St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania

Source

Source: Partial public-domain source packet for St. Vitus and the dancing mania. Main source: J. F. C. Hecker, The Black Death and The Dancing Mania, translated from German by Benjamin Guy Babington, Project Gutenberg #1739, from the 1888 Cassell edition. Supporting saint notice: Johann Peter Kirsch, "Sts. Vitus, Modestus, and Crescentia," The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 15 (1912). Coverage: Partial. Hecker's public-domain medical history passages on St. Vitus's dance, plus a public-domain summary of the sain

St. Vitus and the saint legend

t legend and cult.

St. Vitus and the saint legend

According to this legend Vitus was a boy seven years of age (other versions make him twelve years old), the son of a pagan senator of Lucania.

From Lucania he was taken to Rome to drive out a demon which had taken possession of a son of the Emperor Diocletian.

St. Vitus is appealed to, above all, against epilepsy, which is called St. Vitus's Dance, and he is one of

Hecker on dancing mania

the Fourteen Martyrs who give aid in times of trouble.

Hecker on dancing mania

Strasburg was visited by the "Dancing Plague" in the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there, as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine.

They were thus conducted on foot and in carriages to the chapels of St. Vitus, near Zabern and Rotestein, where priests were in attendance to work upon their misguided minds by masses and other religious ceremonies.

Paracelsus divides the St. Vitus's dance into three kinds. First, that which arises from imagination (Vitista, Chorea imaginativa, aestimativa), by which the original Dancing Plague was to be understood.

Our business here is only with that morbid sympathy by the aid of which the dancing mania of the Middle Ages grew into a real epidemic.