Global Warning | 3 January 2009

Reading an account by the historian John Waller of the Dancing Plague in Alsace in 1518 recently, I could not help but notice the interesting but perhaps incomplete parallels with our own time.

Economic conditions in Strasbourg were dire in 1518 when a woman called Frau Troffea started dancing in public and continued for days on end until she was exhausted and had damaged her feet severely. Several hundred people soon joined her; the madness was collective.

What accounted for this collective madness? Some have suggested that it was caused by ergotism, a condition brought about by an ergot-producing fungus that spreads on mouldy grain; but, while ergot does cause visual hallucinations that send people mad, and a burning sensation in the extremities that might make them hop about for a while, the gangrene of the fingers and toes that is a prominent symptom of ergotism was never described among the sufferers of the dancing plague.

No, it was distress that did it.

The level of suffering in Strasbourg’s poorer districts was highly conducive to someone losing touch with reality. High levels of psychological distress significantly increase the likelihood of an individual slipping, or perhaps escaping, into the trance state.

It is possible, also, that malnutrition contributed its mite; and if history shows anything, it shows that trance-like states are contagious.

Let us now look at the condition of our own malnourished pizza- and burger-fed youth. It is obvious from a casual inspection of this most unattractive of human populations that its greatest ambition, the desire of its heart, is to achieve a state of trance or oblivion, as long and as often as possible. They admit it openly. Some use alcohol, some use drugs, some use dance, and some use a combination of them all, to achieve Frau Troffea’s state of self-extinction; clearly, the trance into which they fall, or rather desire to enter, is epidemic in nature.