The Malleus Maleficarum goes on to complain that while torture used to entail the accused being eaten by wild animals, now they’re just being burned at the stake and that “probably this is because the majority of them are women.”10 Typical women. So entitled.
I cannot imagine a better reason to try to repress any sexual, lustful thoughts than knowing they would result in horrible torture. Whenever someone begins pompously complaining that civilization is on a downhill slide, because people participate in harmless behaviors like taking selfies or watching reality television, a good response is to stare at them and respond, “You know, we used to burn people for being witches. That’s what people used to do in their spare time.”
So Paracelsus might have been right in considering that the disease could have been caused by sexy thoughts. But only because people may have felt a desperate need to repress their “depravity” for fear of becoming devil worshippers.
Paracelsus was almost certainly wrong about how to cure the outbreak, however. He thought the best treatment, if the condition was brought on by cursing, was to have the dancers make an image of themselves in wax (talented multitasking dancers!), project their thoughts onto the wax doll, and then set the figure on fire. If the disease was brought on by sexy thoughts or frivolity, the dancers should be kept in a dark room and fed only bread and water until they were too sad to have those thoughts anymore. If it was caused by a “corrupt imagination,” they should ingest opium (the basis for heroin) or alcohol.
Those were terrible guesses. They were bad tries. Maybe it was fortunate that his medical observations did not exist in 1518 when Frau Troffea began her dance, or she might well have attempted them.
As it was, the town generally decided that Frau Troffea was being punished by St. Vitus, the patron saint of dancers, who, I guess, just hated some people. In the sixteenth century it was common to curse someone by shouting, “God give you St. Vitus!”11 As far back as the fourteenth century it was known that if you cursed someone that way, “the cursed person developed a fever and St. Vitus’ dance.”12 I’m not saying you should curse people in the name of St. Vitus before they curse you, but I’m not not saying that.
Since the people believed St. Vitus had it out for Frau Troffea, they thought that if she worshipped before him she might be cured. She was, accordingly, driven off to his shrine in a wagon.
I know that I am setting low standards for human behavior here, but it is astonishing that the townspeople agreed they should try to help her rather than burn her as a witch. John Waller notes, “Never were [the sufferers of the dancing plague] hauled before the inquisition,”13 as they might have been if they were thought to be voluntary followers of Satan. That is shocking! The famous Würzburg and Bamberg witch trials in Germany, in which hundreds of people would be burned at the stake for less peculiar behavior, would happen less than a decade later. Go citizens of Strasbourg! You behaved significantly better than the norms of your century!
Was Frau Troffea cured? We have no information. We do know, however, that within a few days thirty people had followed her dancing lead, equally joylessly. Their feet bled until you could see their bones. Their bones were poking through their flesh. People kept dancing until they had heart attacks or collapsed from dehydration or infection (not surprising since their bones were sticking out of their feet). Waller explains: “They almost certainly were delirious. Only in an altered state of consciousness could they have tolerated such extreme fatigue and the searing pain of sore, swollen and bleeding feet. Moreover witnesses consistently spoke of the victims as being entranced, seeing terrifying visions and behaving with wild, crazy abandon.”14
Remarkably, this behavior wasn’t altogether uncommon. The outbreak of 1518 was not even the first instance of the dancing plague. There had been seven similar outbreaks in Europe since 1017. Frau Troffea’s dance was just the first to be widely reported, likely because Strasbourg had a printing press. None of the prior epidemics gave people any clue how to handle the condition. For instance, although we are not absolutely sure this story is true, it was reported that during the outbreak of 1017, the local priest, who did not care for dancing, cursed everyone dancing to continue for an entire year. I am so infatuated with stories of religious officials going around cursing people as though that is a judicious use of power.
In 1247 about one hundred children danced out of the German town of Erfurt, which sounds really cute until you take into account that by the time their parents found them, many were dead. In 1278 two hundred people danced, again, seemingly joylessly, over an unstable bridge, which collapsed, killing all of them. In 1347 dancers in the Rhineland “cried out, like lunatics, that they were dying.”15
Let us be absolutely clear that no one was dancing because they wanted to dance, or because they were involved in some sort of cool cult that necessitated dancing. So it is sort of bizarre that Strasbourg initially responded as though everyone was doing this for fun.
Guildhalls in Strasbourg were opened to provide music as people danced, madly and miserably, to their deaths. A wooden stage was set up specifically for the dancers. Professional dancers were hired to dance alongside the afflicted. Whenever people began to slow their pace or seemed ready to collapse from exhaustion, the musicians played more upbeat music, using fifes or drums. The logic behind this was, according to Waller, that people suspected the disease was caused by “putrefying blood cooking normally moist and cool brains,”16 and it could be cured only if the dancers remained in motion.
Some people joined in without actually being ill. The sixteenth-century chronicler Specklin claimed that there were “many frauds trying to benefit from the situation”17 since the towns’ citizens were donating food and wine to the dance halls. Free food was a big draw if you had survived the scarcity of “the bad year.” The entertainment was over quickly, though. Specklin claimed, of the dance halls and music, that, despite the townspeople’s great efforts and good intentions, “all of this helped not at all.”18 The weaker dancers collapsed from strokes or heart attacks and had to be carried off the dance floor by family members.
Later in the summer of 1518 a notice in Strasbourg read:
There’s been a strange epidemic lately
Going amongst the folk
So that many in their madness
Began dancing
Which they kept up day and night
Without interruption
Until they fell unconscious
Many have died of it19
The chronicle suggests that fifteen people were dying per day.
Realizing that their plan to cure compulsive dancing with more dancing was ineffective, the town authorities decided that the plague had been sent by God as punishment for all their sinful ways. This is notable because they took responsibility as a community, rather than just blaming the afflicted individuals. Gambling and prostitution were outlawed, and anyone who participated in those activities was exiled from the town, though only “for a time.” Instead of providing public dance floors and excellent music, authorities decided that those stricken with the strange plague should stay inside. An official at the time wrote: “As the dancing disease did not want to end, the city council decided, that families should stay in their houses when a member was infected—to make sure that nobody else was infected. If one of their servants was affected, families had to keep them on their expenses somewhere or send them to St. Vitus. It was punished heavily.”20 They actually decreed that you had to take care of people, even lowly servants.
Dancing was also outlawed. The only exception was for “honorable people” who wanted to dance at weddings or “first mass.” However, even those people were firmly instructed “on conscience” not to use tambourines or drums.
A note from the time by Sebastian Brant read: “Sadly at this time a horrible episode arose with sick … dancing persons, which has not yet stopped, Our lord councilors of the XXI turned to the honor of God and forbade, on pain of a fine of 30 shillings, that anyone, n
o matter who, should hold a dance until St. Michael’s Day [September 29] in this city or its suburbs or in its whole jurisdiction. For by so doing they take away the recovery of such persons.”21
For by so doing they take away the recovery of such persons. What a town!
It is lovely to see that all the edicts related to helping the suffering people. The community did not want their fellow neighbors to die and were experimenting on many fronts to help the afflicted. Today we still have outbreaks where we become so fearful for ourselves that we forget all about our neighbors. The people of Strasbourg were ahead of their time in their regard for one another.
What actually seemed to cure the sufferers? The fixation on sending people to the shrine of St. Vitus? Yes, it did! I bet you didn’t see that coming! At least it did according to Specklin’s description. After outlawing all the prostitutes and sinners “for a time,” town authorities “sent many on wagons to St. Vitus [shrine] in Hellensteg, beyond Severne, and others got their own. They fell down dancing before his image. So then a Priest said mass over them, and they were given a little cross and red shoes, on which the sign of the cross had been made in holy oil on both the tops and the soles.”22 The color red might have been selected because in prior plague outbreaks victims had been unable to see or unable to tolerate the sight of the color red. Or it might have been selected because it seemed that their feet were on fire.
If you are interested in artistic responses: yes, the dancing plague is the inspiration for the story-ballet-movie The Red Shoes (1948), about a girl who puts on a pair of red shoes and cannot stop dancing.
Not in this case, though!
After their pilgrimage to the shrine, many of the afflicted simply stopped dancing. They returned home and went back to their daily lives, probably somewhat worse for the wear, and forever afraid of drums and tambourines. Records state that the time at St. Vitus’s shrine “helped many, and they gave a large contribution.”23
It seems remarkable that dancing around a saint’s shrine and wearing red shoes served as an effective cure because, as modern people, we know that diseases are not treated by magic. This isn’t a matter of not having religious faith. It’s a matter of not believing in vengeful saints cursing people and then curing them in exchange for donations to their shrines. Yet in the sixteenth century people really did believe in religious miracles, exorcisms, and transformations, in a way that we simply don’t today. Believing they were being cured by a great power might have been enough to actually cure them. The dancing plague of 1347 was supposedly halted by a priest holding open the mouth of each suffering person and shouting into their mouths, “Praise the true God, Praise the holy Ghost, get thee hence, thou damned and foredoomed spirit.”24 (When your boss suggests you try new ideas and think outside the box, you could consider yelling into your coworkers’ mouths the next time you’re stuck on a work problem.) We could think of this unswerving faith in God and saints as having a kind of placebo effect, which we still experience today.
Strasbourg officials made sure the plague stricken were taken to the highest authority figure available. Okay, the treatment worked because the problem was likely largely the result of a psychological disorder. But as much as their faith in the power of St. Vitus might have cured the dancers, it seems equally valid to say that the sufferers were—wait for it—cured by the power of friendship. Seriously. The people of Strasbourg were exceedingly, abnormally kind to those afflicted. They didn’t burn them at stakes. They didn’t permanently cast them out of the community. Thought and concern went into considering ways to make them healthy again. People cared about them, so much so they used the community’s limited resources on (totally misguided) ideas like hiring professional dancers to hang out and caper alongside the sufferers. They then attempted to limit their own dancing because they were afraid of impeding other town members’ recovery. When you compare this behavior to people abandoning their loved ones in the middle of the night during the bubonic plague, the difference in the level of care is staggering. And this kindness may have been an overwhelming novelty for the sufferers. People were being nice to them, perhaps for the first time in what would have been their likely miserable lives. Waller writes that they might have been cured or at least unlikely to begin dancing again as
many of them had experienced years of neglect, misery, want, and exploitation, but in the previous days or weeks they had been subject to the earnest attentions of civic and religious leaders who would normally have treated them with unmitigated contempt. To many of the alienated and the marginalized, the response of the authorities must have felt deeply gratifying. Reflecting on the assiduity with which Church and government had sought to cure their ills, many were emotionally fortified against a relapse.25
They felt butter.
Can we recover from a disease just by knowing that the people in charge want us to get better? Surely, government authorities should always want everyone to be healthy. Even if you assume government officials are all abject sociopaths, having people dying en masse in your town is bad PR. But it is rare, even today, that people suffering from diseases aren’t demonized. The U.S. government sponsors antismoking ads, which often imply that smokers deserve to get lung cancer because they didn’t quit smoking rather than putting those funds toward researching a cure for lung cancer, the actual enemy. Response to the AIDS crisis was delayed at least in part because those suffering were viewed by some as sinners. Clearly, those diseases take more than human kindness to cure, but there is never a situation where care and attentiveness by the community is a bad thing.
Hysterical outbreaks did not disappear after the sixteenth century. They still occur today. While the science behind them isn’t fully understood, they are often thought to be related to terrible or repressive circumstances—the mind’s confused and disordered attempt to make the conditions bearable. Mass hysteria is mainly associated with major trauma. For instance, Cambodians who survived the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s sometimes developed hysterical blindness. “Seventy percent of the women had their immediate family killed before their eyes,” Professor Patricia Rozee-Koker of Cal State, Long Beach, told the Los Angeles Times when she was studying their vision complaints. “So their minds simply closed down, and they refused to see anymore—refused to see any more death, any more torture, any more rape, any more starvation.”26 Hysterical blindness had been a trope in war movies long before the 1970s. Usually a soldier would see something awful, go blind without any physical cause, and be nursed back to health by the love of a good woman. And though we might sneer at those movies and shout at the screen, “Medicine doesn’t work that way!” I guess … sometimes someone being kind does make a difference to physical health.
In 1962 there was a laughing outbreak at a girls’ school in Tanzania. It began with one girl laughing, then spread to the rest of the classroom, and then the entire school. It spread to at least 217 people. The girls alternated between laughing and crying, and became violent when the teachers demanded they stop. The affected girls would laugh and cry for about sixteen days, then stop, then start again. To this, you might say, “Well, that’s an anomaly. Why would being a teenager in a girls’ school be so psychologically unbearable?” Congratulations on becoming an adult who has utterly forgotten what it was like to be in high school.
Christian F. Hempelmann of Texas A&M, who studied the laughing epidemic, claimed that outbreaks of mass hysteria often begin when “there is an underlying shared stress factor in the population. It usually occurs in a group of people who don’t have a lot of power.”27 Some people say that the outbreak in Tanzania might have occurred because the country had just become independent, and everyone in the community was under a tremendous amount of stress. But there are still instances of the laughing hysteria in Tanzania today. One woman recounted to the program RadioLab that it happened to three girls in her high school class the morning of a math exam.28 One of the girls recovered only when her boyfriend came to stay with her in the ho
spital. If your immediate reaction is that she was faking illness to make a man pay attention, remember that people thought the same of Frau Troffea until she danced her feet off.
And, lest you’re inclined to think, Well, that couldn’t happen here, Waller notes: “Nor is the secular West invulnerable to hysterical fears. In fact, some are virtually endemic. American and to some extent European cultures remain awash with paranoid delusions of alien abduction and flying saucers.”29
In 2012 a group of teenage girls from Le Roy, New York, began to simultaneously develop tics that caused them to twitch uncontrollably. Once the event was labeled as a bout of mass hysteria, it prompted one of their guardians to remark to the New York Times Magazine, “What are we—living in the 1600s?”30 Though the doctors seemed to think the girls’ symptoms were related to stresses in their lives, some did get better when put on antibiotics—which we have as much faith in as sixteenth-century Germans might have had in a shrine. (With good reason. The most terrifying medical problem we’re likely to face in the near future is diseases becoming resistant to antibiotics.) Their doctor admitted to the Times, “It’s hard to distinguish between the drug and the placebo effect.”31
Today it often seems we consider physical wellness to be entirely separate from our emotional state. We like to think that Dr. House on television can be a great doctor despite the fact that he shouts at his patients things like, “You’re barren, like a salt field!” or “So your kids committed suicide—get over it!” But treating patients unkindly does not mean that a doctor is smarter than everyone else; it just means that the doctor is emotionally deficient. It’s perfectly possible to be smarter than everyone else and still be polite and even deferential—women have been doing it for centuries. Often people need the most tenderness when they are ill. Sometimes people actually need kindness to get well.
Get Well Soon Page 6