Between the 14th and 17th centuries in England, Germany, and the Netherlands a deadly, contagious illness broke out resulting in exhaustion, injuries, and sometimes even death. The cause of this illness is unknown, however numerous explanations have been hypothesized as to how thousands of people have been affected by this disease. Many philosophers, doctors, priests, and other experts have believed that either St. Vitus or St. John the Baptist have brought this curse and that praying to them was the only method of ridding this horrid disease. Other experts believed that folks were possessed by demons and the only way to relieve the curse was to be exorcised. Other conspiracies about the cause of this illness include ergot poisoning, stress from poverty and hardship, madness, and staged performances (which is the most plausible cause).
The earliest known outbreak struck Bernburg, Germany during the 1020’s, at Christmas time, when 18 pheasants began singing and dancing around a church, while service was in progress. Since then, this illness has been best known as the dancing plague, or dancing mania to others. Other outbreaks include a similar tale of the famous children’s’ fairytale The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and the biggest outbreak occurred in Strasbourg, in 1518. During the Pied Piper-like incident, in 1237, a large group of children, travelling from Erfurt to Arnstadt, were inflicted with dancing mania. They started jumping and dancing all the way to Arnstadt. During the Strasbourg incident, one woman was reported dancing for a month with 400 other people joining her. Because of the non-stop, uncontrollable dancing, injuries resulted in chest pains, convulsions, and broken ribs. Many people simply stopped dancing and fell over due to exhaustion, while some people even died due to broken ribs. Many have even suffered from heart attacks, and died as a result.
By means of terminating this illness, people had to guess how to stop the disease because they did not what caused dancing mania in the first place. Some people believed that music would cease the dancing so musicians were hired to play for folks who have been plagued by dancing mania, however the complete opposite would happen most of the time. The problem with hiring musicians is that the music would encourage more people to join in the plague in addition to the musicians who were hired.
Having read this article for the first time, I learned a great deal of information. While reading this article, I found it fun and interesting. I also found it unbelievable that such a phenomenon actually occurred in medieval Europe. Upon reading “Dancing Mania” I did not even know that dancing mania was an actual event that occurred long ago in central Europe until reading this article. Even though I did find this article to be interesting, this information is not useful to me in any way. The only people that I can think of that this information could be useful to are (pre) medical students, history students, and psychology students. After all, dancing mania is a psychological disease.
Because anyone can post anything to Wikipedia pages, most Wikipedia pages cannot be trusted because of fictitious content however after doing research about dancing mania, it can be concluded that this strange phenomena is true. After exploring more about this topic through both Google Scholar and the library’s database, I found that researching dancing mania is an easy subject to find and that numerous articles surround this subject. People can find just about anything on the Internet so naturally this topic would be an easy find, and because everything can be found on the Internet dancing mania has earned a Wikipedia page. One reason why this post earned a Wikipedia page is to educate people about this disease. In my opinion, I find this information to be untrue but the research that I have done points me towards the other direction, that dancing mania is true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania
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