The Dancing Mania

Description

The Dancing Mania presents in fact not one, but two of the terrible illnesses that affected the Middle Ages: the Black Death and the dancing mania. The first part of the book discusses the causes and the spreading mechanism of the black death, while the second part is a great and detailed account of one of the strangest phenomena that occurred between the 14th and the 17th century: a phenomena that involves masses of people dancing erratically, usually in the streets, falling into a kind of trance and not stopping until they collapsed because of the exhaustion.

Justus Hecker was a medical doctor and a medical writer as well, interested primarily in epidemics such as the plague or smallpox that he was interested in as much as they influenced the course of human history. He published his book about the dancing mania in 1832, when medical science could only guess what could have caused huge crowds to start dancing while being apparently moved by hallucinations and a shared, trance-like state of mind.

Without too much scientific evidence, Hecker presents the theories that tried to account for the phenomenon – some thought that the mania was caused by an attempt of the impoverished masses to forget about their miserable lives through dancing, others thought the dancing scenes were staged to frightened the masses and there were theorists who believed the mania was caused by some sort of fungal infestation with a mushroom that grew on rye and caused hallucinations and other neurological symptoms in humans.

The book summarizes and synthesizes everything known about the two illnesses at the beginning of the 19th century and not only from a medical point of view. Hecker offers insight into the social, economic and psychological effects of the phenomena described and he does so in an interesting and engaging style that makes the book challenging and very entertaining as well.
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