Dance epidemics

In antiquity, Europe suffered from many epidemics, but there was a very particular one that was well known and documented by multiple sources because it spread through several countries and lasted for years, one of them is known as the dance of San Juan, in July 1374 a A group of men and women were seen dancing hand in hand in a wheel dance at the village on Chapel Island on the German-French border.

The dancers appeared to be in a state of delirium and continued to dance until they collapsed complaining of chest tightness and difficulty breathing, The writings say that while they danced they had hallucinations, some claimed to feel that they were submerged in rivers of blood, which forced them to jump higher and higher while they danced.

Italy had its own brand of dancing epidemic, it's called tarantism, it's supposed to occur when someone is bitten or stung by an arachnid such as a tarantula or scorpion and manifests itself with tremors in the extremities that are alleviated only by dancing, dancing and drinking large amounts of wine.

Basically putting together a party, curiously it has never been proven that the bite of an arachnid in the region produces these symptoms, this tells us that they are completely psychosomatic, probably the people who were bitten by these bugs panicked, that explains the tremors and having heard that the remedy was to dance, since they had no choice but to rock the boat.

Unlike the dance epidemics of the countries of the North, in Italy the outbreaks of tarantism lasted until modern times, the most recent case occurred in 1959, it is even part of the culture of the region with the traditional dance called tarantella.

The last great dance epidemic in Europe happened in July 1518, it is known as the dance plague of San Vito and it is the only one where there is a record of patient zero, it was a woman named Trofea, this woman began to dance from the nothing on the streets of present-day Strasbourg France, and a week later more than 20 people had already joined him.

By August, the outbreak already had 400 infected, but not everything was dancing and fun, some people dancing were violent and it bothered them that people would see them without participating in the dance, so they subdued the gossipers and forced them to dance with them When the nobles saw this, who were obviously outside of all these mundane things of the town, they worried because when a good part of the lower class, mainly peasants, spends their time dancing in a trance without working, it affects their wealth.

The “solutions” were not sensible at all, they ranged from promoting dancing to banning music, but people continued to dance even with injured feet until some cardiac arrest victims collapsed, then they began massing the infected to dedicated Saint Vitus, a Sicilian child martyr who was believed to protect people from dancing epidemics that were apparently more recurrent than the plague and holy remedy, literally, little by little people were relieved through religious suggestion and mass exorcisms.

One explanation for these outbreaks of collective hysteria is in the intoxication by fungi in cereals that people consumed, this is called ergotism and produces symptoms similar to those of these epidemics such as hallucinations and the inability to stop moving arms and legs, it is It is possible that some people were intoxicated with ergotism while others were infected by seeing them through their management. The mind is very powerful.

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