In 1518, a City Hired a Band for People Dancing Themselves to Death

July 1518, Strasbourg. A woman steps into the street and starts to dance. No music, no celebration. She dances for days. Within a month, more than two hundred people are dancing. The city asks its doctors what to do, and their answer sounds insane today: let them dance it out. So the city builds a stage, hires a band, and brings in strong, healthy dancers to keep them moving. This is the true story of the dancing plague: what really happened on those stages, why the cure made it worse, and why something very much like it happened again in Le Roy, New York, in 2011. CHAPTERS 0:00 The city that hired a band 1:27 Strasbourg, 1518 1:53 Frau Troffea 2:16 It spreads 2:47 The doctors' cure 3:37 Until some died 4:03 The saint who curses with a dance 4:40 The ban 5:09 The red shoes 5:40 So what was it? 6:18 Le Roy, New York, 2011 6:53 The man who signed the ban SOURCES Kleine Strassburger Chronik 1424-1616, ed. R. Reuss (Strasbourg 1889), p. 5, the entry for 1518 ("until some died, collapsed, or wore themselves out"): https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_9F... Paracelsus, "Von der Krankheit, die man nennet den Veitstanz" (on Frau Troffea), Volumen Paramirum: https://archive.org/details/b24867330 J. F. C. Hecker, The Epidemics of the Middle Ages (London 1844), pp. 84-88, with the verse chronicle quoted from Schilter's edition of Koenigshoven (1698): https://archive.org/details/epidemics... Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools, English version by Alexander Barclay (1509), ed. T. H. Jamieson (1874), vol. 1, pp. 292-293 ("Of lepynges and dauncis"): https://archive.org/details/shipoffoo... The council's ban on public dancing and music, 2 August 1518, signed Seb. Brant (Strasbourg archives). John Waller, "A Time to Dance, a Time to Die" (2008) and "A forgotten plague: making sense of dancing mania", The Lancet 373 (2009). Le Roy, 2011-2012: New York State Department of Health investigation (2012); Reuters, "School's end clears up New York students' mystery twitching" (23 June 2012); overview with references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Le... Overview of 1518 with references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing... WHAT IS KNOWN AND WHAT IS NOT The city chronicle says the dancers were left to dance "until some died". No document from 1518 that we know of gives a number of dead; the famous "fifteen a day" comes from a later family chronicle. Mass psychogenic illness is the explanation most historians favor today, but it is an interpretation, not a certainty. In Le Roy, the diagnosis of conversion disorder was disputed by some of the families. ABOUT THIS FILM Original illustrated animation made for WHAT EUROPE FORGOT. The narration is a synthetic (AI) voice. All pictures are illustrations drawn for this film; they are imagined, not evidence. Sound: CC0 recordings from Freesound.org, and sound effects and tunes made with ElevenLabs. If you had been on the council in 1518, would you have built the stage? Tell me below, and subscribe for more of the history Europe forgot. #History #DancingPlague #DarkHistory