The Summer Strasbourg Could Not Stop Dancing

In July 1518, in a narrow Strasbourg street, a woman the chronicles call Frau Troffea stepped outside her house and began to dance. There was no music. She did not stop. After a day she collapsed; after a few hours, she got up and danced again. Within a week, more than thirty neighbors had joined her. By August, by some accounts, the count was around four hundred.

The city council's first instinct was to lean in. The afflicted, they reasoned, would dance the sickness out. Guild halls were cleared. A wooden stage went up in the horse market. The council hired musicians and paid strong men to hold dancers upright when they faltered. This made things worse. Pilgrims arriving from elsewhere joined in. Physicians and clerks describe people dropping from strokes, heart attacks, and exhaustion through August.

By late summer the council reversed course. Public dancing was banned. The remaining sufferers were carted to a shrine of Saint Vitus in the Vosges, given red shoes blessed with crosses, and left to pray. By September the mania had ended.

For centuries the favorite explanation was ergot, a fungus on damp rye that produces an LSD-like alkaloid. Historian John Waller, who has spent his career on the case, argues that doesn't fit. Ergot causes gangrene and convulsions, not coordinated dancing for days. It also doesn't explain why the same region had at least seven similar outbreaks between 1374 and 1518, all near rivers, all in places where Saint Vitus was the patron of the cursed.

Waller's case is that Strasbourg in 1518 was a city primed for it. Three years of failed harvests had ended in famine. Smallpox and syphilis were in the streets. People believed Saint Vitus could lay a dancing curse on you. One desperate woman started; the rest of the town read her trance as proof; a culturally trained reflex took over.