The Dancing Plague of 1518

In the summer of 1518, a woman stepped into a Strasbourg street and began to dance—and didn’t stop. Within days, dozens of people were staggering and convulsing beside her in the heat, some dancing until they collapsed from exhaustion. City leaders watched a crowded market square turn into one of Europe’s strangest public-health crises.

This Time and Tales Podcast episode walks through Strasbourg’s Dancing Plague from the first recorded dancer to the city’s escalating response—physicians, bans on public dancing, appeals to St. Vitus—and into the modern debates over what really happened: ergot poisoning, mass psychogenic illness, or some mix of fear, famine, faith, and imitation that spiraled out of control.

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Sources:

• John Waller – A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 – John Waller – scholarly work on the 1518 Strasbourg outbreak (journal articles/abstracts)
• Public Domain Review – “The Dancing Plague of 1518”
• The Guardian – feature coverage of the Strasbourg dancing mania
• History.com – “The Dancing Plague of 1518”
• Wikipedia – “Dancing Plague of 1518”; “Strasbourg”