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Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

So I remember looking into this a while ago, and I don't really have proof, but it seems like the description of "dance" is probably misleading. There's, for instance, something called St. Vitis' Dance, which is a neurological condition people still get today. You can look at videos of that and I don't think any modern person would possibly describe that as dancing, but that's how it was perceived in an older age. As fascinating as the case of the dancing plague is, I suspect it was a disease with the more mundane symptom of muscular dyskinesia or dystonia and we're imagining something akin to actual dancing.

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.

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Looking at this example of Sydenham chorea (which seems to be the underlying condition behind the symptom named St Vitus' dance?), I could see it being described as a dance:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vWWnQErrmpg

The word ‘chorea’ is derived from the greek word for ‘dance’ as it happens.

That explains where the word “choreography” comes from :D

Wow, you're right.

In looking into that, ‘dance’ doesn’t seem a far fetched description.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydenham%27s_chorea

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6799876/

Huntington's disease looks nothing like dancing yet it's called chorea, which is Greek for dance. I believe that the term was historically used rather loosely for a variety of involuntary movement/neurological symptoms we might today call dyskinesia, tremors, tics, or even seizures.

I think you are most likely correct. However, I’m still very curious about this event. Those kinds of diseases are typically neural degenerate, and not often readily transmissible. What could cause an entire town to catch it simultaneously? Something in the water or food supply?

I've heard of the hypothesis it was a fungus infecting the wheat. I don't know what it's called in English, it's Mutterkorn in German. Concidentally (or not?) the precursor substance of LSD is produced by this fungus.

It's "ergot" in English:

> 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]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania

(slaps forehead) Of course. Thank you!

Ergot-ism.

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.

> It just seems like we're taking the descriptions we have too literally from an era where medical terminology was often metaphorical

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"

The wikipedia page isn't as detailed as I recall. I don't think that physiological disease can totally explain the phenomenon. The building of stages and congregating of dancers together, to me, suggests there was another dimension to the phenomenon.

Humans are highly social animals.. everything is seen is an opportunity for socializing come at least that's the way it was and more tightly bound societies such as we had before today's atomized modern society

Even if some were dancing for physiological reasons, it would be arbitrary to discount the people who join in for social reasons.

There's a tricky linguistic zone where languages are similar enough to modern times that everyone feels like they don't need a "translator", where words may even have similar denotations to today (though there are shifts in those too sometimes), but often have very different connotations. People reading text with modern denotations and connotations for the same word are worse off than if they're presented with a truly foreign text, where they realize they need a translation to do anything.

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.

One of my favorites for this is the term “making love”. In older times, this basically meant wooing or courtship - literally trying to and building feelings of love and affection in another person.

Now, of course, it means sex. Which can make can making reading some older texts very surprising for modern readers!

The euphemisms are full of examples like that. Not only can they confuse you in the way you meant, you can just plain miss them. Just yesterday I learned that "watery knees", when used in the context of being very afraid, doesn't necessarily refer to what I thought it referred to, which was just shakey knees that were as stable as water. It refers to pissing oneself, hence, literally, "water" (itself a common historical euphemism for piss) actually on the knees, as well as everywhere else. I don't know how many times I've seen that without putting that together.

(Pardon the bluntness, but explaining one euphemism with another seems rather pointless.)

It could be both. I.e., you have an involuntary muscle contraction but then you finish it off with a little dance to make it look less stupid.

That's a very funny theory but it actually makes sense. Add to that a bit of social contagion and maybe that's the story.

There are dozens and dozens of documented instances over centuries. your

Well, that's just Elaine from Seinfeld's dancing.

In the 500 years since this event happened, you are the first person to think of this as an actual reason. Congrats, we can close the case, finally. Thank goodness for you.

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