The summer heat came to Strasbourg the way bad luck always
comes—slowly at first, then all at once.
It was July 14th, 1518, a week before the feast of Saint
Mary Magdalene, and the city along the Rhine had that sticky, breathless
quality it sometimes got in deep summer, the kind of heat that pressed down on
you like a hand on the back of your neck. The kind that made you feel watched.
The air smelled of tallow and river mud and the sweet-sour perfume of bodies in
close quarters, which is to say it smelled exactly like the medieval city it
was—alive and festering and utterly, almost beautifully, unaware of what was
coming.
Frau Troffea stepped out of her house that afternoon.
And she began to dance.
There was no music. No celebration. No particular reason
that anyone could see, including Frau Troffea herself, who wore her plain
household apron and the white linen cap of an ordinary woman going about her
ordinary life. She hadn’t planned to dance. You could tell that from her face—her
face showed nothing that could be mistaken for joy. It showed, instead, the
particular expression of a person watching their own hands do something they
had not asked them to do.
Her skirt swirled. Her feet kept moving. Her husband came to
the door and watched, and the first thing he did was nothing at all, because
sometimes the mind simply refuses what the eyes insist upon. He watched her the
way a man watches a lantern fall toward dry hay—with that frozen, useless sort
of horror that accomplishes nothing.
She danced straight through the day.
The shadows lengthened. The mist came off the river and
swallowed what was left of the sun, turning the alley soft and gray. And
Troffea kept dancing—kept moving—in that spastic, lurching way that wasn’t
beautiful, had never been beautiful, was the opposite of beautiful. Her shoes
darkened with blood around the soles. Her linen cap sagged with sweat. She
danced until her legs simply quit, until she folded to the ground the way a
scarecrow folds when the wind gets tired of it.
She slept.
And then she woke, and started again.
By the third day, crowds had gathered the way crowds always
do when something terrible is happening slowly enough to watch—merchants and
priests and nuns and the nobility of the city, all pressed together in a
fellowship of morbid curiosity that cuts across every social boundary. They did
not help her. Of course they did not help her. What could any of them have
done?
Some said she was possessed. The devil has taken her,
they said to each other, nodding, relieved to have a name for it. Paracelsus
himself—Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, the German-Swiss physician and
alchemist who would later write up her case in his 1531 manuscript Opus
Paramirum and go on to reshape Renaissance medicine—wrote that a pagan
spirit called Mager had gotten into her. That this spirit had particular taste
for women, who were, he explained with the confidence of a man who had never
once questioned himself, possessed of naturally weaker minds and morals. The Malleus
Maleficarum, that notorious 1486 witch-hunting handbook that had been
conveniently reprinted just the year before, agreed: it was women’s insatiable
carnal lust, the authors insisted, that opened the door to demons.
Troffea danced.
On the sixth day, city officials loaded her onto a cart—carefully,
the way you’d load something dangerous—and sent her thirty miles into the
Vosges Mountains to a shrine dedicated to Saint Vitus in Saverne. A local
nobleman named Andreas Drachenfels had concluded, to his credit, that this was
an illness rather than simple madness. The decision had taken six days. Six
days of watching a woman dance herself toward death before anyone in a position
of authority decided to do something about it.
The cart ride took a full day over bad roads.
It didn’t matter.
Because by then, the thing had already spread.
---
That’s the part that kept the scholars up at night, five
centuries later. That’s the part that lives in the marrow of the story like a
splinter you can’t quite find.
Within days of Troffea’s first step out of her door, more
than thirty people had joined her in the streets. Within weeks the number had
climbed to somewhere around four hundred. In a 2009 article for The Lancet,
historian John Waller—a professor at Michigan State who’d spent years piecing
the outbreak together like a man reassembling a shattered mirror—reported that
the frantic, nonstop exertion killed at least fifteen people outright. Their
hearts simply gave out. Their bodies used themselves up.
The plague spread exactly the way the real plagues spread,
the ones that came with black swellings and fever. It moved through contact. It
moved through proximity. It moved through watching.
The victims were not enjoying themselves. That’s the part
people always get wrong when they imagine it, when they picture some strange
medieval festival gone too far, some excessive celebration of life. The victims
were not celebrating. Waller, drawing on contemporary city council reports
preserved in the Bulletin de la Société pour la Conservation des Monuments
Historiques d'Alsace, made that very clear: they expressed fear and
despair.
They wanted to stop. Every single one of them wanted
desperately to stop, and their bodies simply would not let them. Their faces
wore the expressions of people watching themselves from a great distance,
powerless, exhausted, terrified. Pieter Bruegel the Elder caught it perfectly
in his 1564 engraving—The Epileptic Women of Meulebeeck—the dazed,
pained look of souls that have been turned loose from their moorings, that are
staring out at a world they can still see but can no longer reach.
---
The explanations came, as explanations always do, clustered
around the edges of the thing they couldn’t quite touch.
The supernatural argument was the first to arrive and the
easiest to dismiss, though it took a few centuries. Curses. Demons. The
particular vulnerability of women to spiritual contamination. These were the
answers of people who had no other tools in their kit, and you couldn’t
entirely blame them.
The ergot theory arrived later, wearing the costume of
science. Ergot is a fungus—Claviceps purpurea, if you want the Latin—that
colonizes damp rye, and it produces ergotamine, which is a psychotropic
compound chemically related to LSD. The millers of Alsace had noticed that the
wooden spouts in their granaries had been warped and distorted by moisture,
which is never a good sign, and the working theory was that the region’s bread
had been heavily contaminated. Ergotamine can cause severe delusions. It can
cause twitching and violent, involuntary spasms. It is, in high enough doses,
fully capable of triggering mass hallucinations that ripple through a
population like a stone rippling through water.
But Waller wasn’t buying it.
“Two additional reasons to dismiss the ergotism hypothesis,”
he wrote. “First, it is unlikely that people would react in the exact same
bizarre way to ergot poisoning. Second, while ergot can cause delusions and
convulsions, it much more commonly leads to reduced blood supply to the
extremities, resulting in horrible burning sensations, gangrene, and often
agonizing death.”
Ivan Crozier, a historian of medicine at the University of
Edinburgh, put it even more directly: ergot causes hallucinations, he noted. It
doesn’t give people the energy to dance for days.
And that was the thing, wasn’t it. That was always the
thing. The sheer duration of it. The terrible, inexhaustible,
machine-like duration.
---
Here is what Strasbourg looked like in the summer of
1518, because you cannot understand the what without first understanding the
where and the when and the why.
The city had been eating itself for years.
Bitter winters had come one after another, the kind that
killed livestock and cracked frozen ground so hard it couldn’t be worked in
spring. Then scorching, drought-ridden summers had followed, the kind that
burned whatever the winters had left. The crops failed. The crops kept failing.
And in the spaces left by failed crops came the diseases—smallpox and syphilis
and leprosy and the terrifying “English sweat,” which swept through populations
the way fire sweeps through dry grass.
The social fabric didn’t just fray. It tore.
The city hospital, built to house a hundred poor retirees,
was crammed with more than five hundred patients, many of them children. The
orphanage strained at its walls. Peter Wickgram, the cathedral preacher,
recorded that by 1518 the hospital alone was caring for three hundred orphaned
children. Historian Paul Adam, writing in Charité et Assistance en Alsace au
Moyen Age, drew on Wickgram’s own calculations to estimate more than 2,200
people surviving on alms that year—entirely separate from the eight hundred
permanent residents already packed into the orphanage and the hospital.
Parents brought their children to the orphanage door and
left them there because they could not feed them. Parents—and this is the part
of the record that hits like a fist, that you read and then read again because
surely you’ve misunderstood—parents in those desperate, famine-stripped years strangled
their infants and threw the bodies into the River Ill, so that their older
children might have a marginally better chance at survival. Wickgram recorded
it. Adam cited it. The city kept the records.
This is the world Frau Troffea stepped out into on July
14th, 1518.
---
Waller’s ultimate argument—the one that emerged from years
of archival work and the grim arithmetic of misery—was this: the Dancing Plague
was not a curse. It was not a fungus. It was not any one identifiable pathogen
or compound or spiritual force.
It was the mind breaking.
It was the body turning itself inside out because the inside
had become unbearable.
When modern patients present with identical symptoms—sudden,
involuntary motor dysfunction, uncontrollable movement, dissociation from the
body’s actions—and you run the blood tests and the EEGs and the MRIs and the
PET scans, you find nothing. No infection. No lesions. No structural damage of
any kind. What you find, when you dig into the history, is trauma. Depression.
Abuse. A life that the nervous system has finally, comprehensively, decided it
cannot continue to process in normal fashion. Clinicians call it conversion
disorder—a name that is clinical and bloodless and does almost nothing to
convey the sheer horror of watching your own hands do what you haven’t asked
them to do while your face arranges itself into an expression of fear and
despair.
Per Fink, Morten Steen Hansen, and Lene Søndergaard
published a study in Psychosomatics in 2005 finding that roughly 35% of
patients referred to neurology clinics suffered from symptoms with no clear
medical basis. One to two percent exhibited motor or sensory dysfunction driven
entirely by psychological distress.
In a city of starving, traumatized, grief-drenched people,
watching each other die of cold and disease and the simple mathematics of
insufficient bread—in a city where mothers had begun throwing their infants
into the river—the number who broke, who converted their unendurable inner
lives into spectacular, terrible outer motion, was around four hundred.
And the disease was the watching.
That’s always how mass psychogenic illness works, has always
worked, will always work—it is contagious the way fear is contagious, the way
yawning is contagious, the way the sight of someone else’s terror is
contagious. You watch a person do something wrong with their body in a context
of maximum social stress, and something ancient in you—something that predates
medicine and science and rational thought—says: I recognize that. That’s
what it looks like when the terrible thing happens. The terrible thing is
happening.
And then the terrible thing happens.
---
Frau Troffea came home from Saint Vitus’s shrine, or she
didn’t. The records don’t say. She passed through history like most people do—briefly
and at the edges, visible for a moment in the terrible specificity of her
suffering, and then gone.
But for six days in July 1518 she stood in a narrow alley
just off a market street in Strasbourg, in her soaking apron and her ruined
shoes, with her face arranged in an expression of fear and despair, and she
danced with a frenzy that defied all reason.
And the city watched.
And slowly, then quickly, the city began to dance with her.
The heat pressed down. The river ran past. The orphans
waited in their overcrowded rooms.
And four hundred souls went out into the streets and kept
moving, kept moving, long past the point where any of them had anything
left—
Because that, when you strip everything else away, is what
human beings have always done with what is unendurable.
We keep moving.
We keep moving until we can’t.
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