It was a week before the Holy Festival of Mary Magdalen on July fourteenth, fifteen eighteen, that Frau Trafea began her dance. One can picture her in the shadows of one of Strasbourg's half timbered houses, white linen cap limp with sweat, and her skirt and apron swaying as she jumped awkwardly from foot to foot. Despite pleas from her husband to desist, Frau Trafea went on dancing into the evening in front of a crowd growing all the time
in size and bewilderment. As the shadows of buildings and onlookers lengthened and she could barely raise her limbs, Frau Trafea collapsed into sleep. The repose only lasted until she had recouped enough energy to restart her dance. Early the next day she resumed. Frau Trafea went on dancing for a third and then a fourth day. At this point
the authorities intervened. She danced interminably, apparently heedless of the terrible bruises, bloody sores, and lacerations that must have formed on her feet after so many days of near constant movement. We don't know what frautraff you thought, or what she said while she danced, whether she screamed for help or maintained a troubled silence. We can be fairly sure though, that she was in genuine distress.
Oh spooky, so spooky.
So that is from the book called The Dancing Plague by John Waller, and that's the subject of this episode of this podcast, Will Kill You.
Yep.
Yeah. Hi, I'm Erin Welsh.
And I'm Erin Alvin Updike.
Welcome.
I'm so excited for today's episode. I know, I've been like barely able to contain myself.
It's really exciting. I mean, we've been wanting to do another medical mystery type thing since encephalitis lethargica. Yep. But and so I'm really excited to do this because a lot of people have asked us about it or like sent us email saying, hey, have you read this? Have you heard of this?
Yeah? Which, okay, let me tell you. I have to tell you the thing that I'm There's several things that I'm most excited to talk about. But one is the fact that so we're doing the format of this differently than our normal episodes. It'll be more similar to the format of art encephalitis lethargic episode, but even a little different than that.
I feel like, just join us for the ride.
Yeah, it's gonna be great. But Erin, I know absolutely nothing about the dancing plague. Oh really, Like I had never ever heard of it until you suggested this a very long time ago, and then we've had a lot of people, you know, message us like, hey, can you do the dancing plagu Can you do the dancing plague?
I I know literally nothing about that, and I was so careful, like you told me the hypotheses to research, so that's what I researched, and I was very careful to never google anything to do with the dancing plague.
Oh so good. Oh so this is gonna be a very interesting episode. It's going to be so.
Fun because I have these things that I researched that I'm like, I have no idea how this ties in. I can make some guesses based on the fact that it's called a dancing plague, but like, oh my gosh, I just can't wait to hear all about this and then just do some hypothesizing with you.
Yes, okay, So to ease this conversation along. Yeah, should we pour ourselves a quarantini? Quarantini?
I think we ought to.
Okay. This week's quarantini is called Boogie Fever, of course, and it has tequila the dancing juice. Yep, it has guava juice.
Because it's pretty and dasty.
It has lime juice, sparkling water mint, and then garnish it with a flower because it looks pretty.
Why not.
Yeah, it's also delicious.
So we will post the full recipe for that quarantini as well as our non alcoholic placy Bata on our website. This podcast will kill you dot Com and all of our social media channels, so make sure you check those out. Perfect, and we have new merch if you haven't seen our awesome water bottles, they are very very cool and new smelling soap which smells so good.
Yeah, check it out. And our shirts should be stalked at the point.
Yeah yeah, if not now, very so.
I think in January yeah yep.
Okay, so oh we got some gifts from people, but I haven't opened them. Yeah, open them because it's Christmas. Oh okay, oh my god. Okay, So Kimberly Baxter sent us these adorable little knit microbe Oh.
My gosh, that's right, she knitted little h one n one. Yeah, they're a little swag.
They're so cute and the little beads are hes and ends. Oh my gosh, oh, thank you.
Kimberly's so so adorable.
And then also, this is a long belated but Nick Davis sent us an amazing box full of quarantiny supplies and accustomized quarantiny.
That's incredible, it's so incredible. We so much.
We're thrilled. We haven't been in the same place to drink it together yet, but rest assured we will.
Yes, absolutely so, thank you so much.
Thanks Kimberly, you're too nice to us.
That's Christmas ever. Yeah.
Oh okay, I think that's all of our business now.
Excellent. I guess we should jump right in.
Yes, let's dance right in. Should we take a quick break.
First, let's do it. Okay. So you heard from our first hand account a little bit about the fifteen eighteen dancing plague in Strasbourg. But there's so much more to tell. Okay, so let's pick up where we left off in the beginning. Okay, but before I start, I want to say that this story you're about to hear here almost certainly happened. Like the events, the baseline events really did happen, no matter how bizarre it sounds. But what's less clear, and the point of our episode today is why it.
Happened, right, Like, what the heck happened to?
Right this happen?
Yeah?
What's going on? Okay, So let's set the stage a little bit. So Strasbourg is in present day France, sitting close to the German border. Back then it was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and it looks really lovely in pictures. It's like a little close to the mountains. Maybe we should add it to our TBWKY vacation destination. Yes, and the dancing plague that we're going to focus on, because spoilers, it's not the only one who is the
one that happened in fifteen eighteen in this town. Okay, what were the early fifteen hundreds like in Strasbourg?
Probably dirty and smelly like everywhere.
Exactly grim, just really grim. As you may remember from our syphilis episode, that disease by this point was sweeping Europe. So like the late fourteen hundreds, early fifteen hundreds is when it kind of went everywhere. A plague like the actual bubonic plague would swoop in every few decades to carry off some proportion of the population. And then what goes better with plague and disease and syphilis than famine?
Of course, death was around every corner, and to deal with this constant threat of death, many people turned to religion because science as an explanation for things that happened to you wasn't really happening yet, like it wasn't enjoyed yet. Yeah, and at this time, the religion that dominated this region was a super fiery, demon fearing Bible beating Christianity with
a very stark hierarchy. So if you were part of the clergy, you held the power and the answers and the wealth, and the people like peasants and so on, they turned to the Church for guidance and they would do this especially so during trying times, which is like all the time in the fifteen hundreds. Okay, so what was going on in Strasbourg around this time? Specifically in fifteen fourteen, there was a terrible winter that frosted and blunted the crops and led to many people just straight
up freezing to death, oh my gosh. And then two years later, a horrible harvest and another bitter winter led not just to people dying of freezing to death, but also a huge amount of resentment and unease, resentment particularly towards the church. So prices for grain had more than doubled over the past few years, and people were getting resentful of the Church's demands for tithes and fees and whatnot.
And there were active rebellions actually to try to overthrow the church or the clergy, oh, which is kind of interesting, but none of them succeeded, all right. So then in fifteen seventeen, which is the year before the Dancing plague, that year was dubbed by one chronicler as simply the bad year. So imagine this one year in the sea of bad years.
So it was very bad, very bad.
There was malnutrition, starvation, smallpox epidemic, the English sweat so the sweating sickness, which is another historical medical mystery. We touched on it a bit in the hauntavirus episode, yeah, but we didn't really go too much into it. So that would dominate the region in Strasbourg that in fifteen eighteen or fifteen seventeen. So, needless to say, many people in Strasbourg had their faith severely shaken, kind of felt
they were being punished for something. Okay, So now we arrive in fifteen eighteen Strasbourg, things don't look so great, even though it's July and probably gorgeous weather. Except it wasn't. It was unbearably hot. It was like very hot and
very dry. So when Frau Trafea started her dance, rumors of the devil's involvement circulated, but they were quickly overruled by the majority, who believed that her uncontrollable dance resulted from like a divine retribution, so punishment for faithlessness and immoral behavior and sin and blah blah blah, and so a lot of this.
It had to do with God, but it wasn't demonic possession specifically, right, okay.
Right, So it was more of like this is you are being punished by God, okay. And this was probably fortunate in a way that it wasn't viewed as being satanic or a demonic possession, because then she would probably have been burnt at the stake or something.
Okay.
Yeah, And so under this punishment Frau Trafia danced for six days NonStop, basically only to sleep and then eat, and then kept dancing and dancing against her husband's wishes
and insistence. And it's funny because like the first chronicler that really came, the first well known chronicler that wrote a lot about the dancing plague came to Strasbourg I think around seven six or seven years or no, seven or eight years after fifteen eighteen, and it was his name was Paracelsus, and I've talked about him before as like a medical historian chronicler, and he hated women, and
so it's really like very interesting. He's like, oh, well, these women are just dancing because they're like loose women and loose morals and blah blah blah blah blah. They want to listen to their husbands exactly. He was like, oh,
she she only started dancing to infuriate her husband. Whatever. Anyway, as Frau Trafia danced, more and more people arrived to gawk at her, and then, as I said in the firsthand, the medical authorities intervened, and what that meant was that she was ruled to be sent to Severn severnez seven in which is like a nearby place in the mountains where there was a shrine to Saint Vitash and the other name that was given to this dancing plague besides
choreo mania choreo from like dance choreography and stuff, meaning like yeah, woh uh huh, all right, this is Saint Vitas's dance. Okkay. So who was Saint Vidas and why would our dancing queen be sent to his shrine? Okay? So, Saint Vidas was a Sicilian martyr who didn't die after being burned in a cauldron of lead and tar or after being attacked by lions, and he didn't succumb to the temptations of a bunch of seductive dancers to go back to Roman gods.
Sorry, he was burned in a cauldron of lead and tar. Die Okay, I mean it was like the year three hundred, so okay, okay, citation needed now.
He was a super popular saint. Actually, people prayed to him to be healed from epilepsy and also people struggling to conceive. Back then, people viewed saints not just as being able to heal them of various things, but also as have the power to inflict punishment in sort of the opposite way that they would heal. So if Saint Vitas could cure epilepsy, he could also cause it.
Oh interesting.
So Saint Vitas somehow became associated with these outbreaks of spontaneous, uncontrollable dancing sometime during the fourteen hundreds, and the only way to stop the dancing was to go to his shrine and ask for help or be ordered to the shrine. And so that's how Frautrafia found herself there. Unfortunately, we have no idea what happened to her after that, in in all likelihood she stopped dancing and returned exhausted to Strasbourg.
But whatever happened to her was overshadowed by what was happening all across the town, which is that people had started to dance. At first, it was just dozens of people this frenzied sort of like it was actually dancing, like it was described as dance, huh. And they would move to music in a circle until they until they dropped, basically like they would dance from as soon as they woke up to as soon as they to the when they just collapsed from exhaustion.
So they're not just like flicking about their dancing.
Right, they're actually dancing, okay. Frautrafia being the first one, happened in mid July, and then within a month it had turned to hundreds of people.
Okay.
By the end of the plague, around four hundred people had this uncontrollable dancing. This isn't a town of twenty thousand, which is like, okay, not a small amount.
No, that's I mean, four hundred people in a town of anything is a lot to be dancing.
And they like they.
According to chroniclers, did not want to be dancing.
They did not want to be dancing so well, a lot of chroniclers described them as sort of being in like a trance like state or or or at least that's our modern interpretation of it. Okay, like their minds were lost to them is sort of what would have been described. And it's not like they were like they weren't entirely lucid, it appears.
Right, so okay, yeah, my gosh, this is so bizarre.
It's so bizarre, and not everyone escaped, like not everyone would just dance and dance and then get tired and stop, like This was a relentless entrance dancing that people could not seem to stop, no matter how much they wanted to or how much they they were threatened with fines or losing their dignity.
Can I ask a question, yes, of course, and you might be answering this, but I need to just know this now. Were they all dancing together? Was it like one so Frau Trophia started this and then the next person? Were they in the same vicinity as her? How did next people start? And then was it like four hundred people all in the same area that were dancing. Was it one giant dance party that no one wanted to be a part of?
I mean kind of yes, actually the to the one giant dance party. So I don't know exactly, and I don't know if it's if it's in any chronicles exactly how the next people got started. It's just sort of like more people started to dance, okay. And so at the very beginning it was viewed as a medical condition, which is kind of interesting because they when they referred to it, they use the word for plague rather than the word for curse, which would have implied like a spiritual condition.
Yeah, and the.
Town council, or what was in effect of the town council. They decided, Okay, this is a medical condition, we're going to treat it medically. And they treated it with like like needs.
Like oh, so, like, let's dance.
They constructed a wooden stage, they hired musicians, they brought in dance and they were like, just keep dancing, just get it out of your system. Stop it. Are you seriously serious? And then they're like, I get it.
You just need to dance it out. You just will make it happen.
I mean I kind of like that attitude, just like dance it just come on.
I can relate to needing to dance it out.
I relate. But pretty soon, like within a few days, they're like, oh no, oh no, this is bad. This is not what we should have done. Like more people were joining in, more people were dancing, and then people started to die.
People died, people died people dancing.
Yes, oh my gosh, Aaron. So at the there was one It's it's hard to say exactly how many people died, but one chronicler wrote that at the peak of the epidemic, fifteen people died every day. What and so that that has to be an exaggeration because the plague affected around four hundred people, and so if it if it every day like that would imply multiple days. That would be like hundreds of people dying.
Yeah, how long did this whole thing last?
Around two months?
Two months? That's yeah, that's like at least what sixty, No, fifteen? I can't do that math, Aaron, fifteen times sixty, that's a lot of people.
Like, not everyone who dance died, for sure. Yeah, And so another person just wrote many people died, Okay, So and I think that like, if you're in the fifteen hundreds and you're a chronicler and you say many people died and you've seen things like plague and smallpox, it's a lot of people.
Yeah, okay, so well we don't know. Yeah.
So then after it became pretty clear that hiring musicians and constructing a dance hall and like encouraging this was not going to work and actually was being more causing more problems.
And this was all happening because the first person, she was kind of in like a town square type area. It sounded like like everyone came to watch her.
Yeah, she was dancing outside like she was visible dancing public dancing.
Yeah, public dancing, and then everyone like other people. This all started and then they were like, well, let's cure this by having a giant dance party. So then they brought in all these things and then it just kept escalating from there. Yes, okay, just making sure I understand. Ooh, this is good, Aaron.
I mean, and these are like people who didn't look like they were enjoying themselves, like they had blister bloody feet.
They were Rory Gilmore wasn't enjoying herself at the end of the twenty four hour dances on either, but.
She wasn't and there are a lot of parallels with that and this so welcome on this episode of this podcast, We'll Killing Gilmore Girls Edition. Yeah, it is sort of like, it's really funny that there are a lot of comparisons made between these like dance plagues and like rave culture and the dance marathons of especially like the early nineteen hundreds or the first I.
Didn't Dance Marathon you see LA dance Marathon?
Did you last? Yeah?
I did. It was great, It was really I enjoyed it a lot. My little brother came, we all did it.
It was so so after obviously this wasn't working, this public dancing. They were like the town was like, okay, we've made a huge mistake and we are now outlawng dancing, and if you are seen publicly dancing, you'll be fined. And so it was just sort of like we're going to try the opposite now, okay, And that didn't really
work either, shocking people still dance. People were still being infected by this dancing craze whatever, and so eventually they resorted to shuttling people either by wagon or by like or on foot to the shrine to Saint Vitus in the mountains, which is around thirty miles away, okay, and
it kind of seemed to work. Like they're at Saint Vidas they were prayed over, they were given red shoes, like there was like some strange order for like a bunch of red shoes Dorothy, Dorothy and snow white and blah blah blah, like it's a very Yeah, there was something about the color red that was associated with like dancing, uncontrolled dancing and this like fervor. I don't know all right anyway, and so yeah, it kind of like this is kind of an abrupt end. But basically they went
to the shrine. They most people recovered, but the trauma, you know, stayed with them for a long time. And for the people that had to witness this, and it didn't really fade into memory. People made drawings, they made paintings, they wrote stories. And you know, we're still talking about it today, huh. And I think you know that brings me to you because we're still talking about it because there it seems like such a bizarre event and hard
to envision people having uncontrolled dancing until they died. Yes, and there have been several different hypotheses as to what caused this, like and we'll talk about them all. There's yes burgut, poisoning, conversion disorder, mass hysteria, and probably a couple others that I'm sure you're gonna tell me about. So let's hear it from you, Erin, tell me about these things. Let's all his mystery.
All right. Let's what we'll do is we'll take a quick break and then we'll go through each of these hypotheses one at a time and we can debate them.
Does that sound perfect? Love it?
Okay? So Aaron, you had told me to research some specific things, right, Yes, these specific hypotheses. The ones I'm gonna tell you what you told me to research. Ergotism, Okay, which is ergot poisoning. We'll talk about it. Encephalitis, which, like I'm just gonna say right now, it's not that. Yeah, okay, we can briefly talk about that. Also, mass hysteria, which is a terrible term, but we'll talk about that. And Sydenham Korea, Well we can talk about that as well.
So those are the four I know I can tell, based on my research one hundred percent, what the only thing that this could even possibly be. Yeah, okay, but let's go through these one at a time, starting with the absolute least likely. Okay, that sound fun.
Sounds excellent.
Okay, the most least likely is that a good way to say it?
I think could just be the least likely.
The least likely is encephalitis. Yeah. Uh, we've talked about encephalitis before. It is such a ridiculously broad term first of all, to just say encephalitis that I was like, I don't even have anything to research. I don't have any sources for you on encephalitis because it's not a single disease. Encephalitis means swelling of the brain. Most of the time it's viral, but tons of different things can cause it. So you can absolutely have symptoms that include seizures.
That's the closest thing I can think of. That might be something like dancing plague, like uncontrolled movement.
Yeah.
Other than that, it's like headache, fever, vomiting, stiff neck, maybe hallucinations, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, it's absolutely not encephalitis.
Cool that out of here.
We should have a buzzer sound. I thought this is one ums down, all right. I bought this is too that it's definitely not h Sydenham. Korea or Korea, you could say it both ways. So do you know what this is?
Erin only that only the in the Korea aspect of it.
Okay, So the term Korea, And it was really interesting when you said choreography, because I don't know. I think I knew that a long time ago, but I didn't remember that to make the connection. The connection, I think I'm having too much fun. So the term Korea, it generally just means in large involuntary movements of usually the limbs, but also the facial the facial muscles. Right, So, Huntington
disease is also characterized by Korea. Sydenham Korea is a specific form of Korea that happens as a result like following a strep throat infection a group A strep infection. Interesting, it's not entirely clear exactly what causes it, but it's pretty clear that similar to rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease, it's a result of antibodies that you make following this strep infection that then go on to infect your brain.
But why just this type.
So it's thought that it infects your brain stem, and so your brain stem has a lot to do with motor control and movement.
And it's just by step type A group A strap.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, group A strap and group A strap. Like, there's a lot of auto antibodies that get made. That's why you also get rheumatic fever, rheumatic heart disease. Now there's thoughts that there could be something called PANDACE, but that's pretty controversial at this point. So, yeah, there's definitely a lot of auto antibodies that get made that can it made if you have a strep infection.
That's untreated, gotcha.
Yeah, So that's why when you like, especially because kids get strep throat like all the time. Yeah, it's really important to go get that diagnosed and treated because you can prevent all of these future complications if it's treated for the most part.
Gotcha.
So was this the dancing plague? Two thumbs down. Highly doubtful based on it sounds like most of the people that were involved were adults.
Correct, they seem to be adults. I think they were largely women. Okay, that's the only but it does seem to be like all all age groups though.
I'm gonna put an asterisk in that what you just said, yeslie, women Okay, okay, yeah, so that's then very highly unlikely. Also because what it sounds like you're saying is there were coordinated type movements. It wasn't just irregular type sort of non sense movements, right.
No, it was it was dance like. It seemed to be structured, like they use different terms to describe epilepsy than they used to describe dance, for instance, right.
Okay, So send in ham Korea. Okay, we've already very very quickly eliminated two of these hypotheses.
I mean, yeah, it's pretty yeah.
Okay, So then ergotism. Yes, we're going to spend some time on this because I did a ton of research on them.
Okay, good, because I have the huge section on this too. Oh great.
Okay, So let's talk about what ergod is. Ergot is a fungus kind of, it's a group of fung guy kind of. It's a little bit weird and complicated. So when people talk about ergot, especially in the context of ergotism or ergot poisoning, they're talking specifically, for the most part, about a fungus called Claviceps purpuria.
Yeah, this is a fungus.
That infects rye. It's actually a parasitic fungus. It grows into the rye like the ovum of the rye flower and then replaces the kernel.
Oh cool.
So this Claviceps fungus produces this little nugget within that flower that replaces like a kernel of rye for example. So the the ergot part of it is kind of that specific kernel. But then ergot is also a term used to refer to that whole group of fungi, So it's a little bit weird. Okay, does that make sense?
Yeah, But in this for this episode, we'll talk about ergot, meaning the fungus.
Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, we're not going to talk in depth about the life cycle. It's very interesting. It's a plant parasite, so that's kind of the important part that you need to know. And the other thing is that
ergot produces a ton of alkaloids. We've talked about alkaloids a lot in some of our crossover episodes with Matt candeis of indefensive plants, because alkaloids are organic compounds, so that means they are carbon based compounds that have basic nitrogen attached nitrogen atoms attached to it, that are really commonly produced by plants, bacteria, fungi, et cetera. These tend to be defensive compounds that plants and fungi produce, okay.
And.
In the case of ergot, they produce a bunch of different kinds of alkaloids. There are a couple Ergonavine, which is also called ergometrine. Don't ask me why, okay, Actually I'll tell you why. It's because it was discovered in multiple places at the same time, and they called it two different things. Classic classic so erganavine or agometrine, and then also ergotamine those are kind of the to biggest
ones or the most common ones. But there's a whole bunch of different alkaloids that are produced by ERGOT and it turns out that these are rather similar in structure, and therefore in our bodies tend to have actions at serotonin receptors in our bodies. Okay, okay, most people have probably at least heard of the word serotonin. I'm guessing it gets a lot of press because it's called like the happy hormone sometimes so a lot of antidepressant medications.
Their action is to increase the amount of serotonin in your brain. So serotonin is an important neurotransmitter. It does a lot of things in your brain. We don't really understand all of them, but they also importantly, there are serotonin receptors in other places than just your brain and central nervous system. There are serotonin receptors in your gut. In fact, a lot of serotonin is produced in your gut. Interesting, in your uterus, interesting, very important and I can't wait
to tell you about it. Oh my gosh, and your smooth muscle. In other places like your blood vessels and things like that. Okay, I want to.
Know I have so many questions, but I'm just gonna wait because I don't.
Yeah, okay, here's the other thing I was so excited about for this episode. I knew you were gonna have so many questions, and my notes are so disorganized, but I have like sixteen sections where I just have asterisk with here's a question Aaron's probably gonna ask, and then the answer for it.
I'm so predictable.
I love it.
It's so good.
Okay. So it also so it's important to also know that dopamine, serotonin, histamine, all these things are kind of they can sometimes cross react on the same receptors, and so the ergot alkaloids can also react on a number of different receptors. Just the very specific serotonin in your brain receptors. Cool, okay, Okay, so that's the ergot alkaloids.
They act on serotonin type receptors. I have a few side notes here because I got very excited when researching this because we actually use ergot alkaloids, specifically ergonovine and ergotumine ergnovine and er godtumine. We use them medically in two main areas. Ergonovine I'm on my obegine rotation right now. We just talked about ergonovine. Oh my gosh, the day before I was researching ergot alkaloids for this episode.
Uh, stars aligning. I know.
It's so exciting. It's like I was doing work I was supposed to be doing. So one of the main things that we use ergonovine for is to uh improve or control postpartum hemorrhage because it turns out that there's so many of those receptors in the uterus. Ergonovine attaches very strongly to those receptors and causes uterine contraction and increased muscle tone of the uterus. Really yeah, I know, isn't that fascinating?
How did anyone even figure that out? I don't know.
But so ergot has been used like throughout history for like uterine type no.
Yeah, yeah yeah yeah throughout history yeah yeah yeah.
Yeah, totes. Okay. Then there's also ergotamine, which is the other most common alkaloid that is used commonly today for the treatment and prevention of migraines. So migraines, A lot of treatment for migraines. Uh. It's thought that migraines have to do with like vasodilation in the brain and increasing pressure in your brain blood vessels. So you treat it with vasoconstrictors that kind of specifically target those blood vessels in your head, and that can reduce and it can
actually like abort migraines if you get it early enough. Really, and so ergotamine is one of the drugs that we can use for like prevention and treatment of migraines.
That's amazing, I know, also.
Medically, not medically, but recreationally. LSD yes is very similar in structure to the ergot alkaloids. So all of these ergot alkaloids have what's called the lysergic acid backbone. That's the name of like the main structure of all these alkaloids. LSD is lysergic acid DIETHYLAMIDEK. So that's LSD. Yeah, So it's not produced naturally by ergot LSD is a synthetic derivative of lysergic acid. But if you think about the fact that LSD causes like massive hallucinations, right, like huge
amount of halluciningetic effect. So it's not unreasonable to think that poisoning by ergot can cause hallucinations. Because we know that LSD can cause that, and it's not that different
in form or structure from LSD. Right. And because we're talking about a fungus that grows on a plant, we know from all of our crossovers with MATT that the ratios and amounts of these different types of alkaloids is going to differ a lot between and among different individual fungi and different strains of the fungus or the plant
that it's growing on. Right, because it's gonna also depend largely on the environment in which it's grown, how many of these alkaloids they produce, what specific types of alkaloids, and in what ratios. Okay, cool, So that's kind of ergot like an overall picture of ergot and its alkaloids how they're used today. So what happens if you get or got poisoning? Yeah? Okay, So when one ingests ergot infected rye. Rye is the most common grain that God infects,
but it can also infect like rice, other grasses. It can infect a lot of different monocots. There are three main syndromes that you can get from ergot poisoning. Most of the literature says two, but more recent literature divides it into three.
Okay, two.
Yeah, gangren is ergotism. Gang green is like if you imagine your limb turning black and then falling off. Yes, that's gangreen and tarot ergotic and taro meaning your gut. So you can have a form of ergotism that's more specific just to gastrointestinal symptoms. Okay, and convulsive ergotism.
Right, So the gut makes sense and the convulsive makes sense. Why does it cause gangreen? Is that one of big questions questions?
No, but we'll talk about it. That's one of the things I will of course explain. So the remember I said that one of the uses of the ergot alkaloid is for vasoconstriction in your brain.
Mm hmm.
Okay, so we know that ergot alkaloids can cause vasoconstriction.
Ohta, If you.
Have vasoconstriction in the small vessels of your limbs, that can lead to necrosis, which is tissue death. Which necrosis on a large scale is what gangreen is. It's death of a large amount of tissue. With or without you can once that tissue starts dying, it's very easy to get a superimposed bacterial infection on top of that. So gangrenous Ergotism can become so severe that you can lose
entire limbs. Entire limbs or parts of limbs will die to the point where if you just hit them, they will fall off completely with very little bleeding at the site where the tissue kind of falls off from, because all that tissue is also dead.
That's horrifying.
Yeah, it's it's really gnarly, so gangreness. Ergotism is also called Saint Anthony's fire mm hmm, because it's not just a chill process of your limbs slowly dying, like, oh, no, big deal, it's just slowly not that Okay, that's obviously a massively huge deal. But it's also not like a painless process, right. Uh. This is also associated with very intense neuropathic pain, so nerve type pain, these violent burning
pains that shoot through your limbs. Yeah, and back when, first of all, we didn't they didn't know exactly what caused ergotism or how to prevent it from infecting grains and how to like separate it from the rye. And back in medieval Europe they used rye for everything, right, right, Like all their bread was made of rye. Everything was
made of rye. So apparently this, this forman gangreness ergotism was so common and had such specific symptoms that that that's why it got its own name, Saint Anthony's Fire.
Uh huh.
Yeah, so I think that's pretty interesting.
Yeah, yeah, I have a little bit about Saint Anthony and oh the whole thing. Yeah, oh cool.
Okay, so then let's talk about the convulsive form of ergotism. This is most likely more what people were thinking when they thought the dancing plague might be associated with ergotism, right, right, because it wasn't like people were dancing and then legs were falling Well maybe legs were falling off.
They weren't though, So that's something that's like I'll talk a little bit about sort of the the evidence pro and against or whatever, but in terms of contemporary accounts, but perfect, yeah, there isn't. There doesn't seem to be like, oh so and so's leg fell off. Yeah, it's just the more of the convulsive thing. But do you know the proportion of gangernous versus convulsive?
This was one of the questions not just what is the proportion, but what determines whether you get gangreness or convulsive?
Right form is it different strains are more prone to some.
We have absolutely no idea, quite honestly, is what it seems like.
Because there was something though that I read something that was like strains that are east of like in eastern Europe, tend to be more convulsive and west as gangreness.
In the past, in Germany, people west of the Rhine River usually got gangreness ergotism. East of the Rhine, they tended to get convulsive. So it's been suggested that it might be due to chemical differences in the different strains of fungus, but there's been at least one study that showed that that wasn't the case, Like, there isn't that big of a difference in the chemical composition of the alkaloids.
To specifically explain that, someone else had suggested it might be concomin at vitamin A deficiency, So if you're also vitamin A deficient, that then you would be more likely to get the convulsive form. But that also doesn't seem
to hold water either. It's not into entirely clear. What's interesting is that within an outbreak, like especially in more recent outbreaks, it's often the case that some people will get gangreness and some people will get convulsive, but it's very rare for someone to get both gangreness and convulsive at the same time.
But even within the same outbreak, you don't get both. Interesting.
Yeah, So my guess would be it probably does have a lot to do with the combination of alkaloids, but it might not be as easy to separate, like this strain versus that strain. It might just be very environmentally dependent, like growing in this type of environment, you might be more likely to get this combination of alkaloids, et cetera. But then it also probably has to do with individual susceptibility,
so there's probably some combination effect going on. So with the convulsive type, I will say that you often also get GI effects. Okay, so nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, this is really common, especially early on in convol ergotism. But then you will get more of that neuropathic like pins and needle sensations. What's really common is something called formication. Ooh, well, not forlornication. So that's the sensation that ants are crawling underneath your skin.
Oh my gosh, like form like okay, yeah, like.
The family name for ants. Yeah, okay. Then you'll also get like small muscle twitches, large muscle spasms, convulsions, you can get whole body spasms, et cetera, et cetera. You can also get hallucinations, dementia, delirium mania. It can be really bad. So that's ergotism. What do you think, erin?
Okay, So there are a couple of things I want to talk about because and this, I knew that ergotism was one of the things, and I didn't know anything about it except that it was a cause by a fungus and in in rye flower. So but there has been a lot of discussion about whether ergotism was the cause of dancing plaguey and Okay, so let's let's go through some of the things. So, first of all, there's this that that convulsive ergotism can cause these like jerky
movements and whatever, convulsions and so on. But that's not how you would describe dance like, that's not and so the fact that they very clearly use the words for dance and dancing indicates probably not urgotism.
Right.
Secondly, Ergo, poisoning, as you said, doesn't affect every person in the same way, and it's not entirely predictive like you it come in. Some people could cause like you said, these hallucinations, and some people could be just having diarrhea. So ergot poisoning, yeah, it could cause hallucinations and maybe convulsed convulsions looking like dancing in an individual, but not four hundred people.
Yeah, well yeah, and it's not going to be called dancing.
It's not going to be called dancing. And then the other thing is that people knew about ergot poisoning, like they knew what it was. It had been written about from I think the first instance had been written about in eight hundred and fifty seven, like the year eight or in fifty seven, and even around the area there were like where the rye flower went through pipes to
be packed into bags. At the end of the pipes were these like horribly distorted faces that had been put there as a reminder, like historians think now it might be a reminder of the hallucinations that ergot poisoning can give you. Fascinating and so it's called Saint Anthony's Fire, like who was Saint Anthony? So it was this Catholic order of monks that were really talented at healing people who had the Holy Fire, and it probably was because they just left and had other sources of food.
But yeah, most people. It's surprising that even people who had like very severe convulsive ergotism, the mortality rate was only ten to twenty percent, which is really low when you consider that at that time there was absolutely no treatment essentially, right. So and it's cumulative, right, yeah, it can be absolutely.
Okay, So okay. So the fourth thing is that ergot poisoning can cause some of the symptoms maybe that we're described with the dancing plague, but it wouldn't give you the energy to dance on end for days after days to the point of death, like your extremities makes them numb maybe, or would restrict your ability to move or dance.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Probably not good poisoning.
I say, definitely, two thumbs down.
Two thumbs down. But we're not entirely done with the discussion of ergotism. If that's okay, No, we're not okay, good, because are you going to talk about what I think what I'm going to talk about.
I'm ready to talk about what I know you're going.
To talk about the Salean witch trials.
Absolutely, yeah, amazing, I think I.
Might have read the same paper as you when I was looking through your Sources.
Nineteen seventy six by Yes Carporeal. Yeah yeah, okay, so yeah, so this this episode, we wanted to focus on the Dancing plague. But you can't really talk about Ergot poisoning without talking about the Salewich Trials. You can't because that's like one of the modern explanations for what was going on. All right, do you know? Well, I guess now that since you read that paper, you know more about the Salem Witch Trials.
I know a little bit. I knew almost nothing except like, yes, the Salem Witch Trials happened.
Yeah, the same I thought for like as a kid, I thought for the longest time, but it was in Salem, Oregon, So that's where they happened. I still have this, like very like this sense of Salem, Oregon being like a very spooky, haunted place. I don't really is I don't know. But so for you all out there listening, who may know just as much as we did before we started this episode about the Salemwich Trials, let's just give you
some background. Okay, Yeah, So the Salemwich Trials took place in sixteen ninety two to sixteen ninety three in Salem, Massachusetts, not Oregon. And so in the early sixteen hundreds, the population there consisted mostly of these super religious people, pilgrims who had come to North America for religious freedom or whatever.
But this brand of religion was pretty extreme and so but over the next hundred years, as the area became more and more populated, the population of the merchant class grew, and the merchant class being lighter on the religious side of things. So anyway, what all of these things led to be is that in the late sixteen hundreds in Salem, it was a pretty fractious town. There was a huge divide religiously politically, and there was a lot of infighting in this town. I think quarrelsome was one word I
saw used to describe it. So neighbors were always fighting with neighbors over property lines or who didn't go to church that week, and there was always gossip and petty revenge being enacted. Oh and then there was witchcraft, which was this sort of it was like assumed to be a real thing, was not an uncommon accusation, and it was just part of the religious aspect, like not necessarily which craft itself, but like you know, communing with the
devil and whatever else. Okay, so do you know around one hundred thousand people are thought to have been put to death for practicing witchcraft.
One hundred thousand.
Uh huh, around one hundred thousand people.
And I had no idea it was that high.
It was really high. And so this literal witch hunt had more or less died out in Europe by the mid sixteen hundreds, and in part due to scientific revolution. But Salem was a bit behind the times. Okay. So here we are in this quarrelsome town that firmly believes in witchcraft and is full of a bunch of people with a lot of time on their hands and petty
revenge that they wanted to carry out. So it started when several young girls accused three women, Tituba, a slave from the West Indies, Sarah Good, a poor woman who didn't go to church, and Sarah Osborne, who also didn't go to church, and she had also remarried an indentured servant. So anyway, these were sort of these women did not
have a lot of standing in the community. So the accuser claimed that the invisible spirit of the witch would pinch, choke, prick with pins, and bite them, also causing them to thrash and writhe about. And the number of afflicted girls in a few days increased, as did the number of accusations, until I saw somewhere there were over one hundred and fifty witches accused. Yeah, that's seventy eight percent of them were women, by the way, Oh.
Shocking, uh huh.
And then trials went about as you would expect. If you confess, you were pretty much fined and released or let off with light punishment. But if you maintained your innocent your innocence, you were executed.
That's so interesting to me. If you're like, yeah, yeah, I did it, I'm a witch, they're like, all right, stop doing it. And if you're like, no, really, I'm not a witch, they're like, we're gonna burn you at the steak. That's really I did not know that until reading this.
It's really strange. Also, no one was burned at the stake. Nineteen people were hanged. One person was pressed to death, like crushed.
Okay, that's horrible, yeap, and means had died in jail I while awaiting trial. So how come you think of witches being burned at the stake.
Probably because they were in like Europe and other places. Oh okay, also in the US, but who knows. Okay, So that's that's the very short version. There's a lot of you know, really fun reading out there, really interesting reading out there where you could get a lot more information. Yeah, okay, But where does ergotism come into play? Yeah, So in this nineteen seventy six paper by Linda Caporeal there was it was published in Science. She proposed that orgatism was
the reason for the symptoms of the afflicted girls. So the twitching, the choking sensation, the pinprick feeling, hallucinations and these all kind of fit in fairly nicely with how ergotism acts on someone. They do. And then there's the fact that ergotism had been known in Europe for hundreds of years, but there was no evidence that it was
known to occur in North America at this time. Wasn't until the early eighteen hundreds that it was referred to in writing, so it could have been just not written about, but known whatever. And there's then she also points out in this paper the climate conditions so like really good for fungal growth, warm, damp summers. Yeah, ever, spatial pattern kind of fits. I don't kind convinced by that in terms of like which which households were affected? Hm, okay.
And then there's the abrupt ending of the whole event, like it was just sort of one day, it was just like and then it's over, no more afflictions. So what do you think? Are you convinced? Did you read the reply to the nineteen seventy six paper.
Oh no, I didn't see that there was a reply.
Oh yeah, I'll tell you about it, okay.
I I mean I was absolutely not a thousand percent convinced. I don't think that I would ever be convinced about something that is so difficult to try and actually pinpoint. Yeah, but it was a very it was a very interesting idea, and I like the idea that someone is trying to
put an explanation. I got to be honest, I didn't know that during the sale and which trials it started with, like girls who had these symptoms that then accused other people of being witches that did those symptoms to them, right, That I didn't realize that aspect of the story. And so I think thinking about those initial cases being cases
of ergotism. Yeah, Okay, maybe maybe maybe, But you know, it's a little weird that like nobody else then would have had symptoms if it was a really bad year for ergot then how come like there wasn't more like any men who had symptoms or other people in those same households that had symptoms, if it was a geographical thing. So it's kind of like, Okay, it's fun toie.
It's a fun hypothesis. Yeah, And so I read this reply to this paper, which was like, here's a pro side. Here is a negating every single point that the nineteen
seventy six paper made. Okay, And so the two authors Spanos and got talked about how they talked about the gangreness and the convulsive form, and then they talked about the hypothesis that vitamin A deficiency usually needs to or usually is present when there's when the convulsive form appears, and Salem was not likely to be a place where vitamin A deficiency happened, so there was ample fish and cows. There was also no mention of any gang green during this time.
Yeah, and the.
Age structure of those who were afflicted doesn't match either, So convulsive ergotism happens mainly in young children apparently, but only three of the eleven afflicted girls were under fifteen years old, and I think one was under ten. Yeah, and you would expect, like you said, more small children or more people to have or.
Even more of like people who work with rise so like bakers, things like that, people who are like being more exposed like constantly too. I would kind of think maybe that those people would have had some kind of symptoms as well, right.
And then, like you know, the nineteen seventy six paper makes this point about or tries to make the spatial argument that like, oh, in this household, in this household, but really it wasn't a household wide affliction. Yeah it was.
It was just like girls in those particular houses, right. Yeah.
A couple other people who then have refuted this reply or whatever, have said, oh, people have different susceptibilities to ergotism. True, different strains of the fungus might be like play a role here. And so I mean I think overall, like what it seems is that it's like, just like you said, it's a fun hypothesis, but it's probably not that well supported. Yeah.
Yeah, but that's how I would feel about it. I would say that ergotism is a better fit for the Salem Witch Trials than it is for dancing plague.
Oh, for sure.
To get back on that track.
Also, so real quick though back on Salem. I saw one of the hypotheses somewhere for the Salem Witch Trials was or for these afflictions, was encephalized lethargic got trans carried by birds? What?
Yeah?
And there was no like citation at the end of this for me to like read more about it. But like, what.
Encephalis lethargic got carried by birds? Makes no sense?
No, but that was not there. They weren't saying this is what I proposed. They were saying, this is one of the hypotheses that is.
Really weird, isn't it. Yep. Well, so let's get back on the track of dancing plague. That was a fun little aside.
Yeah, there was a lot of little aside.
It was, but it was good. Now we don't have to do a whole episode on the Sandwich Child, so dancing play ergotism, m M. Which what's funny is because again I knew nothing about dancing plague before this, and I so when I was researching this I was like, yeah, maybe it was zurgotism. You can have a lot of spath, but I had no idea that dancing bike was like literally people dancing on a town hall stage until they dropped.
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
So yeah no, no, definitely not. Okay, we should take a quick break, I think, before our last hypothesis. So the last hypothesis we've already mentioned is, of course, in air quotes, mass hysteria.
Yeah, what's a better term for this, because that's what I saw a lot of the places.
Mass psychogenic illness is one of them. Also, let me find the exact terminology for it, outbreaks of multiple unexplained symptoms.
That's a mouthful. Okay, it's a.
Very broad term. Yeah, so let's let's start right there. Actually, the term mass hysteria is a terrible, terrible term. It's simultaneously very like othering anything. When you refer to something as mass blah blah blah illness, like it's very like, oh, those those people, the masses, you know, which is problematic in a lot of ways. But the word hysteria hysteria has roots. This is a thing We'll do a whole episode on some for sure. So if you are unaware.
The term hysteria comes from a Greek term that meant womb, like the root h y s t er histor is from a Greek term for womb, which is why we still call it uterine removal surgery a hysterectomy to me, So, hysteria used to be thought to be something that only happened to people with uteruses, and it was the result of a wandering.
Uterus, the wandering uterus? Can that be our like band name?
Yes, one hundred percent? Is there not already a band called the Watering the Wandering Uteri?
There's got to be Oh yeah.
So for a very long time, this was used as an excuse to brush off and explain away any potential pain, issues, emotions, anything that a person with a womb might have. It's like, oh, they've got hysteria, they must be hysterical. So yeah, that is a terrible term.
Well, maybe Frau Trafea just had a dancing uterus.
Maybe she had a dancing uterus she just couldn't contain herself. So yeah, what's what's also really interesting is that so you know, when I was trying to research this, I was googling on Google scholar mass hysteria, of course, because that's what it was called. And it's really infuriating how many relatively recent papers still exist using that terminology. But if you want to find more information about it, the most common term I found was mass psychogenic illness or
mass psychogenic response. It's still kind of not a great term, quite honestly, right, it's not perfect. It still is using that these masses of people, and in general, we don't know very much about psychogenic illnesses. So a psychogenic illness is a term that's used to mean any number of either what's called somatiform or dissociative disorders, So either disorders where you have it's thought that you have psychiatric stressors of some kind that cause actual somatic or bodily symptoms.
That's a somatophor disorder, and then dissociative disorders, which are disorders where again psychiatric stressors cause a change in consciousness or identity of some kind, so like a fugue state. That's a that's an associative disorder. So that's kind of what that term a psychogenic illness means.
So first of all, at.
Some point people have tried to separate mass psychogenic illness into two types. You have mass like panic and then you have mass like motor disorders.
Right yeah, okay.
And they' and then other people have tried to be like, no, it's actually one and the same. So I don't know the consensus. If there's something I know less than biochem, it's psych quite honestly, So sorry in advance, I'm not sure where the consensus lies at this point, whether mass psychogenic illness is two separate like mass panic versus mass motor psychogenic illness. But in this case, either way, we're
talking more about motor symptoms. Right, Yes, there was probably panic going on, but what we're really talking about is a bunch of people that are having physical symptoms, not uncontrolled dancing that they don't want to be doing. These are voluntary movements in that they are voluntary muscle groups moving, but they are involuntary movements in that the person does not want for them to happen and feels that they
are not in control of them happening. So that is actually if that happens in an individual, it's often called a conversion disorder. So to talk about mass psychogenic illness in this instance, we actually have to also talk about conversion disorder.
Yes, this is fascinating, it really is.
And again I apologize that I'm probably not doing a super great job of it because psych is not my strong suit. But conversion disorder is unexplained. Bodily symptoms usually neurologic symptoms, but also I mean anxiety type symptoms have often like neurologic components as well, but they can also
have things like vomiting diarrhea. A lot of times conversion disorder are neurologic things like muscle twitching, movements, facial twitches that are not associated with any underlying medically known disease. You do all kinds of like EEGs, which is looking at your brain waves. You do EKGs to look at
your heart. You can do tests on your muscles to look at like nerve conduction, and you find that everything you can test for is normal, but this person still has like a twitch or a something that you absolutely
cannot explain. That might be called a conversion disorder. Generally, you also have to have some kind of psychiatric stressor associated with it, So a lot of times it might be past traumas or things like that, some kind of outside stressor that might be causing this that is associated with this conversion disorder, not just like you know someone who has absolutely no no one has no stress in
their life, but you know, right, Okay. So the thing about mass psychogenic illness is that there have been a lot of instances of it where things have been diagnosed and called mass psychogenic illness. A lot of times these happen in schools or in workplaces.
Are you going to talk about the laughing epidemic?
No, I wasn't going to actually talk about any epidemics. Oh, what's the laughing epidemic?
Oh, it's a laughing plague. So in nineteen sixty two in Tanzania near Lake Tanganika, at a mission school, several girls started laughing uncontrollably, and then it was also interspersed with crying, and this became highly contagious, and soon ninety five of the one hundred and fifty nine students could not stop laughing. So they shut down the school because it was just like they could do anything. Yeah, And then this created more of a problems as everyone went home.
The students went home and or they went to their hometowns, and then there they spread the laughter as well. So by the end of this epidemic, several hundred cases of uncontrolled laughter were reported over like a few months or something.
Wow, that's fun.
But there's also like other dancing plagues. Yeah, so I think that's that's really interested. There's also there have been cases also of contagious fainting. Maybe that was one of the ones that you talked about in schools as well.
Yeah, a lot of it in schools is things like fainting, passing out. There was cases in the one one of those things that I did read about was actually very recently in Australia, following an HPV vaccination, there was a series of girls that all like got very nauseous dizzy, some of them fainted, some went to the hospital. Nothing was wrong with any of them, but every single one of those girls was trotted out through a central quad where everyone could see them as they got taken to
the nurse's office. So this is a really important part of mass psychogenic illness, and it's why I was asking you how this first started after Frau Trofia began dancing. Because they tend to well, they do spread by sight and like visual and auditory type stimulation. So it's either people seeing directly something happened to someone, or hearing this is happening to everyone in this place, or in some cases smell as well.
Smell. Do you have any instances of smell.
There's been a lot of cases where someone, for example, in a school, a teacher came in and smelled gas. She said, I smell gas, and then she started getting nauseous, dizzy, lightheaded, and then throughout the whole school there was They've done tons of testing. They found absolutely nothing, no gas, no no toxins in the environment, no gas leaks of any kind.
But a bunch of students in that school, including the teacher, they all like got dizzy, nauseous, there was vomiting everywhere, things like that.
Interesting.
Yeah, so it can often start with a single smell. So that's another thing about this idea of mass quote unquote hysteria or mass psychogenic illness. Is it tends to occur in women.
Yes.
So, so one of the big issues with calling something mass psychogenic illness is that you really have to rule out that there's not anything else happening right right, Because any type of psychiatric disorder, especially a conversion disorder, you have to rule out. You can't just call it conversion disorder because you don't know as a physician what's going on with somebody. Right, just because you don't know doesn't
mean there's not something going on. And very importantly, it doesn't make the symptoms any less real.
Absolutely, and it doesn't make like, let's say, so you're saying that a lot of these conversion disorders and a lot of cases of conversion disorder, and a lot of instances of mass psychogenic illness happen when there's extreme trauma
around a situation. And so that's why I spent a lot of time at the beginning talking about the years leading up to the fifteen eighteen outbreak, and why I talked a little bit about Salem and stuff like this, is that these you can't just discount, like you're like, oh, well, whatever, that mass hysteria was just caused because whatever, a bunch of people were crazy. They were crazy, yeah, right, And
it's like, no, there was this extremely traumatic events. There's this extremely important cultural context and historical context that you have to consider when these are happening. And it's so it does seem very dismissive when it's just like, oh, mass psychogenic illness. Yeah, the othering of it is a very good point I think that you made.
Yeah, so it is very difficult. And then but at the same time, what's difficult too is when you have a situation where you know you don't want mass panic and if there isn't anything happening, like for example, in the case of the HPV vaccine, after that incident, there have been many many studies and before and since that incident to make sure that there really wasn't anything going
on with that vaccine. Yeah, but you don't want people to then not vaccinate because they're worried about this side effect of vaccination that actually had nothing to do with
the vaccine itself. It really was a psychogenic response. So the question too can like the other thing is in this first person who had it so in Frau Trophia, did she have something like a a medically diagnosable illness that caused her to be acting in this way that then became a psychogenic mass psychogenic response in the general population.
And this is something we can see happening often in things like real like gas outbreaks or like neurotoxin exposures where you have maybe a release of some toxic gas in an area that really does have an effect on people, and then in surrounding areas kind of expanding from that, you can have it amplified by this mass psychogenic response. So then it's even harder to differentiate what people really need, this like medical care because they were exposed to something
versus people who need medical care. But it's not going to be the same medical care because they weren't actually exposed to anything that are causing symptoms that they have. Right, right, it's really complicated.
That is really complicated.
So I want to talk about something that I found very cool about mass psychogenic response.
Oh okay.
That was trying to explain why the pathophysiology of why mass psychogenic response happens.
Okay, Oh, this is this is so cool.
This is a very human reason pathophysiologically, and I'm not saying this is the absolute reason, but this paper was very interesting. So this paper suggested that mirror neurons are involved in a mass psychogenic response. Oh okay, let's talk about mirror neurons. Have you heard of these? Mm hmm okay.
So mirror neurons are these neurons in your brain that so in my brain when I see someone doing something, these mirror neurons in my brain activate the same region in my brain that's activated in your brain by whatever you're doing. Okay, So a concrete example of this, if you, Aaron, are scratching your nose, scratch your nose, scratch okay, right, a certain part of your brain, the nose scratch region,
is activated while you scratch your nose. When I see you scratch your nose, the mirror neurons in my brain activate my nose scratch region.
That's wild, I know, But like, does this happen like we're friends, we're friends, happen to strangers?
Oh? Great question, as far as I know, absolutely, yeah, Okay. It suggested that this mirror neuron system is involved in a lot of our higher order functions, like imitation, which is something that's really important for learning and also for social behavior.
Right.
Imitation is something that we do very naturally. A lot of times you don't even realize that you're doing it. But if you're with a group of people, like people start to sort of imitate unconsciously what other people in
that group are doing. Yeah, but it's also very likely that there's inhibition on this system because we don't go around imitating absolutely everything that we see, right, that would be socially unacceptable and weird if you did that, right, Okay, So I want to go through some of this paper's hypotheses that they lay out in support of why mirror
neurons might be involved in mass psychogenic illness. One of them, first of all, is that the features of mass psychogenic illness very commonly, Like I said already, they spread these symptoms by sight or by sound or oral communication. That is often that is the way that mirror neurons also function. Both visual and auditory stimulation have been implicated in mirror neurons stimulation.
So if I said to you, I'm scratching my nose, we all are scratching our nose over here, then your nose neurons would scratch. Maybe.
Gotta be honest, I don't know a lot about mirror neurons, really don't, okay. So, Also, in addition to motor imitation, which we know mirror neurons are involved in, so scratching your nose, et cetera, it's also suggested that mirror neurons play a role in emotional cognition, So the tendency to catch emotions of other people and be able to recognize emotions in other people.
Is that empathy plus?
Yeah, but mirror neurons might kind of like help us get empathy essentially, right, access empathy.
That's very interesting.
So it's possible that mass psychogenic response might be this kind of emotional emotional contagion where you're seeing this emotion of other people and that's causing that same type of response in you, especially in the case of something like panic, right If other people are panicking, you're more likely to panic, right.
Well, And that's also like a that seems like it would be an evolutionarily favored response.
Absolutely, although it's how I ended up in therapy, so other people's anxiety giving me anxiety anyways. Yeah, So overall, that's kind of like a very bare bones look at mass psychogenic illness. What do we think, Aaron Dan.
I think mass psychogenic illness it's.
The only thing that seems, from a medical perspective possible. I think what's really important to keep in mind whenever you're thinking about something like any psychogenic illness is that it doesn't make the symptoms any less real just because we can't identify what it is medically or somatically. That's causing that illness. Just because it's your maybe outside stressors that are manifesting in this bodily symptom, it doesn't make those symptoms any less real. And that's so so important.
These people suffered and died in cases. Yeah, and it might just be you know, it's not something that we can explain with like a disease or an illness or a malnutrition or anything like that. But our brains are incredibly, incredibly powerful.
It's amazing, it's incredible. Yeah. Yeah, so okay, Oh, this was so fun. Thereic, this was really fun. I had a really good time.
Me too. More medical mysteries, let's tast we'll find another one.
Yeah, we'll come up with more, or send us more. Yeah.
If you know of medical mysteries, we will add them to our list. Yes, awesome, Okay, now sources time sources, all right.
I already mentioned the Dancing Plague book by John Waller. I also read a little bit of a book called Keeping Together in Time, which is about sort of like the anthropological history of Dance by William McNeil cool and then a few papers that nineteen seventy six Carporeal paper about ergotism, and then the reply by Spanos and Gottlieb a couple other papers about dancing plague, and I will post all of these on the website.
I have a number of very cool articles about ergotism, several on mass psychogenic illness, and a few resources if you'd like to look more into Sindenham Korea. I'd like to give a special shout out to a paper by Lee on the history of ergot RAI from antiquity to nineteen hundred and another more recent one by Belser Erlik about ergotism since nineteen hundred, and there are several other
on ergotism. And then that paper on mass psychogenic illness and mirror neurons was by Lee at All in twenty ten.
We will post all of these sources and a few more that we mentioned on our website where you can find them at this podcast will Kill You dot com.
Thank you so much to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and.
All of our episode, And thank you to you listeners for listening to our podcast and allowing us to make this because it's really fun and we really enjoy doing it.
I hope you had fun with this episode. It was so fun for us.
Yeah, okay, well, until next time, wash your hands
You filthy animals.