In the summer of 1518, Strasbourg faced an emergency unlike any ordinary epidemic. Residents began dancing in public for prolonged periods, apparently unable to stop despite exhaustion, pain, hunger, and collapse. The outbreak lasted for weeks, drew an official response from the city council, and became linked in local belief to the punishment of Saint Vitus.

The best-known account begins with a woman remembered as Frau Troffea, though the details of her first day come through chronicles and later reconstructions rather than a surviving eyewitness record written in the street. What is more firmly established is that Strasbourg authorities treated the dancing as a serious civic crisis. Physicians were consulted. Spaces for dancing were arranged. Musicians were hired. When that approach appeared to worsen the disturbance, the city restricted public dancing and music. Sufferers were reportedly taken to a shrine associated with Saint Vitus.

Later accounts claimed that hundreds participated and that dancers died at alarming rates. The surviving evidence supports severe distress and official intervention, but not a precise number of dancers or deaths. Modern explanations include ergot poisoning from contaminated rye, religious trance, social contagion, and mass psychogenic illness shaped by famine, disease, fear, and cultural expectations. Five centuries later, the central question remains: what could make a group of people appear to lose control of their bodies together—and why did that distress take the form of dance?

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YES OR NO: Was the Strasbourg outbreak mainly a form of mass psychogenic illness???????