The following summer, orphanages, hospitals and shelters were overflowing with the desperate. A chronicler described 1517 with poignant brevity as a “bad year”. It’s home to about 250,000 people today but about five hundred years ago, probably played host to about 5% of that number. It was clear to observers that they did not want to be dancing. And then, one day, the dancing just stopped — suddenly, without explanation, just like it began about two weeks prior. To these locations they escorted the crazed dancers in the belief that by maintaining frantic motion they would shake off the sickness. Last modified on Tue 24 Jul 2018 11.44 EDT. This is what happened in European convents before the early 1700s, when nuns would writhe, convulse, foam at the mouth, make obscene gestures and propositions, climb trees and miaow like cats. What caused it? Available for everyone, funded by readers. censored news reports detailing the flu’s impact, Spain — a neutral nation in the war — had no problem reporting the truth. The epidemic was a global one; Spain wasn’t hit any harder than the rest of the world. Copyright © 2020 | MH Purity lite WordPress Theme by MH Themes, Click here for more information or to pledge your support. By the time the authorities intervened, hundreds more were dancing in the same frenetic fashion. They ordered the clearing of an open-air grain market, commandeered guild halls, and erected a stage next to the horse fair. In such cases, the possession trance also spread to witnesses who shared the same theological fears. //]]> Such beliefs in supernatural agency can have dramatic effects on our behaviour. From an outsider’s perspective, though, it looked like the flu struck Spain much harder than anywhere else, and the “Spanish flu” moniker was born — and stuck — as a result. And it happened 500 years ago this summer in the French city of Strasbourg. Feel free to submit interesting articles, tell us about this cool book you just read, or start a discussion about who everyone's favorite figure of minor French nobility is! So what could have caused people to literally dance themselves to death? 0. Others soon joined her, and eventually over 400 people were afflicted, with some of them dying from heart attacks or exhaustion. Their visibility ensured that other cityfolk were rendered susceptible as their minds dwelt on their own sins and the possibility that they might be next. The chronicles agree that most people were quick to assume that an enraged St Vitus had caused the affliction. Except, maybe, for the Dancing Plague of 1518. All rights reserved. /r/History is a place for discussions about history. Arms flailing, bodies swaying and clothes soaked with sweat, they danced through the night and into the next day. During floods and damp periods, ergots were able to grow and affect ryeand other crops. April 30, 2019 Most likely caused by food-poisoning. Art, poetry and music of the time can provide some clues Some believe the dancing could have been brought on by food poisoning caused by the toxic and psychoactive chemical products of ergot fungi, which grows commonly on grains (such as rye) used for baking bread. It was probably a curious thing for onlookers to see — not only was she the only one dancing, but there wasn’t any music playing. Ergotism can cause hallucinations and convulsions, but cannot account for the other strange behaviour most commonly identified with da… ------------------------------------------------------------ But this didn’t help and, arguably, backfired, attracting even more dancers to the plagued area. One of the most prominent theories is that victims suffered from ergot poisoning, which was known as St. Anthony's fire in the Middle Ages. Why were the dancers made to wear red shoes? The reason for the misnomer: World War I. One particular idea appears to have lodged in the cultural consciousness of the region: that St Vitus could punish sinners by making them dance. While mass hysteria and LSD from old rye bread that people ate have been put forward as explanations, do historians have any idea what may have caused this strange incident? While the historical details of the plague are well documented by the standards of the day, unfortunately, the medical community at the time wasn’t advanced enough to do the tests needed for us to know for sure. For some time, ergotism looked like a good contender. It can induce terrifying hallucinations and violent twitching. }); We don’t know for certain what caused the Dancing Plague, but there are a handful of credible theories. The epidemic had come to an end. Just as improbable is the claim that the dancers were religious subversives. As the History Channel notes, “before long, some three-dozen other Strasbourgeois had joined in” during that six-day period. No, it wasn’t a joke either. But this was not one of those 80s raves that began in a remote layby and ended in a muddy field. One of its residents back then was a woman named Frau Troffea, and one day in July of 1518, she took to the streets to dance for a bit. According to the BBC, “at the height of the dancing mania, 15 residents were dying each day from strokes, heart attacks, and sheer exhaustion.”. This is a somewhat more serious subreddit compared to many others. A painting in Cologne Cathedral, more than 200 miles downstream from Strasbourg, dramatises the curse: under an image of St Vitus, three men joylessly dance, their faces wearing the divorced-from-reality expressions of the delirious. The curse of St Vitus is just the kind of supernaturalist belief that can drive the suggestible into dissociative states. Now I Know is a free daily newsletter; It appeared as though those affected were having involuntary leg contractions, something still seen in a small portion of psychiatric … One of them, writer Sebastian Brant, had devoted a chapter of his moralising bestseller, Ship of Fools, to the folly of dance. The dancing plague struck the city of Strasbourg in July of 1518, with hundreds of the cities inhabitants literally dancing to death. 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. We can be more confident, I think, in saying what did and did not cause this strange phenomenon. It just looked like one. Few events more vividly reveal the bizarre extremes to which our brains can take us when in the grip of collective fear. But it probably shouldn’t have been called the “Spanish” flu. As Slate notes, the combatants in WWI didn’t report on how badly the flu had hit their nations; “neither side wanted the other to find out they were sick—nor did they want their own troops to lose morale or their publics to panic.” While these nations (Germany, the U.S., the UK, France, etc.) In July 1518 a plague broke out in the town of Strasbourg - first one woman began to dance uncontrollably in the streets. The US anthropologist Erika Bourguignon has written about how being raised in an “environment of belief”, in which spirit possession is taken seriously, primes people to enter a dissociative mental state, where normal consciousness is disabled. Bonus fact: As noted above, the Spanish flu claimed roughly 75 million lives from 1918 to 1920. In the decade before the dancing plague of 1518, famine, sickness and terrible cold caused widespread despair in Strasbourg and its environs (Rapp, 1974). Local officials, at a loss for what to do — and the doctors of the time were no help either — decided to simply give the dancers what they thought they wanted: music. The councillors implemented what they felt was the appropriate treatment – more dancing! What caused it?
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