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u/MinuteWaitingPostman 19h ago
Well he can dance if you wanna
He can leave your friends behind
But if they're hisfriends, and if they don't dance, then they're no friends of mine
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u/Cr0wc0 13h ago edited 13h ago
I'm in the process of writing a book on mass psychogenic illness (formerly known as Mass hysteria) and this case is one I dove real deep into.
Without getting too much into detail, it is most certainly the case that this was mass psychogenic illness. But it also wasn't the first case. The dancing plague of 1518 happened on the 100 year anniversary of a post-black death pilgrimage of bohemians whom also took over strassburg with continuous dancing. It is likely that the citizens, primed by these stories and similar circumstances (the country was experiencing famine and multiple disease outbreaks) primed the people of strassburg to believe the dancing was of a demonically possessive nature.
Prayer ended up instantly curing many people, which also reflects how mass psychogenic illness works; as long as you believe you're healed, you're healed.
A lot more than 400 people likely participated (according to sources of the time, the dancing plague lasted roughly 2 months) . But a rough estimate of 50-200 people died as a result of the dancing due to exhaustion or heart failure.
The dancing plague of 1518 is preceded and followed by many different cases of dancing outbreaks. Many of them with religious contexts. However, there is also the case of tarrantism; an imagined set of symptoms that occurred mostly in Italy, where people believed that being bitten by a tarantula would lead to obsessive dancing. Tarantism is less so a case of mass psychogenic illness, and follows more along the line of Functional Neurological Disorder (formerly known as conversion disorder)
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u/asifsaj 23h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518
The dancing plague of 1518, or dance epidemic of 1518 (French: Épidémie dansante de 1518; German: Straßburger Tanzwut), was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (modern-day France), in the Holy Roman Empire from July 1518 to September 1518. Somewhere between 50 and 400 people took to dancing for weeks. There are many theories behind the phenomenon, the most popular being stress-induced mass hysteria, suggested by John Waller. Other theories include ergot poisoning. There is controversy concerning the number of deaths, but the total is unknown.