What it looked like
- JulyOne woman starts dancing in the street and continues for several days in a row.
- A week laterDozens of townspeople join her. The dancing continues without music or stopping.
- AugustThe authorities decide the cure is to let it continue: they provide spaces and hire musicians.
- AutumnThe phenomenon fades. The records mention people who died from exhaustion.
The authorities' decision seems strange, but it followed the medical thinking of the time: people believed that hot blood had to leave the body through movement. In practice, this only prolonged what was happening.
This was not the only event: similar outbreaks had been described in the region in earlier centuries. In other words, people already had a ready-made cultural template for this kind of condition.
What explanations have been proposed
The grain-fungus theory is popular, but it does not fit the description well. Ergot poisoning causes seizures and impaired blood flow, making prolonged, coordinated dancing physically impossible.
The more widely accepted theory is a mass reaction to extreme stress. The year brought famine, the city had suffered disease and crop failure, and local tradition included a belief in a saint who caused uncontrollable dancing.
Similar outbreaks were described in the twentieth century: bouts of laughter at a school, collective fainting in factories, and symptoms without a physical cause in groups of people. The mechanism is thought to be the same; only the form changes.
It is important that the participants were not pretending. The symptoms feel real, and a person cannot stop them simply by deciding to, which is why historians reject explanations based on deception or fashion.
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Sources
- The 1518 outbreak in Strasbourg was recorded in city chronicles and medical records from the time
- dozens of participants and fatal cases were reported. The ergot-poisoning theory does not fit the clinical picture of ergotism well. The most common explanation is mass psychogenic illness against a backdrop of famine, epidemics, and local beliefs
- similar episodes were also described in the 20th century