25. Death Dances Were a Thing for Centuries
Concerned Strasbourg authorities consulted local physicians. They opined that the viral dance fever was caused by “hot blood”. Convinced that the dancers would recover only if they got it out of their system by dancing continuously, the authorities hired musicians to play for them. A wooden stage was erected, and to make additional dance space, guildhalls were opened up, and the marketplace was cleared out to make more room. Those measures backfired, and simply encouraged even more people to join the craze.
Within a month, the number of nonstop dancers had ballooned into the hundreds. At the height of the dance fever, fifteen residents keeled over and died each day from exhaustion and heart attacks. The Strasbourg dance plague was not an isolated incident. Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were enough similar outbreaks 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. As such, it is simply categorized as an unusual social phenomenon – a mass public hysteria, or a mass psychogenic illness of unknown provenance.
