Choreomania: dance and disease
- Born December 24, 1020 Eighteen citizens started singing and dancing uncontrollably around the parish church, and the Christmas Day Mass was suspended. This phenomenon is called choreomania and also chorea, a disease of the dance or dance of Saint Vincent, as some believed that the disease was caused by the curse of this saint.
What happened in Berbung is one of the oldest descriptions of choreomania, but not the oldest. The first mention of choreomania dates back to the seventh century. However, the most notable manifestations occurred in the Lower Middle Ages, many of them in Germany. In 1237 a group of children danced and jumped on a 20 km road between Erfurt and Arnstadt. In 1278, about 200 people met dancing on a bridge over the Mosa River, until its derrib. One of the most serious dance epidemics began in Aachen on St. John's Day of 1374 and spread to Flanders, Italy and Luxembourg. 1518 started in July in Strasbourg: A woman named Frau Troffea started dancing in the street, in four days she was joined 33 dantzaris, reached 400 in one month and many of them died from a heart attack in the head. Many thought that helping the sick musically was going to cure them, but most of the time the symptoms worsened.
Since the mid-17th century, there have been few references to the disease; the exception is the outbreak of Madagascar in 1840.
Experts do not agree on explaining the phenomenon. One of the hypotheses is that ergotism, that is, branches began to dance poisoned. Encephalitis, epilepsy and typhus are also mentioned. But many, more than a health problem, consider choreomania a social phenomenon. Outbreaks occurred in difficult times, after poor harvests or pests. Some of them have been linked to religious sects. C. in 1997 Hetherington and R. Munro blamed the confusion for “shared stress.”
In Italy, a similar phenomenon was called tarantism, since it was believed that the passion for dance was due to the maturity of spiders; the so-called tarantela was born to cure tarantism. R.E. According to Bartholomew, tarantism and the healing of evil “allowed the population to adopt liberating attitudes prohibited at that time. That is, in hard times it was an opportunity to flush the bowels and relieve stress. And that's very contagious.
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