Dancing Mania

Dancing mania, also known as dancing plague, choreomania, St. John's Dance or St. Vitus' Dance, was a phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, in which groups of people, sometimes thousands at a time, danced erratically until, allegedly, they collapsed from exhaustion and injuries, and sometimes died. One of the first major outbreaks struck Aachen in 1374 and quickly spread across Europe, with a particularly notable outbreak in Strasbourg in 1518. Well documented in contemporary reports yet poorly understood at the time, remedies were based on guesswork, and musicians were often brought in on the belief that music would treat the mania, a tactic that sometimes backfired by encouraging more people to join in. Modern scholars have no consensus on its cause, with theories ranging from religious cults to a stress-relief response to poverty, and it is speculated to have been a mass psychogenic illness, physical symptoms with no known physical cause spreading through a group as a form of social influence.