The Dancing Plague of 1518,One day in Strasbourg, Germany a woman named Frau Troffea took to the str

The Dancing Plague of 1518,One day in Strasbourg, Germany a woman named Frau Troffea took to the streets and inexplicably started dancing.  I don’t mean that she went out into the street and did a little jig, she danced between 4-6 days straight.  Curiously, people began to join with her in fervent dancing, so that after about a week a group of 3 dozen people were dancing in the streets of Strasbourg.  The religious and political leaders of the day had no explanation for this unusual outburst of dancing.  Doctors ruled out astrological causes or any supernatural cause like witchcraft or satanic influence.  Rather they suggested that the mania was a disease caused by an imbalance of “hot blood”.  They suggested that in order to cure the disease, the mania of dancing had to run it course. Convinced by this explanation, authorities took steps to further encourage dancing, by opening a guildhall and two markets to the dancing.  They also hired musicians and constructed a large wooden stage in hope that eventually the people would eventually wear out and stop.  Instead the opposite happened as more and more people were encouraged to join the dancing mania.  At the height of the Great Dancing Plague of 1518, a crowd of over 400 dancers had gathered in the streets of Strasbourg, dancing continuously day and night.  Dancers even danced to the point of death, dying of heart attack, stroke, and exhaustion.Eventually the dancing mania did wear down, lasting about a month.  Several scientific and psychological theories have been offered to explain the cause of the Dancing Plague of 1518, but to this day the event has never been conclusively explained. -- source link

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