The Black Death, and The Dancing ManiaHecker, J. F. C. (Justus Friedrich Carl)
History
The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania
Hecker, J. F. C. (Justus Friedrich Carl)
Black Death; Chorea, Epidemic; Epidemics
they remained, for the rest of the year, exempt from any further attack,
after having thus, by dancing and raving for three hours, satisfied an
irresistible demand of nature. There were at that period two chapels in
the Breisgau visited by the St. Vitus's dancers; namely, the Chapel of
St. Vitus at Biessen, near Breisach, and that of St. John, near
Wasenweiler; and it is probable that in the south-west of Germany the
disease was still in existence in the seventeenth century.
However, it grew every year more rare, so that at the beginning of the
seventeenth century it was observed only occasionally in its ancient
form. Thus in the spring of the year 1623, G. Horst saw some women who
annually performed a pilgrimage to St. Vitus's chapel at Drefelhausen,
near Weissenstein, in the territory of Ulm, that they might wait for
their dancing fit there, in the same manner as those in the Breisgau did,
according to Schenck's account. They were not satisfied, however, with a
dance of three hours' duration, but continued day and night in a state of
mental aberration, like persons in an ecstasy, until they fell exhausted
to the ground; and when they came to themselves again they felt relieved
from a distressing uneasiness and painful sensation of weight in their
bodies, of which they had complained for several weeks prior to St.
Vitus's Day.
After this commotion they remained well for the whole year; and such was
their faith in the protecting power of the saint, that one of them had
visited this shrine at Drefelhausen more than twenty times, and another
had already kept the saint's day for the thirty-second time at this
sacred station.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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