Dancing Plague Grips Strasbourg

1518

A woman named Frau Troffea stepped into a Strasbourg street and began dancing. Within weeks hundreds had joined her, twitching and reeling until they collapsed from exhaustion or heart failure. City doctors, unable to explain it, prescribed more dancing. The outbreak lasted into September. Modern theories have attributed it to mass psychogenic illness, ergot poisoning, or religious hysteria in a community wracked by famine.