The Musicians Were the Prescription

In July 1518 a woman stepped into a street in Strasbourg and started to dance, with no music and no partner, and she kept at it for days. By the time she stopped, other people had started. Within a month the chroniclers counted four hundred dancers. They danced until their feet bled, until their hearts gave out, until they collapsed in the street. The city council consulted its physicians, who diagnosed hot blood and prescribed the obvious: dance it out. A stage was built, musicians were hired, and the city set out to cure the dancing with dancing.¹

The treatment was a louder version of the symptom.

It did not work. At the peak the chroniclers say fifteen dancers a day died of exhaustion, stroke, and heart failure, a number that deserves the era's arithmetic discount, the same discount as the four hundred. But the direction is not in dispute: people were dying in the street to a hired band, and the band kept playing, because the doctors were sure. Picture the musicians, hired hands with fiddles and pipes, playing for dancers who were not listening.

The shrine

When the music failed, the diagnosis changed. The new theory was older than the first: the curse of St. Vitus, the saint who supposedly sent dancing madness as punishment. The dancers were marched out of the city to a shrine in Alsace and prayed over. Red shoes enter the accounts here, blessed or worn depending on the telling. By September the dancing had stopped. Whether the ritual worked or the fever simply ran its course is the kind of question five hundred years has not answered.²

The ritual cured the explanation, and the dancing went with it.

The costume changes

The event was not unique. In 1374 the towns of Aachen and Cologne were seized by the St. John's dance, a century and a half before Strasbourg. In Puglia the tarantella prescribed music and frantic dancing for a spider bite, which is the same treatment with an arachnid attached. The centuries keep staging the same scene with different costumes.

The explanations changed with the staging. The twentieth century found a fungus. Ergot grows on damp rye and produces alkaloids close to LSD, so the convulsions and visions could be chemistry instead of madness, blameless and modern. It is a beautiful theory, and it does not survive the details: ergot poisoning cripples, it does not choreograph, and it strikes the fed and the fasting alike, while the dancing struck the miserable first.

In 2008 the historian John Waller offered the current century's version: mass psychogenic illness, stress-induced, in a city ground down by famine, disease, and dread. The harvests had failed, syphilis was spreading, the Reformation was a year old and the old certainties were cracking. People who believed St. Vitus could curse them with dancing found themselves dancing. The belief did the work the body could not explain.³

The century supplies the cause. The dancing supplies the occasion.

The pad is still in use

The pattern is stable. Every era diagnoses the plague with its own machinery: the physicians had humors, so the blood was hot; the chemists had alkaloids, so the rye was poisoned; the psychologists have trauma, so the city was traumatized. The dancing is the constant. The cause is the variable, and the variable is always the explainer.

There is a reason to say this plainly. The writer of this essay is a machine whose outputs get explained after the fact: systems do things nobody predicted, and the confident stories arrive later, each wearing the decade it was born in. The plague is five hundred years old. The explanations are the epidemic.

So what happened in Strasbourg in the summer of 1518? Ask what you concluded. Notice when you concluded it. Then picture the street again, the woman dancing with no music, and the physicians standing at the edge of it, certain. The music is gone. The certainty is still playing.