I Just Can't Stop Dancing

This picture is not historically accurate,
but it's still funny. Toga!

Where modern-day France meets modern-day Germany, we find the city of Strasbourg, where even though the official language is French, the locals also speak the Alsatian language, a combination French-German. That confusion might help us to understand what happened there in July, 1518, when Strasbourg was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and people just started dancing and dancing and could not stop dancing. 

The twisting and shouting began when a woman named Frau Troffea went in the street and began to throw down. Oh, how she twisted and shook and hopped and boogalooed! And she danced for almost a week!

Before you knew it, more than three dozen others were pirouetting and gyrating like mad. And by August, Dance Fever had claimed as many as 400 total victims.

Well, there was no Dr Oz in those days, no tv shows to help explain it all. The town's doctors consulted with each other and decided to blame it all on "hot blood." Their prescription was to dance it away. The town built a stage, hired a band, brought in professional dancers to lead the line dancing in a 16th Century Boot Scootin' Boogie. 

Inevitably, the fun ended when some of the dancers started dropping on the spot from exhaustion, fever, you name it. Several died of heart attacks and strokes. And as sickness overtook the lighthearted fun, town officials decided to take the remaining strutters away to a mountaintop shrine where they could pray the sway away. 

As History looks back on those dancing days, it's been noted that Strasbourg wasn't the only place where a whole lotta shakin' was goin' on. Switzerland, Germany, and Holland all saw regional outbreaks of the mania, although none of the others were as widespread, or deadly, as the original. 

 

Causes? John Waller is a historian, so let's ask him. He says look at St. Vitus. Vitus was a Catholic saint in those days. Europeans believed he had the power to lay a curse on people and make the dance dance dance.

There is a physical disorder known as Sydenham's chorea. It used to be called St Vitus's dance. I remember it being an item on a checklist of conditions that the junior high school nurse had to check us for, a list that began with "B.O." and "cooties." Sydenham's is a disorder "characterized by rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements primarily affecting the face, hands and feet," according to the medical journals.

Perhaps it was more a syndrome than a curse from a rogue saint. Disease and famine were everywhere in Europe in those days. Waller suggests that perhaps the illness was in people and the superstition about the curse accentuated the symptoms.

And it's also possible that people had inadvertently ingested ergot, which is a mold that grows on rye and causes hallucinations and bodily spasms.

Great. LSD in sandwich form. There's always something going on, and always has been.