Stories of mass hysteria

Few things are as healthy as dancing, you do cardiovascular exercise, while you produce hormones that make you feel good, and incidentally it's fun, we do it to live together, to celebrate, and to forget our problems, but you know that it is not healthy to dance without stopping, more than to eat and sleep or faint from exhaustion for days, weeks or months.

In the United States they do dance marathons that at least have a prize in between, dancing and continuing to dance when it's no longer fun is not something you want to do, unless you suffer from a disease, an epidemic called choreomania.

Choreomania is a type of collective hysteria, a mass psychogenic and sociogenic disease, that is, it originates from a mental illness combined with the social context and requires a group of people to detonate and become an epidemic.

Choreomania manifests as an irresistible compulsion to dance, where he cannot stop and continues dancing indefinitely only stopping to eat drink and sleep or pass out from exhaustion, this behavior spreads to other people who observe it and soon you have a lot of people dancing a medieval version, this happened frequently in Europe during the Middle Ages.

The first records of a dance epidemic are from the year 1027, on Christmas night outside the Calvik church, a town in Germany, a group of 18 people who were drinking, dancing and singing interrupted the Christmas mass with their merriment, and the priest came out to curse them to dance and sing non-stop for a year until the following Christmas as punishment and the 18 people actually continued dancing and singing against their will for days.

Until two pious bishops freed them from the curse after they slept for three days and recovered except for four people who died, another story tells that in the year 1237 a group of 100 children escaped from their homes dancing from the town of Erfurt to Arnstadt (traveling 21 km) also in present-day Germany and when they arrived they collapsed exhausted, then their parents picked them up and took them home where some died of exhaustion.

These stories do not sound very credible, one is from almost 1000 years ago and tells of priests who place and remove curses and the other bears a suspicious resemblance to the story of the Pied Piper of Hameln, which tells of a mysterious young man with a flute who comes to a village to offer his pest control services, luring the town's rats with the music of his flute and when the inhabitants refuse to pay for his services the piper uses the flute to take the children away as he claimed. did with the rats.

It turns out that this story is based on true events, someone kidnapped 130 children from the town of Hamelin in 1284, only 47 years after the other children who escaped from their homes to dance to the other town, if music was used to take the children, and if they were dancing is not very clear, but it would not be the last time that people left their towns en masse to the sound of a rhythm.

One explanation for these outbreaks of collective hysteria is in the intoxication by fungus in cereals that people consumed, this is called ergotism and produces symptoms similar to those of these epidemics such as hallucinations and the inability to stop moving arms and legs, it is possible that some people were intoxicated with ergotism While others were infected by seeing them through their management, the mind is very powerful.

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