Hundreds die in 'dancing plague' in France

- Gochar-Agochar-Devesh Mehta

- The dance epidemic, which started in July 1518, abruptly stopped in September 1518. The woman he started with, named Frau Trophy, has mysteriously disappeared

How many mysterious events have taken place in Du Nia which have not been solved despite the passage of centuries. One such mysterious event took place five hundred years ago in which four hundred people died in a frenzy of constant dancing. It is quite natural for people to start dancing at the time of laughter, but this ghana became not only a mental illness, but an epidemic. It is also known in history as the Dancing Plague of 1914. It became a curse not only for one person or community but for the whole city.

In the 16th century, in July 1917, a woman named Frau Trophy (Khachik Krkich), living in Strasbourg, Europe, suddenly started dancing one afternoon while she was at home. He felt as if some invisible force was trying to force him to do so. At that time no one was singing, no musical instrument was playing, no one was even giving rhythm, he started dancing even though there were no circumstances that made him want to have fun. Rather than dance, she came out of the house and onto the public road. Even the people who had gathered on the street to watch her dance began to dance as if she had contracted a strange dementia. Hearing about this, his family and acquaintances rushed there to stop Frau Trophy from dancing, but they all fell victim to a strange disease.

The disease then spread from one area to another. Instead, it spread throughout the city. Everywhere you look today, the tide of protectionist sentiment is flowing. It involved people with heart disease, anxiety, and disability. People who danced for hours on end began to die. Initially 4 people died but people did not stop. After dancing for hours, it stops for a while but starts dancing again after a little bit of energy is transmitted. The madness of her dancing like this was going on from July to September! About four hundred people died during the entire dance epidemic. The administration had tried so hard to stop this dance frenzy that even if they set fire to the roads, people would not stop dancing and go to their homes. Sometimes he would go home to eat, drink or sleep, but he would come back on the road and start dancing. This was a form of mass hysteria, said Evan Crosier, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh. During this period it spread not only to Europe but also to some countries in Africa and Asia.

This phenomenon of mass dancing, which is widespread in Europe, is not new. One such major event took place in the German village of Kolbigak on Christmas Eve in 1061. This type of dancing mania was called Tarantism in Italy. In Italy people believed that the bite of a tarantula spider made people dance uncontrollably. People in the Middle Ages also believed that the main cause of this dancing plague was demonic possession. People who became addicted to the devil became victims of this 'dance disease' and eventually died.

Some even believed that the Strasbourg dance in France was a pandemic-dancing plague. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, witchcraft was widely practiced in Europe. So when the dancing plague broke out, most people believed that there was a shadow of a witch or ghost on the dancers.

According to another opinion, these people may have consumed fungus or psycho-chemical substances, which is why such an incident took place. Ergotamine is the main psychoactive product of arugate fungi. The drug is structurally linked to the lysergic acid diethylamine (LSD-2). This is the substance from which LSD-O was originally mixed. The same fungus was blamed for another such behavior discrepancy, including Salem Witch Tiles. However, experts say that such an unusual behavior or delusion cannot arise from arugate alone unless it is associated with opiate.

Psychologically, this is a psychogenic movement disorder that occurs in mass hysteria or psychiatric illness.

An example is also observed, in which many people suddenly display the same kind of strange behavior. Such bizarre behavior spreads rapidly and widely as an epidemic. Historian John Waller, in his book A Time to Dance, A Time to Die - The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1917, covers the whole incident in full detail. Eugene Beckman also mentions this phenomenon in Religious Dance in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine. Timothy Jones, a professor at Vanderbilt Medical College, speculated that the seasons had changed dramatically in Europe and France during the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Crops were often destroyed by extreme heat and drought. Sometimes hail with heavy rain. Thus the rage of the seasons caused great trouble and many physical and mental ailments like syphilis, leprosy, eye problems, disability etc. arose. This led to an increase in the number of deaths. For some reason religious faith would have led them to dance and would have died rather than dancing because they were physically weak. Historians estimate that the incidence of dancing plague increased sevenfold in Europe during 1914.

The dance epidemic, which began in July 1917, abruptly stopped in September 1917. The woman he started with, named Frau Trophy, has mysteriously disappeared. She was nowhere to be found alive or dead. No one has been able to say exactly what caused the outbreak of the so-called dancing plague, which claimed nearly 200 lives.