23. Dance, Dance, Dance
The authorities’ efforts to help the crazed dancers get it out of their system backfired, and simply ended up encouraging even more people to join the mania. Within a month, the number of nonstop dancers had mushroomed into the hundreds, and at the height of the dance fever, fifteen residents were dying each day from exhaustion and heart attacks.
The Strasbourg dance craze was not an isolated incident, and between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, similar outbreaks with enough frequency for contemporaries to coin a term for the phenomena: Saint Vitus’ Dance, or Saint John’s Dance. There is no modern consensus on the cause, so it is simply categorized as an unusual social phenomenon – a mass public hysteria, or a mass psychogenic illness of unknown provenance.
