The Dancing Plague: Why Every Fix Made It Worse

In the summer of 1518 a woman in Strasbourg started dancing in the street and couldn't stop. Within a month, hundreds had joined her. So the town council built them a stage and hired a band. For centuries, Europe kept catching dancing fevers - and every time, the people in charge had a fix. Priests tried to cast the devil out. A convent threatened its biting nuns with a beating. Doctors said hot blood, so dance it off. Italy decided a spider bite needed a fiddler. Councillor Grubb and his runner Bones try every fix in turn - then the two answers historians give for what was really going on. Topics covered: the dancing plague of 1518, Frau Troffea, Strasbourg, dancing mania, the 1374 Rhine outbreak at Aachen and Liege, Saint Vitus's dance, the biting nuns, tarantism and the tarantella, mass psychogenic illness, the ergot theory, John Waller. 0:00 Build the Stage Bigger 0:40 The Towns That Danced 2:36 The Nuns Who Bit 3:37 One Woman Starts Dancing 4:50 The Stage and the Band 5:49 Music Banned 6:01 The Red Shoes 6:43 The Spider Dance 7:49 So What Was Going On? 10:06 What Would You Do? #History #Medieval #DancingPlague Sources John Waller, A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 (Icon Books, 2009) John Waller, "A forgotten plague: making sense of dancing mania", The Lancet 373 (2009) John Waller, "Dancing plagues and mass hysteria", The Psychologist (British Psychological Society, 2009) Ned Pennant-Rea, "The Dancing Plague of 1518", The Public Domain Review (2018) National Geographic, "What caused Strasbourg's dancing plague of 1518?" Smithsonian Magazine, "A Strange Case of Dancing Mania Struck Germany Six Centuries Ago Today" (2016) History Hit, "Medieval Raves: The Bizarre Phenomenon of 'Saint John's Dance'" J. F. C. Hecker, The Epidemics of the Middle Ages (trans. Babington, 1844) Wellcome Collection, "Southern Italy's centuries-long dancing mania" Wikipedia, "Dancing plague of 1518"; "Dancing mania"; "Tarantism"; "Tarantella" New history episodes every week. This video was researched, written, and narrated with AI assistance, based on the published historical sources listed above.