Viking committed to exploring the world in comfort, journey through the heart of Europe, on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, cultural enrichment, and all-inclusive fairs. Discover more at Viking.com. Hello listeners. Before we begin, I'd like to apologize for the lateness of this episode.
If you've been on any of our social media outlets, you'll know the reason why. The reason this episode is late is because I recently had a baby nicknamed the Mini Morbateer by Jordan and the other MCP patrons. Thank you to everyone who checked in with me via email. That was very kind of you.
I didn't mean to worry you. I just like keeping my private and work life separate. This new responsibility may have slowed me down when it comes to episodes, but it hasn't stopped me. You can expect more new episodes, but there will be few and far between for a while.
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Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved. Most of the most disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people. My name is Halle, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast.
History is full of strange events. Events that even today are unexplainable. These events are sometimes recorded by the people who experienced them, but more often by those who have heard about them second-hand. Despite attempts by modern researchers to discover the reason behind such strange happenings, we're often left without any conclusive answers.
One of these strange events took place in the German town of Strasbourg, now technically in France, one of the largest cities in the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages. According to Dr. John Waller of Michigan State University, on July 14th, 1518, in the heat of summer, a woman known as Stroud-Trophia began dancing. It's unknown if music was playing, but there seems to be no joy in her movements.
She went on dancing through the day and on into the night. It appeared she couldn't stop, that she had lost control of her body. Eventually, she collapsed from exhaustion and fell asleep, only to wake a short time later and continue her disturbing dance. Her movements grew more and more erratic throughout the day, until once again, she collapsed.
From the third day of her dance, a crowd gathered around Frau Trophia. They were mystified as to what had possessed her to act in this way. She was obviously an agony, her feet bleeding through her shoes, and her movements jerky and violent. Many theories were put forth.
Were she possessed by demons? Was this dance a punishment from God? Was it some type of disease of the body? After several more days of dancing, Frau Trophia was put in a wagon and taken to a shrine, the general opinion being that she was dancing out her sins or had been punished for them by God.
It's not known if she ever recovered. This was only the beginning. Soon after she was removed, more people began to dance. They were said to have an undeniable urge.
It quickly became known as dancing mania, and those afflicted danced in public and private spaces throughout the city day and night. More and more people joined as time went on. They ached, their feet bled, their muscles tore, but still they danced, hardly stopping to eat, drink or sleep. By the beginning of August, dancing mania appeared to be an epidemic, spreading to hundreds of other people within the city.
It's believed that between 100 and 400 people were affected over the course of the incident. Records state that people died of exhaustion, though how many is uncertain. One chronicle suggested around 15 people died each day, but this number is not corroborated by any other sources. The government of Strasbourg called the council didn't know what to do.
Records in the municipal archive of Strasbourg describe their efforts to deal with the situation. At first they consulted physicians, believing the strange affliction must be something physical, like a disease. Space was made in public areas for people to dance, and music was played as a form of therapy. However, this only seemed to make things worse.
The mania spread, and more people died of exhaustion. Music was then banned in the city until the end of September, especially drums. As the epidemic continued, the council began to believe that something supernatural was affecting the people. Perhaps they were possessed by demons, or, like Frau Trophia, they were dancing out their sins.
While the council took some time to come to this conclusion, the church and many of the citizens of Strasbourg already believed it to be so. On August 10th, city guards and other volunteers were conscripted to take the dancers out of the city in Wagons, to the shrine of St. Vitus of Hohenstein near Saverna. Also ejected from the city were prostitutes, gamblers and drinkers.
A large mass was held, both in Strasbourg and at the shrine of St. Vitus. It seemed the council was making sure the whole city served penance in an attempt to stop the spread of the dancing mania. The shrine of St.
Vitus near Saverna was a small chapel inside a grotto with a cave. Once there, the dancers were given a cross and red shoes with crosses painted on them in holy oil. They were also sprinkled with holy water in St. Vitus' name.
This seemed to help many of them. St. Vitus, also known as St. Guy or Guido, was a Christian martyr, meaning he was killed for his faith and then honored with St.
Hood after his death. According to his legend, he was killed by Roman Emperor Diocletian, around the year 300 CE. During the medieval era when the dancing mania took hold, St. Vitus was known as one of the 14 holy helpers, a group of saints that were thought to be the most effective at helping those who sought it.
In Germany, the feast of St. Vitus, which occurs on June 15th every year, was celebrated by dancing before his statue, so it's not hard to see why those with dancing mania were brought to his shrine, and why dancing mania is sometimes called St. Vitus Dance. Once they were danced out, the exhausted dancers were returned to their homes and families, but some never recovered.
It's recorded that many suffered from tremors for the rest of their lives. By late August or early September, the epidemic had begun to subside. The people of Strasburg were perplexed and not a little fearful of what had taken place. The city had been in utter chaos for a month as the dancing mania had gripped its citizens.
The memory of this event tattooed itself into the minds of the citizens of Strasburg and the surrounding provinces. Many chroniclers wrote of it at the time. Physicians, religious leaders, and government officials. Many other accounts were written fifty to a hundred years later.
One of the most detailed chronicles of the event comes from famous alchemist and physician Paracelsus, who wrote about it in the 1530s. Like many who wrote of the dancing mania close to the time it occurred, his theory was that Frau Trofea was at fault. He believed she had started dancing to humiliate her husband, but was then unable to stop. Paracelsus called the condition Coria la Siva.
Coria, meaning a neurological disorder characterized by jerky involuntary movements. Paracelsus stated that only people without fear or respect were liable to be afflicted. He suggested locking these, quote, whores and scoundrels, end quote, in a dark room with only bread and water for sustenance until they stopped. He later recanted this position however, naming it Coria sunk dvt and treating it more like a disease.
He divided it into three types, Coria imagineativa, which originated in the victim's imagination. Coria la Siva, arising from sensual desire and Coria naturalis arising from a physical cause. I'll talk more about different variants of dancing mania after the outbreak. While this event shocked the area, the 1518 dancing mania of Strasburg was likely not the first epidemic of dancing to affect the lower Rhine Valley.
Several chronicles mentioned other occasions in which a group of people danced for days, seemingly against their will. It wasn't always infectious like it was in Strasburg, but it did confuse and frighten those who wrote about it. On Christmas Eve in the year 1021, a group of people gathered outside a church in a German town of Colbeek in Saxony and danced with wild abandon. It said they had decided to dance instead of going to Mass.
The person of the church is said to have cursed them to carry on for an entire year, but then he recanted. However, his curse had already taken hold. The dancers went on for a whole year, some of them dying in the process. This tale is likely apocryphal as it contains a heavy moral lesson about skipping mass and casting curses, but it's possible that it was rooted in an actual event.
Later chronicles speak of about of unstoppable and sometimes fatal dancing in the German town of Erfurt. In 1237, a group of children was said to have traveled 13 miles to the nearby town of Arnstadt, dancing and jumping throughout the entire journey. Once they reached Arnstadt, they fell to the ground exhausted. A native of Erfurt, Jüster's Friedrich Karl Hecker, a doctor of medicine, published a book, The Black Death and the Dancing Mania, in 1832.
It contained numerous accounts of dancing mania, which he theorized was a consequence of the Black Death, which had reached its peak in Europe in the mid-1300s. He believed that the hardship brought by the bubonic plague indirectly manifested itself in the form of a collective madness. You can check out our episode on the Black Death for more information on that. One of the largest outbreaks of the mysterious dancing plague began in Aachen, Germany in 1374.
Several thousand frenzied people danced in fits that lasted for weeks. Dozens of medieval authors recorded that the terrible compulsion to dance spread like a plague across western Germany, northeastern France, England and the Netherlands that year. Colbeek and Erfurt might be apocryphal, but there's no question that the 1374 and 1518 epidemics of dancing mania occurred, supported by many references in chronicles of the time. However, within a generation or two of a 1518 incident, dancing mania faded away to almost nothing but a memory.
What was it that caused these so-called plagues of dancing? While sorcery, demons and witchcraft were considered decalperates by past people, today other less fantastic agents are thought to have caused it. We'll talk more about these theories past and present after a word from our sponsors. Our regular sponsor is Audible.com.
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You'll have my eternal gratitude. And now back to the podcast. In 1518, the Council of Strasburg at first felt that the dancing mania was some sort of physical ailment. The sufferers were treated with sympathy and therapy or treatment was sought.
Most of the public and members of the church, however, believed it was a condition sent by God, either as a punishment or as a cure for sin. Physicians near the time of the event took notes of the common symptoms and tried to determine what could be causing it. Wilhelm von Burgistel wrote in 1491 that the dancers jumped about in circles sometimes until their ribs broke or they died. Apparently thinking their movements might drive out the pains they felt in their hearts and bodies.
Sometimes they couldn't perceive the color red, but stated they could see the head of Saint John the Baptist dripping with blood in their minds eye. A little after the mania had passed, Paracelsus and John Schenk von Graaffenberg, a German physician who wrote in the late 1500s, noted that there seemed to be several versions of dancing mania. One was acute and epidemic, meaning it lasted a matter of days and spread like wildfire. The other was chronic and recurrent, in which once a year, usually in June, both previously afflicted and new people would dance frantically for a period of time.
In this recurrent form, many of the victims were convinced they'd never be calmed with their anxiety and pain unless they danced it out, either at shrines or wherever they stood. Once they did so, they were free of the compulsion for the rest of the year. Other physicians in the 14th to 16th centuries proposed to get be a form of epilepsy or choria. Most notable of these physicians was Thomas Sidenham, a famous English physician of the mid-to-late 1600s who renamed Saint Vitusdance, Sidenham's choria.
He described it as an auto-immune disease caused by streptococcus bacteria, characterized by rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements, primarily affecting the face, hands, and feet. However, the historic descriptions of Saint Vitusdance don't match up consistently with the modern descriptions of epilepsy or choria. Following the now-defunct humeral system of medicine, many physicians believed that an imbalance in the humors causing hot blood was the culprit and recommended cold foods and environments as treatment. Most physicians agreed that whatever the cause, the illness was most certainly a type of madness.
It should be noted that there are many issues researching mania and madness during this time period. Neurotic and psychosomatic complaints appeared, changed, and even disappeared throughout history and don't always fall into modern medical categories. Written sources often lack context or the bias of the writer is not immediately obvious. The words the authors use may not mean the same thing they mean today.
The type of madness described might not exist at all today as mental illness changes depending on culture, environment, and the technology of the time. It's also important to remember the sheer force of religion at this time, which in Germany was mainly Christianity. Religious ecstasy, visions, and trance were often encouraged. These are all categorized as psychosis today, but back then they were gifts from either God or curses from Satan.
Possession and witchcraft were also very real to most people. In the 16th and 17th century, a bout of dancing mania hit Italy. There it became known as tarantism, as it was thought that the bite of a tarantula caused the victim to dance exhaustively in order to get the poison out. In mania seemed to overcome people at a specific chapel in Galatina in southern Italy around the time of the feast of St.
Paul, which is also in June. In this case, the dance was the therapy for the bite. We know today, however, that dancing is not an effective treatment for spider or tarantula bites. The legend goes that a specific dance, the tarantella, developed from these events.
In the early modern era, poisoning was considered as a possible cause, the most popular theory being that the people of Strasburg had ingested ergot, a mold that grows on the stalks of ripening rye plants and can cause hallucinations, spasms, and tremors if consumed. It can also cause headache, vomiting, diarrhea, and gangrene of the fingers and toes. A victim's extremities, usually a foot or leg, could alternate between a cold or burning sensation, which was referred to as St. Anthony's Fire.
A convulsive form of ergotism was also known and characterized by convulsive episodes every few days, as well as manic episodes and hallucinations. However, this doesn't explain the disease-like spread of dancing mania in Strasburg, nor the fact that it often ceased with a trip to the shrine of St. Vitus. Another newer, yet little-mentioned theory is that the dance was actually a new social pastime that conservative people of the time attacked and described as an illness due to the so-called moral dangers of dancing.
Dances might be held on holy days, wives and unmarried daughters might dance with men they hardly knew, monks and priests might risk their immortal souls and be tempted to dance, and female commoners might try to snare a husband well above their station. This is hilariously known as the Footloose Theory. Another recent theory on the cause of dancing mania in medieval Europe is that social and political environmental stresses caused people to unconsciously vent their frustrations by acting in a way that was socially acceptable, that of being mad or possessed. Dr.
Gregoroman of the Free University of Berlin believed that the people were attempting to act out their fears of being in purgatory. To people of the Christian faith, life was a liminal period. A baby was innocent until it was born, then it was considered a sinner. People spent their whole lives trying to attain salvation, but would never know if they had achieved it before death.
Roman believes that the endless disturbing dance was somehow a reproduction of the uncertainty of their status in the eyes of God. With this theory, it must be remembered that the people lived in abject fear of the wrath of God and possession by demons, so it's not a stretch that they might feel incredible stress not knowing the final destination of their immortal soul. The most recent and popular theory is a more medical one, that the people of Strasbourg had suffered from a mass sociogenic illness. As sociogenic illnesses, sometimes referred to as mass psychogenic illnesses and previously referred to as mass hysterical illnesses, usually originate from a nervous system disturbance, either excitation, anxiety, or a loss or alteration of certain body functions.
This causes physical complaints that seem to have no corresponding organic origin. In summary, it's a set of symptoms with no apparent cause that occurs after some sort of stressful incident or within a stressful environment. These symptoms then rapidly spread among members of a cohesive group, such as a family or small community. This type of illness is very hard to diagnose and even harder to recognize in historical reports.
According to Dr. Robert E. Bartholomew, senior lecturer in psychological medicine at the University of Auckland, before the 20th century, most reports of what may have been mass sociogenic illnesses occurred just after long periods of harsh religious, academic, or capitalist discipline. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, many European convents came under incredibly strict Christian religious orders.
When paired with belief in witches and demons, dozens of epidemic sociogenic episodes among nuns broke out. At the time, these nuns were widely believed to have been possessed by demons. Outbreaks lasted for months, and in several cases, recurred over several years. At a young age, girls were often coerced or forced by elders to join these socially isolated religious orders, where rigid discipline in confined, all female living quarters, vows of chastity, near starvation diets, repetitious prayer rituals, and lengthy fasting was the norm.
Punishments for any rule-breaking were harsh and included flogging and even further isolation. The outbreaks of so-called hysterical fits usually appeared under the strictest administrators. Priests were summoned to exercise the demons thought to be possessing the nuns. Disliked individuals, such as the strict administrators, were often accused of casting spells, consulting with demons or bewitchment, and were then banished, imprisoned, or burned at the stake.
In rare occasions, nuns themselves were executed for bewitching other members of their order. Major convent outbreaks were recorded around the time of the dancing mania, and after. The trigger for these outbreaks seems to have been long-standing anxiety, which gave rise to confusion, delusions, and hyper-suggestibility. These delusions included the fears and culture of their upbringing, which was quite religious.
Dr. Simon Wesley, a British psychiatrist, identified two types of mass sociogenic illness in 1987, mass anxiety and mass motor. Mass anxiety, sociogenic illness, is usually shorter, lasting around a day and is due to a sudden extreme anxiety following a perceived threat. Mass motor sociogenic illness is due to a slow accumulation of pent-up stress, lasts longer, and usually occurs in an isolated and strict social setting.
It also includes confusion and alterations in psychomotor activity, such as shaking and twitching. Outbreaks of mass sociogenic or psychogenic illnesses are not limited to history. In a more modern setting, these occur in fairly stressful or rigid environments such as boarding schools or large factories. Modern symptoms are far more vague, including headache, dizziness, nausea, fatigue, cramps, inability to concentrate, numbness, anxiety, rashes, and itching.
These symptoms make diagnosis very difficult, as the environment must first be checked for any physical causes, such as gas leaks, contamination, pollutants, or other issues. This takes time, and usually the symptoms stop by the time the tests come back. A quick diagnosis of mass sociogenic illness is problematic because there's often controversy surrounding the outbreak. Time is needed to analyze environmental and medical test results, and there's always a chance that whatever physical substance caused the symptoms has dissipated quickly and left no trace.
According to Dr. Bartholomew, modern mass sociogenic illness is an underappreciated social problem that is both underreported and often a significant financial burden to responding emergency services public health and environmental agencies and the affected school or occupation site, which is often closed for days or weeks. He states also that, quote, no one is immune from mass sociogenic illness because humans continually construct reality and the perceived danger needs only to be plausible in order to gain acceptance within a particular group and generate anxiety, end quote. Today the symptoms are different than in the past because our reality is different.
We fear terrorist threats, gas leaks, and viral contaminants, and therefore the delusions suffered by those affected by mass sociogenic illness reflect that. From the early 1980s until now, there's been an increasing presence of chemical and biological terrorism themes in mass sociogenic illness. Symptoms include concerns over food, air, and water quality, especially exaggerated or imaginary fears involving mysterious odors, which are assumed to be toxic gases. In October of 2001, over 2,300 anthrax loss alarms were reported, mainly involving sociogenic symptoms.
This was just after several anthrax attacks occurred a little over a week after the September 11 attacks on New York City. Uncertainty and fear after such disasters commonly generates psychogenic or anxiety symptoms, such as hyperventilation, headache, and nausea, which can be difficult to distinguish from the early stages of a chemical, biological, or nuclear attack. The intense media coverage seems to exacerbate outbreaks, and as we are more and more connected by media these days, it's likely these events will continue to occur, although we won't know their mass sociogenic illnesses until much later. As our reality continues to evolve, these fears will change as will the symptoms of mass sociogenic illness.
The exact cause of the dancing mania of Strasbourg is still uncertain, leaving the events of 1518 a mystery. While modern researchers believe that they have the most likely answer, it's also likely the truth will never be known as we cannot travel back in time to test our theories that is why dancing mania sparks our curiosity. The Morbid Curiosity Podcast was produced by H. Lloyd.
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