The Dancing Plague of 1518 — The Sinister Past
July 1518. A woman steps into a Strasbourg street and begins to dance. She does not stop — not that day, not the next. Within a month, four hundred people have joined her, and the city's own physicians make it catastrophically worse.
In this episode, we explore the dancing plague of 1518 — one of history's best-documented cases of mass hysteria — the city's disastrous attempt to dance the affliction away, and the competing theories that still can't fully explain what really happened.
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