learn more about the dancing sickness in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kandis Keen. You're joined by fellow editor Katie
Lambert Candy. Hi Katie, if you haven't already seen it,

(00:20):
The Discovery Tale has a new show called Monsters Inside Me,
and it's about parasites and other strange and eerie things
to get inside the human body and freak havoc. Uh.
And Katie, as always, I am so glad for your
historical expertise, but also today especially your health expertise, because
I've been doing a lot of research on different moments

(00:44):
in history where people and uh, the places they live
and have been affected by parasites and and and disease
and and plague. And it's important to understand that if
you have some sort of say, parasitic infection, and if
I beca's not only your physical well being but your
mental well being too. And we're going to talk a

(01:05):
little bit about contagion actually, and we're going to lead
in with an email from the reader who requested this topic.
And I'm not going to read the entire email like
I usually do, because he's very knowledgeable and if I
read it would give away the whole story. But I
would like to thank Ian for his recommendation of our
discussion the dancing plague of fifteen eighteen. And if it

(01:28):
sounds pretty cool, that's because it is, unless, of course,
you had the dancing plague. Um. But in July of eighteen,
there was a woman named Fraud Trofea we think that's
how you say it. I'm not sure actually, And she
was in Strasbourg, France, and all of a sudden she
basically walked out in the middle of the street and
started dancing and she didn't stop. Now, and this is
centuries before Lady Gaga, so of course people are wondering

(01:52):
what is causing a woman to dance dance? And it
went on for they say, between four and six days,
and by the end of the week a whole bunch
of other people had also caught this mysterious dancing ailment.
And if you read accounts of the dancing plague of eighteen,
it sounds almost like a fable. Because the town authorities

(02:15):
thought that the best way to cure people of the
dancing fever was to encourage them to keep dancing and
not stop. And again we're giggling because it is so ludicrous.
They actually erected a special stage, a little platform for
them to dance on, and they hired musicians to come in,

(02:36):
and they got professional dancers to dance alongside them to
help pep them up and prop them up when they
got fatigued. And it turned up to be very serious
because people became so tired from dancing that there were
heart attacks and strokes and people just dropping out due
to your exhaustion. Reminds me of a dance the Phon

(02:56):
episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But these people
and not happy about the dancing like you would think
of them, you know, having a grand old time with
their their disco fever. But they apparently were really afraid
and really desperate and couldn't stop. Like it wasn't a
voluntary kind of thing. It was almost like some sort
of force inside them was compelling them to flail about

(03:19):
with no control over their limbs. And we we have
descriptions of this particular dancing plague. And there had been
plagues noted before, but none of which were cited in
historical records as specifically and as uh with as many
details as this one, and we know from city council records,

(03:40):
doctors observations, and sermons, as well as a few other
sources that these people had grimaces on their faces, their
limbs were flailing about wildly, their facial expressions seemed uncontrolled,
and they were crying out invoking God's name for help.
And also the name of Vitis st Vitus. And St.

(04:02):
Vitus was a real person, Um. He was martyred in
the three h three A d and Um. The legend
goes that if someone provoked his wrath, according to Um
a Discovery News article we were reading, that he would
send down plagues um and force people to dance. And
there really is such a thing called St. Vitus's dance

(04:23):
is actually known as I think sidon um Chorea, and
it's caused by a stript to Caucus bacteria that causes
rheumatic fever and basically puts people into convulsions like your
arms and legs and torso will twist and contort without
your control. And people still get this today. The most
susceptible to the Korea are girls between the ages of

(04:47):
five and fifteen who live in developing countries. So was
this St. Vitus's dance or was there something else that
was causing this this dancing fever. There have been a
lot of theories proposed, and in the nineteen fifties, Eugene
Backman suggested that the dancers had ergic poisoning. And you

(05:08):
may recall from an earlier podcast and we talked about
the Salem witch trials that ergot is a type of
mold that grows on grain, and even after that grain
has been processed and ground and made into bread, it
still affects people who ingest it. So he was suggesting
that they had ergot poisoning, But later scholars came along

(05:29):
and said, no, that's not exactly right, because the type
of effects that ergot has are similar to L s D.
So these people wouldn't be flailing around, they would be
in trance like state. They'd be tripping and also maybe contorting,
but nothing like his actual dance movement, No for sure.
Then Robert Bartholome you later proposed that it was a

(05:50):
sociological phenomenon and the dancers were members of some sort
of ritualized group and this is how they expressed themselves.
But I don't think any and gives much credence to
that view, because again, these people were really unhappy about
what was happening, and they were dropping dead right right.
People kept pointing back to the fact that no, they
looked as though they were dancing against their will even

(06:12):
though they couldn't stop. So we have a different historian
who's coming out with a book I believe in September
UM called A Time to Dance A Time to Die,
and his name is John Waller, and his theory is
that it was a mass psychogenic illness. And while I
was written before about the dancing plague, and he seems

(06:33):
to be one of the most cided experts at about
the dancing like a fifteen, I know that all of
the sources that I consulted, or most of them, I
should say, mentioned his name in some way, whether he
was running the article or he was an expert consulted.
But his name is sort of synonymous with his dancing
plague because he proposed what seems to be the likeliest
explanation for the madness. It was group beliefs turning into

(06:59):
collective act sction basically is the idea behind it, and
that during to put it at things in context. During
that time, a lot was going on in medieval Europe,
including lots and lots of famines, um, lots of deaths
that followed, and psychologically the people of the time, we're
not in a good mindset now. Many were suffering from

(07:22):
malnutrition and people had been reduced to begging in the streets,
and it was it was very hard to cope as
a community. One could imagine to see your neighbors, you know, dying,
And basically what happens with that kind of thing is,
you know, one person gets this. It's also known as

(07:44):
mass hysteria, but one person gets the belief and it's
sort of transmitted through the community much like a virus
would be. Like, you have to think of it as
sort of a physical epidemic, and it goes from person
to person as everyone buys into that collective conscious And
if you're looking for some other examples of this type
of contagion, there are plenty out there. And there's the

(08:07):
Tanganika laughter epidemic of nineteen sixty two, which is what
most people, I think talk about when they're talking about
mass hysteria, which is when a bunch of girls at
a boarding school started laughing and couldn't stop for days
and it just kept going and going, and it does
seem to be something that happens more often to girls
and the more recent examples. There was also another one

(08:29):
in Chalco, Mexico or six d girls at a boarding
school came down with the same mass hysteria epidemic. Hysteria
affects men as well, though. There's um a phenomenon known
as cora cora, excuse me, which affects people in Asia
and Africa, where the men think that someone has stolen
their genitalia. And these penis thieves can be just people

(08:51):
who say come up to you in the bus or
in the street and maybe bump up against you or
asked directions to a place that doesn't exist, and then
the men report feeling their genitalia either shrink or disappear
inside themselves, and you know, they'll start yelling about the
penis thief. And actually several people have been murdered for
the supposed penis thievery, and it's something they can't prove

(09:14):
because you'll go to a doctor and of course someone's
penis is still there, because this is a psychological kind
of thing, but it has really serious implications because again,
several people have been killed in two thousand and one
in Nigeria, there were at least twelve murders of suspected
penis thieves. And while these cases can be difficult to
study without empirical evidence like you would get from perhaps

(09:37):
studying a parasite, they shouldn't be taken lightly. I mean,
they may be interesting to listen to. I know, I
was certainly fascinated by the penis they it's exactly and
it's been written up and everything from medical journals too.
I think you had an article from Harper's even it's
it's really gripping. But um, you can see how history

(09:57):
plays into these k pieces of mass hysteria. For instance,
during times of war like h during the time of
the Cold War, when people feared some sort of retaliation,
they would start smelling noxious fumes around them, especially in
public places, and people would begin to act very strangely.

(10:18):
Groups of people would begin fainting or they would begin
having headaches. And two, study mass hysteria in conjunction with history,
I think is to more fully understand the minds of
the people who are living in that moment, and culture
definitely plays apart into it. Um. One article was saying

(10:39):
that they should be called sociogenic illnesses because without the culture,
the illness doesn't exist. So without those people in that
place in history, it doesn't exist. Like you know, we'll
talk about say, body dysmorphic disorder in the United States,
but if you're not in a westernized country, that might
not be something that you're worrying about, because that seed

(11:00):
of fear was never planted, whereas it would never occur
to one of us to worry that our breasts were
going to disappear. But if you lived in another place,
in a different culture, that would be the kind of
thing that you would worry about. So I hope that
these insights into the sociological, psychological, neurological, biological AM I'm

(11:22):
missing anything parasitical historical UM and I forgot where I
was doing with that. So all those all those lists
of eagles, if you will, yes, all those egles to
to put it um in a non academic way, but
they do, like Katie said, influenced the way that we
conceive of history, and they make something like the very

(11:46):
mysterious dancing plague of fifteen eighteen into an actual thing
that we can study and try to understand. And if
you want to learn more about the Dancing Plague of
fifteen eighteen, as well as other instance is of mass hysteria,
and where history and medicine come together. Take a look
at our blog post on the homepage at how stuff
works dot com, and don't forget to check out Monsters

(12:09):
Inside Me on the Discovery Channel Wednesdays at nine. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com and be sure to check out
the stuff you missed in History Class blog on the
how stuff works dot com home page.