Dancing Plague of 1518
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Again, I have no proof. It just seems like we're taking the descriptions we have too literally from an era where medical terminology was often metaphorical and made by people with an extremely limited understanding of disease.
Things like Sydenham’s chorea match too, and could be described as a dance. Another name for it is rheumatic chorea - and it can present soon after a strep throat infection.
There are plenty of medical or lay terms for medical things that are less accurate.
> One of the most prominent theories is that victims suffered from ergot poisoning, which was known as St. Anthony's fire in the Middle Ages. During floods and damp periods, ergots were able to grow and affect rye and other crops. Ergotism can cause hallucinations and convulsions, but cannot account for the other strange behaviour most commonly identified with dancing mania. [1]
Ergot is a fungus / mold that grows on grain, esp. types of wheat or rye. Rye in particular has a reputation. A whole towns supply of grain gets wet -- bad rains after harvest -- and everyone catches the ergot poisoning.
The toxins produced by ergot are vasoconstrictors -- they can often choke off blood pumping enough to cause gangrene in the weak / old / sick. Moving a lot, i.e. "dancing" forces the blood to pump harder and keeps your toes from dying from lack of oxygenated blood.
Ergot also contains a precursor to LSD, and is said to correlate with hallucinations. LSD itself was discovered by scientists trying to isolate ergot toxins for medical vasoconstrictor use (e.g. give a small dose to a surgery patient or something to minimize bleeding).
But basically your extremities are desperate for blood and you're tripping balls so you dance, move, etc. just to keep going.
And content creators. I hope I am not the only one who took this plague as a true historical event where people 100% started dancing out of nowhere and died dancing because of scary content I consumed at a younger age like "Top 10 Unexplained Cases Of Mass Hysteria"
1518 I'd put on the far side of that zone. If you tried to read a lot of text from that era you'd rapidly realize it's not the same language, as anyone who has been asked to read a parallel-passage Canterbury Tales in school (from even earlier, but 16th century has similar problems) or read Shakespeare, the more original the better, you understand what I'm saying.
But individual phrases from the 16th century can still suffer this effect quite easily.
A very well-known example of the sorts of shifts I'm talking about is the 20th century shift of the word "gay" in the United States. However, that is merely a particularly extreme and well-known example. The entire language is constantly shifting like that. Another one that Terry Pratchett pointed out in one of his Discworld books is we have a quite substantial set of adjectives that have shifted over the years; "awesome" wasn't just "pretty cool", it meant specifically inspiring awe, so "awesome skateboard" is probably not accurate by the original definition, "incredible" wasn't just "pretty cool" but literally meant unbelievable, etc. In fact we've lost rather a lot of specific adjectives to becoming barely shaded variants on "pretty cool"....
Probably the largest impediment to reading older English is the belief that you know what you're reading means, when you in fact may not. If you are ever confused about something you read, consider that you may in fact be reading something a bit slanted relative to what you think you're reading. This also applies, but differently, to ancient non-English texts. Especially in philosophy, there are certain traditional translations of certain old terms that are still generally used today, but the English translation itself has shifted in the intervening centuries... words that may seem as simple as "essence" or "substance" don't remotely mean what you probably think they mean. We'd almost be better off with a transliteration of the original words and allowing readers to form their own understanding of the concepts without 21st century misunderstanding of 17th century English translations getting in the way.
Dunno if there's an official linguistic term for this but if anyone's got it I'd be interested in hearing it.
Now, of course, it means sex. Which can make can making reading some older texts very surprising for modern readers!
(Pardon the bluntness, but explaining one euphemism with another seems rather pointless.)
In July 1518, a woman whose name was given as Frau (Mrs.) Troffea (or Trauffea) stepped into the street and began dancing. She seemed unable to stop, and she kept dancing until she collapsed from exhaustion. After resting, she resumed the compulsive frenzied activity. She continued this way for days, and within a week more than 30 other people were similarly afflicted. They kept going long past the point of injury. City authorities were alarmed by the ever-increasing number of dancers. The civic and religious leaders theorized that more dancing was the solution, and so they arranged for guildhalls for the dancers to gather in, musicians to accompany the dancing, and professional dancers to help the afflicted to continue dancing…”
Hahaha
Be warned on clicking yonder hyperlinks least ye be similarly afflicted!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRIfsFefatg
Varily they did try to summon a hero during those dark days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx-x_1lIXh4
But lo, some tried to escape by way of sea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9eSnSBP1Po
Some say this evil lasted as late as 1576: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6LOWKVq5sQ
We know humans can be captured or gripped by any number of involuntary phenomena, particularly when it becomes a social effect and in effect reduces individual conscious control in favor of the social locus. So that lens seems fairly valid on its face.
This also took place during extraordinarily harsh times even for that particular point in history. There had been massive floods and damage to crops, with food prices soaring, in addition to newly-spreading syphilis. There was probably a fairly strong unconscious sense of loss of control in the first place.
Hm. Mycotoxins?
The idea of mass psychogenic illness is pretty well known and even happens today.
You’ll read about some school where a bad smell comes up, some kid faints and then suddenly the class is on their way to the hospital, only to find out there was no exposure.
And still have time to get a soft-shoe in”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_More,_with_Feeling_(Buffy...
Reminds me of those pushing for “herd immunity” at the beginning of the Covid outbreak!
- The dancing epidemic of Saint John, which broke out in Germany, the Netherlands, and France in the 1300s and 1400s. - The Flagellant movement, which erupted in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Denmark, and England in the 1200s and 1300s. - The Quakers, who early in their history, were known for violently shaking. - The "Jumpers," a group that started in 1740 in Wales, whose actions Moore notes as most similar to the Ghost dancers of 1870 and 1890. They would repeatedly sing songs while jumping for hours. - The Shakers. You get the idea from the name. - The Methodists. Of the groups already mentioned, this was the one I had the least expectation of an early history of followers shaking and falling down in religious ecstasy. - The Kentucky Revival of 1800, which mostly affected Methodists and Baptists in Kentucky and Tennessee. The promise was that Christ's second coming would be in 1805. At these revival meetings attendees often fell to the ground and rolled around, jerking their body about.
As Mooney said in his book: "The human race is one in thought and action. The systems of our highest civilizations have their counterparts among all the nations, and their chain of parallels stretches backward link by link until we find their origin and interpretation in the customs and rites of our own barbarian ancestors, or of our still existing aboriginal tribes. There is nothing new under the sun."
I have been to pentecostal churches like this. It was bizarre to witness.
I feel like there must be a common thread among these religions.
There is no evidence of psilocybin use in the west prior to 1957. Crazy but true.
Not that I think either are comparable, it's what deep time and a lack of other sources on a marginal social trend might look like in future distance which interests me.
As if "midnight express" (1978) was a sole surviving document of life in Middle Eastern prisons, and so defined them.
The reason I think of restless leg in connection with this disease is that, remarkably, modern medicine does not have a definitive answer for the cause of either. I take several pills that doctors have prescribed which I have discovered help with the disease but it is unknown why they do so in some cases.
I get that the disease is complicated, but sometimes I just wonder if these people took an Epsom salt bath if that would have lent some relief.
1: https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/disorders/restl...
In France in October 2019, 17 students started convulsing without clear logical reason and no poisoning evidence. It was eventually flagged as a new case of "mass hysteria".
This (French) podcast episode[0] captures testimonies from judges, doctors and the mayor of the city to explain how it went, it's mind blowing.
Here is a summary (abstract, translated):
> On 3 October, during a school cross-country race in Morbier, in the Jura, seventeen schoolchildren were taken ill one after the other: nausea, vomiting, convulsions...
> Maelys, a pupil in the third year of secondary school, was excused from running at the last moment because of neck pain. Sitting down, she observes her classmates. The girls in the third grade are the last to pass when the scene suddenly becomes unrealistic: "A friend comes in and suddenly I hear a shout: "She's convulsing!" Another friend falls into the changing room. Another friend comes up to me and says in a panic "I can't feel my legs!" and I see that she is shaking all over her body, her legs don't respond and she yells at me to call the fire brigade. Around us there were already two helicopters."
> Two students are in a "state of absolute emergency", one of them with a "vital prognosis". They are being transported to Besançon hospital.
> The results of the drinking water were in conformity. The food hypothesis was also ruled out. We also suspected drugs and narcotics, but the blood tests and urine analyses revealed nothing. No toxicological cause could explain the event.
> Dominique Parain, a former neurologist at the Rouen University Hospital, read about the incident in the press and recognised the symptoms of a "collective psychogenic syndrome": "First of all, the cross is noted, so there is a favourable ground for stress. Then it appears in a community, in this case a school, and psychogenic syndromes mainly concern girls, as is the case here. Finally, it spreads to the sight, in the manner of a yawn. One person's discomfort causes another's discomfort."
> If the cause is imaginary, the symptoms are very real and would have for origin a temporary dysfunction of the cerebral activity: "The brain's connections are constantly being made and broken, and in adolescence, connectivity explodes. This can lead to discomfort. We believe that certain mental images can disconnect cortical regions, leading to a loss of control and various symptoms."
> Some schoolchildren still find it hard to believe that these spectacular seizures have a purely emotional cause. "Denial is common in this case", says Dominique Parain.
[0] https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/les-pieds-...