Essay Example on Mass Hysteria

“They danced together, ceaselessly, for hours or days, and in wild delirium, the dancers collapsed and fell to the ground exhausted, groaning and sighing as if in the agonies of death. When recuperated, they resumed their convulsive movements.” Mass Hysteria is often described as an enhanced feeling of fear and panic that is transmitted through a population by either a real or perceived threat.

Most common cases that we think of are news reporters giving wrong information causing people to freak out, or world leaders telling people that they’re about to be invaded, but they're not ect. Mass hysteria has led to some of the weirdest things in History, including the Dancing plague of 1518, meowing nuns and the 2019 Malaysian screaming school girls.

DANCING PLAGUE OF 1518:

In july of 1518 a Lady began silently dancing in the medieval streets of Strasbourg France, enticing more and more people to join in. According to Famous Swiss physician Paracelsus over the course of a week she continued to silently dance and eventually over three dozen people joined her. Bystanders are said to claim that people were not enjoying themselves, they were very distressed and unable to stop dancing. 

Doctors of the time claimed this phenomenon was due to hot blood and that the solution would be for people to dance even faster to get it out of their systems. To encourage intense dancing the town built a stage and hired musicians, this led to even more people indulging in this delirium. It is estimated that between 400 and 1,000 people had joined in. People’s bodies could no longer keep up, breaking bones, collapsing and even dying due to intense dancing. 

People of that time believed Saint Vitus was responsible for this and that he had cursed the town to dance till death, so priests prayed over them and it supposedly stopped the dancing. This event to this day has no medical explanation and historians have chalked it up to mass hysteria. 

MEOWING NUNS:

Another strange case of mass hysteria happened in 14th Century France, when a convent of nuns started meowing. According to the book of Epidemics of the Middle Ages, one day a nun started to meow, the other nuns around her joined in this and it continued spreading around the convent and eventually all the nuns were meowing. This meowing continued for several days, the townspeople grew sick of this and demanded them to stop, they didn’t. 

Sick and tired of this the town conscripted an army with whips who beat them until they promised to stop.