After the Strasbourg city council's first chosen treatment for the 1518 dancing plague (hire musicians, build stages, encourage the dancing) had visibly failed, they tried a second approach. What was it?
The Saint Vitus shrine at Saverne in the Vosges was the recognised late-medieval European pilgrimage destination for *Sankt-Veit-Tanz* — Saint Vitus's dance — the religious-medical category for involuntary collective dancing afflictions. The Strasbourg authorities transported the surviving dancers in carts to the shrine over several weeks; the dancing substantively ended over the following month, probably more from the separation of affected individuals from each other and from the original triggering environment than from the religious intervention itself. Frau Troffea, the initial Strasbourg dancer, was not executed; her later fate is not documented.
Read the full story →In July 1518 a woman in Strasbourg began to dance in the street. By August several hundred people had joined her, and some of them had died of it.
Related questions
- Who began the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague?
- In Strasbourg in July 1518 a woman called Frau Troffea danced in the street and could not stop. Within a month several hundred others had joined her; some died of it. The city council's first official treatment, on the advice of the physicians' guild, was?
- The Aachen dancing mania of 1374, the Strasbourg dancing plague of 1518, the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962, and the Pokémon Shock of 1997 are now all classified as the same clinical phenomenon. What's the modern medical name?
- What happened at Strasbourg six weeks before the plague reached the city in February 1349?