Note 14 — Chapter I · THE DANCING MANIA IN GERMANY AND THE NETHERLANDS.

“Chorus Sancti Viti, or St. Vitus’ Dance; the lascivious dance, Paracelsus calls it, because they that are taken with it, can do nothing but dance till they be dead, or cured. It is so called for that the parties so troubled were wont to go to St. Vitus for help; and, after they had danced there awhile, they were certainly freed. ’Tis strange to hear how long they will dance, and in what manner, over stools, forms, tables; even great bellied women sometimes (and yet never hurt their children) will dance so long that they can stir neither hand nor foot, but seem to be quite dead. One in red clothes they cannot abide. Musick above all things they love; and therefore magistrates in Germany will hire musicians to play to them, and some lusty, sturdy companions to dance with them. This disease hath been very common in Germany, as appears by those relations of Schenkius, and Paracelsus in his book of madness, who brags how many several persons he hath cured of it. Felix Platerus (de Mentis Alienat. cap. 3.) reports of a woman in Basle whom he saw, that danced a whole month together. The Arabians call it a kind of palsie. Bodine, in his fifth book, de Repub. cap. 1. speaks of this infirmity; Monavius, in his last epistle to Scoltizius, and in another to Dudithus, where you may read more of it.”—Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Vol. I. p. 15.—Transl. note.