July 14, 1518

Shake the hips, tap the feet, bob the head this way and that: one morning, Frau Troffea began dancing like a lunatic to rhythms in her head that only she could hear. She sweat profusely through the copious fabrics of her dress, and her feet wouldn’t let up until they became bloodied and raw and she collapsed from exhaustion. The next morning, she got up and started dancing all over again. Her neighbors began staring in wonder at her bizarre, ridiculous behavior. Her antics began to draw a crowd.

Frau Troffea wasn’t a wealthy woman. Her Strasbourg street—in an otherwise prosperous town given its choice location on a tributary of the Rhine and at the foothills of the Alps—was a bleak one, replete with stenches the likes of which would make a modern wanderer wretch in horror and sympathy. Death, filth and fear of bubonic plague would have been constant companions. Her people were all the more impoverished by the looming threat of famine wrought by three years of ill weather.

Adding to the anxiety were those clergymen—guardians of souls—who from their cloistered palaces whoremongered, drank and leveraged their economic and food security to keep the underclasses, Frau Troffea’s lot, in a state of privation and debt. With such shoddy shepherding, the poor of Strasbourg were likely going to hell when they died. It’s no wonder the Reformation was right around the bend.

On the third day, this mad dancing had become contagious. Thirty people were frolicking away and with no signs of slowing down. The city fathers were starting to get concerned. This was turning into a mass hysteria event; specifically, it was an instance of what medical historians refer to as “choreomania.” Day by day, the frenzy increased. After a week people started dying of exhaustion-induced heart attacks and strokes.

At their wit’s end, the city fathers began experimenting with mass treatments for the mass hysteria. First, they built a stage in the communal horse pen, corralled the bacchants into the enclosure and hired musicians to spur on the dancing in the hope that they would get it out of their system. This didn’t work, for the music only encouraged more dancing.

Then the whorehouses were shut down. These being superstitious times, a sense of holy terror had emerged: is God cursing our community for malfeasance? St. Vitus, a thousand year-gone martyr with a nearby shrine and a propensity for dancing, was said to have cursed the community. No more whores, they said, at least until the dancing stops. Soon after, music was banned; especially that of tambourines or drums, which was regarded as the most conducive to dancing. String music in homes and music for mass was alright.

The choreomania continued through the summer. By the time they drove the remaining dancers to that shrine of St. Vitus at the end of September, over 400 people had been infected and scores had died. The dancing plague subsided soon thereafter, fizzled out in a community exhausted, perplexed and shaken.

Today

It’s amazing what can happen to a people under a great deal of stress. Failing harvests, a corrupt clergy, the looming terror of an infidel Ottomans making inroads into southeastern Europe, were all great causes of concern. Strasbourg, 1518 was a community marked by uncertainty, anxiety and existential dread.

We, too, live in uncertain times. The leadership is venal and the corruption unhinged. In this country, wealth inequality is reaching historic highs. People no longer see avenues toward the material advancement that was so much a part of our national experience. Polarized and tribalized, decline is the status quo. Environmental degradation runs rampant and there are rumors of nuclear war.

The inevitable question arises: are we overdue for some choreomania?

John Waller, who wrote The Dancing Plague, a masterful account of the events of 1518, does not think so. “If you look at these episodes of mass motor hysteria,” he says, “they tend to involve a widely held belief system.” What enables them is twofold: the vast majority of people being in the same boat—united in poverty and desperation, say—and that same majority being enjoined to the same belief system—like the Christian doctrine of the late Middle Ages, which, beyond answering to the Almighty with its universal philosophy of past, present and future, was a bedrock of social order.

In the United States of today—rife though it may be with religious fundamentalism—there is no sense of the cohesion that mass motor hysteria requires. There are too many ways to relieve the pressure of anxiety. If we don’t like the world around us, we can do something to change it. “There are far more outlets,” Waller says when comparing today to 1518. “They can protest, they can engage in separatist movements, they can engage in different kinds of dissident movements, they can club together in a thousand ways and unify in opposition.”

The Middle Ages were a different time: “There weren’t many ways in which you could be different and not draw the attention of the church and state.”

6-7…

It started with “Doot Doot (6 7),” a song by the drill rapper Skrilla, before being compounded with hand motions used by 6’7” Charlotte Hornets point guard LaMelo Ball, and, finally, amplified by a viral video of a Kentucky child. In 2025, the children of the world went quite mad as mention of the numbers “6-7” became bafflingly risible in classrooms and youth-oriented spaces, first in the United States and then internationally. Say what you will, this country is still a cultural superpower.

There are striking similarities between children today and the lower class residents of 16th century Strasbourg. Both are united in an essential powerlessness and a general ignorance which makes them superstitious. The cohesion of their lots and suffering is striking. A child in today’s Detroit will have these fundamental things in common with its counterpart in Delhi, Doha or Dunhuang.

But was “6-7” a mass hysteria event? Waller doesn’t think so. “I suppose it was an example of mass irritation.” And certainly, the internet will have a role to play in such mass events. “If these kinds of events are possible now, it is hard to imagine the internet not being a part of it,” the historian adds.

But the internet is a shallow place.

The power of “6-7” was diffused as soon as adults started using it. The joke became neutered and unfunny. The hysteria passed.

But one day soon, these children will grow up. Certainly, the pressures adding to society’s sense of anxiety show no signs of abating in the near future. Perhaps the time will soon come when choreomania again overtakes the people of the land. With the frenzy spurred on by the internet, they will be dancing in the streets, their feet will become bloodied, people will die, and the carnage will be harrowing.