In July 1518, a woman in Strasbourg walked into the street and started dancing. She did not stop. Within a week, about thirty people had joined her. Within a month, the city counted around four hundred dancers.
The city's doctors decided the cause was hot blood and the cure was more dancing. The council built a wooden stage, cleared the guild halls and hired musicians to keep the dancers moving.
It made everything worse. People danced until they collapsed. Chroniclers wrote that some died of exhaustion, strokes and heart failure in the summer heat.
The dancing ended weeks later. It was not stopped by a doctor. That part of the story is worth three minutes of your morning.
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