It drives them ever night and day, they scarcely stop for breath. As the hysteria reached a fever pitch, people were even willing to inflict serious physical injury upon themselves, even to the point of death from injury or exhaustion, seemingly unable to stop. The survivors were taken to a nearby Chapel of St. Vitus, the Patron Saint of epileptics. John’s Dance” or “The Dance Plague”, with their numbers swelling into the thousands before the event ceased.
'Dancing Plague' of 1518, the bizarre dance that killed dozens. There’ll be laughin’ and singin’ and music swingin’ There they continued to tremble and twitch on the ground, too exhausted to stand. Particularly in children. A distance of nearly thirteen miles. And dancing in the streets Did Andy Warhol Leave a Dick Pic on the Moon? Till some have dropped along the way, and some are met by death. Besides dancing, participants would also sometimes roll around in the dirt squealing and acting like animals; others would rip off their clothing and sometimes would begin having sex with other Dance Mania participants. I told myself I’d publish 365. However, in other place, you were libel to be killed if you took part, such as in 1507 in Spain when 30 women were burned alive after being seen dancing hysterically. Another case of inexplicable mass hysteria, this time unrelated to dancing and much more recent, occurred on January 30, 1962 known as the Tanganyika laughter epidemic, occurring in Kashasha, Tanzania. Some have blamed “St Anthony’s Fire”, the toxic and psychoactive fungus Claviceps purpurea, or ergot, often ingested with infected rye bread.
Even today there is little consensus about what caused it. Drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder of people suffering from Dance Mania (1564). Symptoms of ergot poisoning are not unlike those of LSD, and include nervous spasms, psychotic delusions, spontaneous abortion, convulsions and gangrene resulting from severe vasoconstriction. I started "Today in History" back in 2013, thinking I’d learn a thing or two.
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Some also would scream for people to beat the bottoms of their feet while they writhed on the ground or would other times try to get people to throw them high in the air.
In the beginning, three girls began giggling and laughing apparently uncontrollably, as young girls often seem to do.
That would have cured it for sure! Some thought those suffering from St. Vitus’ Dance were possessed by the devil.
This was the first of the two best documented cases of this phenomenon, though this sort of thing wasn’t unheard of, with instances as far back as the 7th century. The people would continue vigorously jumping and dancing about, sometimes also screaming out or chanting, until completely exhausted at which point they would collapse and some would die from cardiac arrest or injuries suffered from their violent dance. "Tell me a fact, and I'll learn. A legend of the medieval Christian church had it that, if anyone provoked the wrath of Saint Vitus, the Sicilian martyred in 303AD, he would send down plagues of compulsive dancing. Even though this was considered a common cure, it more often than not appears to have caused the number of participants to swell.
Listen | Print. ( Log Out / I offer these "Today in History" stories in hopes that you'll enjoy reading them, as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. There is a story, presumably wildly exaggerated, that one of the first cases of Dance Mania occurred on Christmas Eve of 1021.
Performing mass exorcisms on people afflicted by the dance.
A third theory describes the phenomenon as some kind of mass psychosis, brought on by starvation. John’s Dance”. Somewhere between 50 and 400 people took to dancing for days.
Another extreme Dance Mania event that was well documented happened in July of 1518, starting with just one woman, Drau Troffea, who began to dance about in the street in Strasbourg, Alsace. October 19, 1864 Civil War comes to Vermont. From Aachen, the mania spread across modern Germany and into Italy, “infecting” tens of thousands of people. View all posts by Cape Cod Curmudgeon. Vitus’ Mania”.
The dancing mania quickly spread throughout Europe, spreading to Cologne, Flanders, Franconia, Hainaut, Metz, Strasbourg, Tongeren and Utrecht.
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