Frau Troffea is the index case of the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague — the best-documented and most extensively analysed of all the European medieval and early-modern outbreaks of involuntary collective dancing. Her first name is unknown. Her family name (Trauffa, Troffa, Troffea in various contemporary spellings) appears in a single surviving source: a brief marginal note in the Strasbourg municipal chronicle of Daniel Specklin, written approximately fifty years after the event.
What is known about her, beyond the name, is small. She was a married Strasbourg woman, probably in her mid-thirties, of an artisan or small-tradesman household. She lived in the Rue des Charpentiers area of the central city. She had no documented medical history before July 1518.
What she did
On approximately 14 July 1518 — the chronicles disagree on the exact day — she stepped out of her house into a narrow street and began to dance. Silently. Continuously. Without apparent provocation.
She did not stop. Witnesses noted that she danced for hours, then for a full day, then for several days. She showed substantial physical exhaustion but did not cease. She did not respond to family attempts to lead her home. She ate and drank only when forced. She slept only when collapsed.
Within approximately a week, thirty-three other Strasbourg residents — predominantly women but with some men — had joined her in similar uncontrolled dancing. Within a month, approximately 400 people across the city were involuntarily dancing. Some danced for days at a time; some died of exhaustion, heart failure, or stroke.
What the authorities did
The Strasbourg city council substantially initially encouraged the dancing: they hired musicians, built temporary stages in the Horse Market and the Grain Market, and provided guildhall space for the affected. The reasoning was the standard period folk-medical belief that the affliction would burn itself out through completion — that the dancers needed to dance their way through the spell.
It made the outbreak worse. By August the council reversed strategy and transported the surviving dancers in carts to the regional shrine of Saint Vitus at Saverne in the Vosges. The dancing ended substantially over the following month — most probably through the separation of affected individuals from the original environment rather than through saintly intercession.
What happened to Frau Troffea
She is not documented after the August 1518 dispersal. The contemporary chronicles do not record whether she survived the affliction or died of it. Her name disappears from the Strasbourg record entirely.
Modern interpretation — the 21st-century mass-psychogenic-illness framework — identifies Frau Troffea’s initial episode as a probable individual dissociative state under conditions of social stress (1518 Strasbourg had recently seen famine, plague returns, and political instability). The subsequent contagion was a social-imitative cascade among a population pre-conditioned by the Saint Vitus folk-religious framework to recognise and reproduce the symptom pattern.
She is the first documented patient of one of the most famous mass psychogenic illness outbreaks in European history. We do not even know her first name.