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 Strasbourg authorities concluded — on the standard humoral medicine of the day — that the dancing was caused by 'hot blood,' which could be cured by yet more dancing until the bad blood was expended. They hired musicians, built two large stages on the central squares, and contracted with several local guildhalls to admit the dancers. It didn't work; the dancing continued into September, several dozen people died of strokes, heart attacks, and exhaustion, and the city eventually reversed course and sent the dancers to the shrine of Saint Vitus in the Vosges instead. The modern medical consensus is mass psychogenic illness, possibly aggravated by ergotism.
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?
- 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 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?