According to an account written in the 1530s by the irascible but brilliant physician Paracelsus, the “dancing plague of Strasbourg” began in mid-July 1518, when a lone woman stepped outside her house and jigged for several days on end. Within a week, dozens more had been seized by the same irresistible urge....There's also the ergotism theory, but it seems to be out of favor these days.
The councillors implemented what they felt was the appropriate treatment – more dancing! They ordered the clearing of an open-air grain market, commandeered guild halls, and erected a stage next to the horse fair. To these locations they escorted the crazed dancers in the belief that by maintaining frantic motion they would shake off the sickness....
The chronicles agree that most people were quick to assume that an enraged St Vitus had caused the affliction. So all it took was for a few of the devout and emotionally frail to believe St Vitus had them in his sights for them to enter a trance state in which they felt impelled to dance for days....
Life in Strasbourg in the early 1500s satisfied another basic condition for the outbreak of psychogenic illness... Social and religious conflicts, terrifying new diseases, harvest failures and spiking wheat prices caused widespread misery.... These were ideal conditions for some of the city’s needy to imagine that God was angry with them and that St Vitus stalked their streets....
July 8, 2018
"Five centuries ago, the world’s longest rave took place in Strasbourg – a ‘plague’ of dancing that was fatal for some. What caused it?"
From The Guardian:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
32 comments:
Five centuries is a long time. Absent physical evidence, you do have to wonder if some chroniclers weren’t indulging in the venerable journalistic practice of making shit up.
"began in mid-July 1518, when a lone woman stepped outside her house and jigged for several days on end"
Does history have a record of the size of her breasts?
Saint Vitus' dance
[sānt vī′təs]
a motor nerve disorder characterized by irregular involuntary jerky movements of the limbs and facial muscles. Historically the condition was once confused with symptoms of a dance mania that reportedly was cured by a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Vitus; it is thought to be caused by sequence of rheumatic fever.
More likely a mass hysteria.
Zardoz, did you know that in the 21st century there was a North American dictator who enjoyed being urinated on by Slavic sex-workers?
Five centuries from now, people will be reading unbelievable chronicles of NeverTrumpism.
If you can get a hold of a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM), flip to the section on culture-bound syndromes. Very fascinating reading. The fourth edition is better than the fifth.
Paracelsus was a fascinating character. I have a whole section in my medical history book about him.
It was he who devised the use of Mercury for syphilis. It was used until 1900 and the discovery of the arsenicals.
The single virtue of low-quality documentaries (which abound on Netflix and Amazon Prime) is that, given their gauche biases and near hysterical tone, they serve as great primers for developing critical thinking in the young. We were watching a documentary about off-shore British financial practices and even my 18 year old son quickly realized that it was saying the same sinister-toned nothings, repeatedly, while showing lots of footage of soldiers and police.
Of course, if you work at The Guardian those sort of observations might elude you.
Time traveling Democrats were likely the blame. They are specialists in psychogenic diseases.
ocial and religious conflicts, terrifying new diseases, harvest failures and spiking wheat prices caused widespread misery
All that would be enough to drive those unfortunate people to an early rave.
Uncontrollable Urge
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!
Got an urge, got a surge and it's outta control
Got an urge I want to purge 'cause I'm losing control
Uncontrollable urge I want to tell you all about it
Got an uncontrollable urge, it makes me scream and shout it
I've got an uncontrollable urge
(He's got an uncontrollable urge) I've got an uncontrollable
It's got style, it's got class
So strong, I can't let it pass I gotta tell you all about it
I gotta scream and shout it
Shout, Isley Brothers (1959).
We-eee-eeel....
You know you make me wanna (Shout!)
Kick my heels up and (Shout!)
Throw my hands up and (Shout!)
Throw my head back and (Shout!)
Come on now (Shout!)
Don't forget to say you will
Don't forget to say, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
(Say you will)
Say it right now bab-ay
(Say you will)
Come on, come on
(Say you will)
Say it, will-a you-ooooo!
(Say you will)
You got it, now!
(Say) say that you love me
(Say) say that you need me
(Say) say that you want me
(Say) you wanna please me
(Say) come on now
(Say) come on now
(Say) come on now
(Say) come on now
(Say) I still remember
(Shooby-doo-wop-do-wop-wop-wop-wop)
When you used to be nine years old
(Shooby-doo-wop-do-wop-wop-wop-wop)
Yeah-yeah!
I was a fool for you, from the bottom of my soul, yeah!
(Shooby-doo-wop-do-wop-wop-wop-wop)
Now that you've grown, up
(Shooby-doo-wop-do-wop-wop-wop-wop)
Enough to know, yeah yeah
Hillary could be President if enough Lefties danced over a cliff. A sacrifice to their lord Satan has been mandated. Now some of you will say that Lefties don't believe in Satan. Yet they keep dedicating their books to him. Odd.
At that time Strasbourg was at the center of the Reformation disputes among the Protesting guys. They did quite a dance around the presence of Jesus' body and blood in their communion wafers, but they never did settle that one. I suppose it was predestined that way.
It must have worked. Strasbourg is still populated to this day.
Well the reason for the plague is obvious to me. Summer was there and the time was right for dancing in the street.
Some great examples in Charles Mackay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds (1841). Esp the section on Tulipmania.
I blame whet rust.
Michael K
Doctor, since this is a medical thread; can you answer me a question?
IF, it was April 25, 1969, and you were treating a man who shot himself while putting on his bathrobe; and if he was in shock and had no urine output...
How would you know? my kidneys work fine, and it'd be hours before people (me!) knew i had no urine output.
Later, if you gave him ethancryinic acid; how would you know he started to make urine an hour later?
Did doctors have some way of checking urine production besides looking for yellow stains? Thanx!
harvest failures and spiking wheat prices
Sound to me like something that would cause people to start eating rye bread, even if the rye was gross and moldy; but what do i know? I'm a Ergotist
Gilbar- agree!
The mental illness of the modern age: pretending we can read people's minds and motivations, while barely understanding our own mind and motivations. Accusations of racism, sexism, bigotry, uvwxyz-phobia, are our psychogenic illness in Twenty-One Century America.
It was [Paracelsus] who devised the use of Mercury for syphilis.
Paracelsus prescribed mercury for everything. Mercury was the alchemical stuff par excellence. He was bound to be right occasionally.
Quaestor predicts a vast Saint Vitus dance down Constitution Ave shortly after November 6th.
Did doctors have some way of checking urine production besides looking for yellow stains? Thanx!
I assume you are kidding but, in case you aren't, Foley catheters are connected to collection bags and in ICU, there are plastic reservoirs that will read the urine flow minute by minute with a photoelectric thingy.
Thanks for reading my book.
Paracelsus prescribed things other than Mercury but that was the only one that worked, aside from laudanum, which he introduced to Europe.
He mostly advocated not using the medicines of the day. Since they were all harmful, it made him many enemies among physicians and he was probably murdered.
Witches, obviously.
This was some decades before the great German witch-craze started, and Strasbourg was exactly the sort of South-German place (an Imperial free city at the time) to have been into that. But in 1518 it doesn't seem like they were always putting two and two together, yet.
I suspect witchcraft, an up to date version of course, is behind many current ills.
Thanx Doc! No, i wasn't kidding; i had no idea how you'd see the urine: I hadn't thought about catheters. That makes much more sense! I should have known, my dad had a catheter last april after his latest heart failure (i HATE doing compression! but he's still kicking, i didn't even break any ribs), and i seen the collection bag.
The book's pretty cool, you just get into a Lot of stuff! Or, at least County Hospital patients do :)
Dancing around all day and burning calories does not seem to be in your self interest when carbs are expensive or rare.
Not the biggest outbreak of St Vitus. There was a rash of outbreaks, mostly along the Rhine, a century earlier.
Proto-liberals.
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
As fake as the news today and we only have to wait minutes or seconds for journalists to lie to us, not 500 years. Progress!
"And, by the way, would you like to know why universities suffer from this curse of nervous disease? Why the great personages stammer or have St Vitus' dance, or jabber at the lips, or hop in their walk, or have their heads screwed round, or tremble in the fingers, or go through life with great goggles like a motor car? Eh? I will tell you. It is the punishment of their "intellectual pride", than which no sin is more offensive to the angels."
~Hilaire Belloc: The Path to Rome.
Post a Comment