The Dancing Plague: What Makes a Person Dance Themselves to Death?

The year is 1518. It’s the peak of a blistering summer. Strasbourg, one of the largest cities of the Holy Roman Empire, is gripped by a dancing mania. Blistered feet stain the streets with blood, sweat pours down jerking bodies, cries for help fill the air, the smell of heat stifles the city. Some dance in the narrow streets, some in the public square, some at home. Strasbourg was afflicted by choreomania: people were dancing themselves to death. 

One month earlier, a woman named Frau Troffea began cheerlessly dancing and never stopped. She would not pause to eat or drink, repeatedly collapsing and getting back up to resume dancing, until she died a few days later. Within a week, some sources claim, as many as 400 people would succumb to the same fate. So, what exactly happened here?  

Choreomania  

There were numerous other recorded ‘dancing plagues’ in several parts of Europe, yet what happened in Strasbourg differed in the way it was understood by its participants. Previous instances of choreomania depict what can be described as a cult of dancers. In 1374, ‘St John’s Dance’ struck Western Germany, the Low Countries, and northeastern France, with girls and women behaving strangely: shouting profanities, dancing through the streets and at the altars of the Virgin Mary inside churches. In true medieval fashion, these girls were quickly determined to be heretics, and many were ‘purged’. They were whipped, forced to vomit, and had holy water poured down their throats. On a smaller scale, as early as 1021, it was recorded that 18 peasants sang and danced outside of a church. As the story goes, they did so for a year straight. In 1278, in Utrecht, 200 people danced across a bridge that collapsed over a river, resulting in everyone drowning.  

Nonetheless, what drew me to the 1518 Strasbourg case is the absence of the devil, witchcraft, or heresy in contemporary understandings of it. 

How did Strasbourg understand the Dancing Plague? 

Initially, actors during the plague believed they were being punished by St Vitus, who demanded that the city dance itself into exhaustion to cleanse its sin. This is known as response expectancy: they believed they were cursed, so they acted as the cursed do. 

This fits within the context of the time. Decades of harsh famines, the onset of syphilis, and repeated attacks by the Ottoman Turks had created an agitated and restless emotional environment. Extreme hunger, hostility towards landlords and the clergy, and unpayable debts culminated in a misery so great it was palpable.  

In a society governed by religious teachings as a way of understanding the world, a curse from God and His saints was as good an explanation for the plague as any. It can be hard to understand this society now, in the post-scientific turn, but what fascinates me is the unique manifestations of stress that arose during this remarkable event. 

A shift in human understanding 

The alchemist–physician Paracelsus produced one of the most detailed accounts of the epidemic a few decades after it occurred. A noted sceptic and misogynist, who was not there during the plague, claimed that Frau Troffea began dancing to attract attention and humiliate her husband, only later succumbing to an uncontrollable urge to dance. Paracelsus insisted that her thoughts were “full of lasciviousness … without fear or respect.” He described many of those who later joined as “whores and scoundrels.” Misogyny aside, Paracelsus was the earliest known figure to frame choreomania as a sickness of the mind and soul. It was an emotional and moral contagion that spread among the most distressed members of Strasbourg’s society. 

His interpretation played a significant role in shifting everyday attitudes and beliefs. Paracelsus ascertained that the choreic movements were meaningless, driven by nothing external and fundamentally “medical” rather than “demonic.” This marks an early step towards the scientific medical model we rely on today. 

Dancing Plague in academic scholarship 

In the latter half of the 20th century, scientists had linked ergotism with the Dancing Plague. Ergot fungi, made up of psychoactive chemical products, commonly grow on grains used to bake bread. Various academics favoured this as an explanation for the choreomania in Strasbourg, as symptoms of this poisoning include convulsions, mania, and psychosis. Nonetheless, this has been discredited. It is unfeasible to argue that such a high number of people would have reacted in the same way to ergot poisoning, and there is no mention of gangrene pain in the chronicles, a very common symptom of this poisoning. 

The prevailing belief today is that the plague was a hysterical reaction to the anguish felt in its prelude. Multiple generations lived in dire poverty, life was bleak. Those who saw the dancers saw an outlet in which to express feelings of helplessness; with no reason to not be dancing, they joined in, and some never stopped.  

Furthermore, once the city’s authority began offering food and wine to the afflicted, as well as paying for dancers to be transported to St Vitus’s shrine in Saverne, the number of dancers began to dwindle. Many believed that they had been blessed by St Vitus and were finally free from sin.  

John Waller argues that there could be a deeper, more unconscious explanation to this ‘healing’. He suggests that the recognition by the city authorities of the dancers’ pain was enough to alleviate symptoms; validation and reassurance were the key to recovery. After years of neglect, misery, want and exploitation, the poor had spent weeks with the attention of civic and religious leaders. This was gratifying and emotionally fortifying. 

What can we learn? 

The case of the Strasbourg Dancing Plague reveals that cultural contexts shape the ways in which societies, and the individuals within them, understand themselves. How you are taught the world works directly influences how you view your role within it. In times of stress, for people of the 16^th century, one had to appease God by acting in accordance with His punishment.  

Today, many of us understand stress as a problem within our personal lives, one that can be worked through. For most people, contextual understanding of the world comes from centuries of evolving beliefs, a broad shift from religious to psychological understandings of the body and mind. Context is everything: the emotions the Strasbourg dancers experienced are the same ones we carry inside of us; we simply understand them differently.  

Bibliography 

Gotman, Kélina, Choreomania: dance and disorder (Oxford University Press, 2018). 

Miller, Lynneth J., ‘Divine Punishment or Disease? Medieval and Early Modern Approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague’, Dance Research 35:2 (2017), pp. 149-164. 

Waller, John, ‘Dancing Plagues and Mass Hysteria’, The Psychologist, July 2009 https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/dancing-plagues-and-mass-hysteria [accessed 9 March 2026]. 

Waller, John, The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness (Sourcebooks, 2009).