||| FROM HISTORY FACTS |||
The phrase “dance the night away” took on a more literal meaning back in 1518, when as many as 400 people were struck by a “dancing plague” in the city of Strasbourg in modern France. The epidemic began in July with a single woman known as Frau Troffea, who spontaneously began boogying away in the middle of the street.
She danced alone and continuously for an entire week before several dozen others found themselves overcome by the urge to dance as well. By month’s end, the number had grown to several hundred. The mysterious dancing eventually waned, and Strasbourg returned to normalcy in September.
Authorities were concerned by this inexplicable rise in dance fever, though ill-informed physicians attributed the ailment to “hot blood” and suggested people simply needed to dance until they no longer felt the urge. As the weeks went on, several dancers collapsed from exhaustion, and some suffered fatal heart attacks. Locals sought answers, and some feared they had been cursed by St. Vitus, the patron saint of dance.
Many modern historians posit that stress, coupled with the rise of new and untreated diseases such as syphilis, likely induced this mass hysteria. There had been numerous reported outbreaks of “dancing plagues” around the Holy Roman Empire in the preceding 500 years, including a significant one in 1374. Another theory points to a fungus known as ergot, sometimes found on bread. The fungus causes convulsions if consumed, and may have been responsible for the uncontrollable dancing as well as other instances of mass panic.
SOURCE: https://historyfacts.com/arts-culture/fact/dancing-plague-of-1518/
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Social contagions are common among humans. Combined with hubris in the medical field, this has sometimes led to catastrophic outcomes.
Another fascinating example is the fugue epidemic of 1887 (which lasted 22 years) would lead men to fall into a trance-like state. This social contagion was triggered by one man and his doctor but spread to many hundreds of others. The book “Mad Travelers” by Ian Hacking is a good one about this “transient mental illness” as he calls it: ‘an illness that appears at a time and in a place, and later fades away.
The medical industry often plays a role in triggering social contagions. Read “Crazy Like Us” to find some amazing examples. For instance, the trigger for bulimia was its inclusion in the DSM in 1980, and another with the widely publicized struggle Princess Diana had with bulimia in the early 90s.
Another interesting example was the social contagion of “hysteria” created by a doctor (Charcot). His patients produced symptoms of the hysteria he’d invented because he created them in his patients via suggestibility. Then it starts to spread, initially via his lectures, which “infected” other doctors, and then women (primarily upper class women) started to produce the same symptoms as it disseminated in literature. The social contagion ended when Charcot died. Other doctors knew this “hysteria” was absurd, but couldn’t challenge him when he was alive. Once he’d died, all of a sudden people could say, that was nuts! and it ended.
What explains all this is the idea of the “Symptom Pool” — a set of behaviors that are considered socially acceptable to express psychological distress. These “acceptable” behaviors change over time, influenced by medical knowledge, societal norms and cultural factors. Unhappy people unconsciously select symptoms from this pool that are recognized by the medical community and society as legitimate forms of illness, so they get the attention they need (because they are distressed).
Multiple Personality Disorder is an example of a horrific social contagion that medical professionals got caught up in, in the late 20th century, and resulted in hundreds of thousands of false accusations and many destroyed families. This social contagion raged after the book Sybil was released, followed by the movie in 1976, to the late 1990s when multiple lawsuits were won that brought the social contagion epidemic to an end.
Psychiatry, while it can be helpful, also contributes to these social contagions. “At least once each decade, psychiatry is swept up by an enthusiasm for fundamentally incoherent practice, and then must spend at least ten years subsequently digging out of the troubles that this practice produced. … The repeated combination of these elements proves how all too often the discipline of psychiatry has been the captive of culture, to the detriment of everyone.” — Paul McHugh
Fascinating, indeed… and I don’t know anyone else who’s read Hacking’s books. “Rewriting the Soul” documented the explosion in diagnosed cases of multiple personality disorder post-Sybil; the condition (according to Hacking) was included in one edition of the DSM at which point the diagnoses started ramping up. Maybe something similar to the increase in “cases” of autism that were blamed on the thimersol used to preserve vaccines in years past. I heartily recommend both books which are both quite readable and, I think, still in print.