Saint Vitus Dance

When I was a child, one of our dogs died from distemper. Losing a family pet is hard. Losing a pet to a nasty disease like distemper is a miserable experience. She deteriorated over a few weeks with escalating health problems. She had a hard time getting around, the pads of her feet became cracked and bleeding and she began twitching uncontrollably. The last symptom was referred to as Saint Vitus Dance. We were talking about dogs the other day and I wondered why they used this term.

According to this article, a group 16^th century Germans believed they could obtain a year’s good health by dancing before the statue of Saint Vitus on his feast day. This dancing developed almost into a mania, and was confused with chorea, the nervous condition later known as Saint Vitus Dance, the saint being invoked against it. His connection with such “dancing” led to his patronage of dancers.

This reminds of a trip we made to Prague ten years ago. There’s a gothic cathedral inside Prague Castle that is supposed to contain the bones of St. Vitus.