In July 1518, a German housewife named Frau Troffea stepped out of her home in Strasbourg and began to dance. There was no music, no festival, and no apparent reason for her movement. She danced in the streets all day, into the night, and woke the next morning to dance again, her feet bruised and bleeding. Villagers gathered to watch what they assumed was a strange spectacle, but before long, she was not alone.
Within days, roughly thirty others had joined her, compelled by the same inexplicable urge. By the end of the month, the number had grown to around 400 people dancing uncontrollably through the streets of the city. What became known as the dancing plague of 1518 was not a celebration. The dancers screamed in agony, begged for mercy, and collapsed from exhaustion, only to rise and resume their relentless movement.
As the summer heat intensified, as many as fifteen people a day died from the affliction. The city council had no idea how to respond. Nothing in their experience had prepared them for a crisis of this nature. Desperate for answers, the council turned to local physicians.
After ruling out astrological and supernatural explanations, the doctors settled on a diagnosis of hot blood, a condition believed to result from an imbalance in the body’s humors. The theory held that the brain overheated, driving the afflicted into madness. The standard remedy for hot blood was bloodletting, but that was impractical for people who could not stop moving long enough for treatment. So the physicians prescribed the opposite approach: more dancing.
They hired musicians to play for the crowds and brought in additional dancers, hoping that the afflicted would dance out the sickness until their bodies simply gave out. The cure failed. Worse, it made the problem grow. The music drew curious onlookers into the square, and many of them joined the dancers, now caught up in the frenzy themselves.
The city council realized that burning out the affliction was not working. They changed course and declared the dancing a curse sent by the saints to warn the city to repent for its sins. Streets were swept for moral corruption. Gambling houses were shut down.
Brothels were closed. Those with loose reputations were banished from the city. The council donated a hundred-pound candle to the cathedral as an offering, but the dancing continued. Then the council went even further.
Following the model of towns that had banned dancing before, Strasbourg outlawed dance entirely, imposing a fine of thirty shillings for anyone caught moving to a beat. Music was banned as well, with the sole exception of string music allowed at weddings, provided no tambourines or drums were used. The municipal archive recorded that drums were considered the most dangerous instrument, since they were thought to trigger the epidemic. None of it stopped the dancers.
This was not the first time Europe had seen such a phenomenon. In 1370, a dancing outbreak had struck the city of Aachen and spread across the Rhine Valley. In that case, the afflicted had held hands and danced in circles for hours in wild delirium until they collapsed from exhaustion. Officials there attributed the outbreak to demonic possession and brought in exorcists, who bathed the dancers with holy water and shouted incantations into their faces.
The episode eventually passed, but the memory of it lingered in the region. In 1526, about ten years after the Strasbourg outbreak had finally subsided, the renowned physician Paracelsus visited the city to investigate what had happened. He concluded that the dancing had been an involuntary physical response, a kind of reflex triggered by manipulation of certain parts of the body. But being a man of his time, he also blamed the women.
He scrutinized the story of Frau Troffea and portrayed her as a rebellious wife who had started the mania to avoid doing housework. According to Paracelsus, her husband had asked her to do something she did not want to do, and she responded by dancing in the streets until her feet bled. During the crisis itself, the city had turned to Saint Vitus. The saint had been martyred as a child in the year 303 on the orders of emperors Diocletian and Maximian, and legend held that he had survived being thrown into a cauldron of boiling lead and tar, emerging unharmed, and that a lion had merely licked his hands rather than attack him.
Saint Vitus had a reputation for healing illnesses involving trembling limbs, which made him the obvious patron for dancers who could not stop shaking. Running out of options, the city loaded the afflicted onto wagons and carried them up a mountain to the shrine of Saint Vitus. The dancers continued to fall at the altar, so priests said mass over them and distributed small crosses and red shoes blessed with holy oil on both the tops and the soles. The blessed shoes appeared to work.
The affliction broke, and the dancing slowly came to an end. Most of the dancers regained control of their bodies, and the event became known as Saint Vitus’s dance. Modern experts do not agree on a single explanation for the 1518 outbreak. Some have suggested ergot poisoning, a mold that grows on grain and can cause convulsions.
That theory, however, does not account for the coordinated nature of the dancing, which witnesses described as rhythmic movement rather than random spasms. Others have proposed group epilepsy or other medical conditions, but those explanations fail to show how the affliction spread, since epilepsy is not contagious. Still others have suggested that secret members of a heretical cult staged the events, but that theory falls apart when weighed against the evidence that the dancers were in genuine agony and that many died. At a time when authorities were highly alert to suspected heretical activity, such a plot would not likely have escaped notice.
The most widely accepted explanation is mass hysteria, and the conditions in Strasbourg before the outbreak support it. The city had suffered four serious famines between 1492 and 1511, and in 1516 food prices had risen sharply. In 1517, a fifth famine killed countless people, with one chronicler labeling it the bad year. In 1518, smallpox and leprosy were spreading, and the orphanage was overflowing with at least 300 new orphans.
Fear of demonic possession gripped the population. People believed their bodies were no longer their own, that an unseen force controlled their movements. That state of mind made the city ripe for a collective psychological collapse. The way the outbreak ended also supports the mass hysteria theory.
The afflicted were cured by a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Vitus and a new pair of blessed shoes, remedies that worked entirely through belief. The dancers stopped when they were convinced the supernatural threat had been lifted. That is the classic pattern of mass hysteria: a shared fear creates the symptoms, and a shared faith ends them. The dancing plague of 1518 lasted for weeks and killed dozens of people before it finally burned out.
It became a lesson in how fear, starvation, and superstition could move an entire city to madness, and how quickly a single woman dancing in the street could become four hundred people dancing toward their own deaths.