The Strasbourg Dancing Plague | A Short Documentary | Fascinating Horror

"In the middle of July 1518, seemingly without reason, residents of the French town of Strasbourg began dancing compulsively in the streets..."

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SOCIAL MEDIA

MUSIC:
► "Emotional Aftermath" by Doug Maxwell/Media Right Productions

#Documentary #History #TrueStories

[onixjaded]

“Please help me stop dancing!”
“Here’s some music.”

[DNinja]

Disease: St. Vitus’ Dance


Symptoms: You boogie oogie oogie
till you just can't boogie no more

[beckfreeman]

People in 1518 were wild, what are we doing? Not dancing that's for sure. Smh kids these days

[charlescole]

We can dance when we want to,
We can leave your friends behind.

[nanuq]

No matter how many times I hear about this throughout the years I am always truly baffled. I can't imagine a belief so true that I commit to dancing myself to death. Baffling.

[drunknwisdom]

All they really needed for that fever, was more cowbell.

[tbg]

It could also have been St. Vitus disorder (an actual disease) caused by Streptococcus. It's contagious just with person-to-person contact and could easily have been spread by tainted food. That also might explain why all the cases happened along the river, maybe it carried the bacteria along with it.

It's strange that dancing mania was an uncommon but not unheard of occurrence for a few hundred years and then hasn't happened at all since. I wonder if that's due to belief in St. Vitus being less common (as well as the poor living conditions that lead to mass hysteria in the first place), or if it's due to built-up immunity to the disease, or even improvements in sanitation that made Strep infections less common. It's probably a mystery we'll never truly know the answer to.

[James-gcif]

They say that if you remember the summer of 1518, you weren't really there.

[Spam_]

God.... and I always thought the council in Footloose was being irrational

[jrchmgn.]

People dancing till death
Rihanna: "Please don't stop the music".

[Facieee]

The mind is a wonderful yet dangerous thing

[maureen]

As a kid in the 1960s in NYC my cousin was hospitalized with "St. Vitus Dance". It's a true disease but affects autoimmune deficient people. Also rheumatic fever. She's perfectly fine and perfectly healthy from the 1960s til now, so I suppose it could've been rheumatic fever even in 1966-ish. She's a terrific dancer though... 🤗

[amberswafford]

This story has always fascinated me. I wish there’d have been more record of it. How could you not report on this extensively?

[BrettonFerguson]

"It happened to peasants... It occured in several small villages... It affected settlements all along the Rhine River. The only thing the settlements had in common was a belief system." The only thing they had in common was their belief system? You just said they all lived along the river Rhine, were all peasants, in small villages. So the only four things they had in common was their belief system, they were all German peasants, they all lived in small villages, and they all lived along the Rhine River. Maybe it was something in the water.

[misschief]

They did have something else in common... the river.

[Tarathathewookiee]

Maybe there were three women on a stage singing "I put a spell on you... and now you're mine!!"

[watchgoose]

Sydenham's chorea, also known as chorea minor and historically and occasionally referred to as St Vitus' dance, is a disorder characterized by rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements primarily affecting the face, hands and feet.

[jesusyamatotv]

They were just playtesters for Dance Dance Renaissance.

[zyxaqc]

"What is wrong with these people? Are they ill? Are they possessed?"
"They're groovin'"

[rubym]

"The problem was in their minds. But no less real and no less deadly for that."
Just remember that.