Dancing plague of 1518 | Patreon Short
Dk and Kirioth talk about the Dancing Plague of 1518.
In July 1518, an uncontrollable dancing mania broke out in Strasbourg, as eventually up to 400 people danced continuously for weeks, until many of them eventually collapsed from exhaustion, heart attacks, or strokes, for still unknown reasons.
Comments (12)
I can say from experience, doing any activity until your feet bleed is not fun. Also Miasma theory stuck around until the mid to late 19th century.
Now that I know that rat King 1518 is based off the dancing plague it makes a lot more sense.
Crazy spooky story and I love the idea of AL going into historical horror stories like this. My first thought of skepticism though is that a person dies after 3 days without water, probably less if you’re constantly moving. Nobody could dance for a week straight, if the dehydration didn’t kill you the heat exhaustion would cook your brain within 3 days.
Love to have another reason to have the "You Like History" shirt.
Holy shit i got major whiplash to hear grimsalvo on here! Love those guys! And whitchouse40K as well!
Yes, more historical stuff, there's so much they can cover! Like the Lost Legion of Rome for a short, or the Bronze Age Collapse for a full episode!
I would love more of these historical oddities short episodes.
The reason the death toll is believed to be so high and the LSD are tied together, because the fungus that makes LSD is found on rotten wheat. If you are starving to death then you make bread out of rotten wheat. Then since it only takes a little LSD to be scary high, imagine you ate multiple pieces of bread laced with the stuff. Then the rest of the town does the same, and monkey see monkey do on the dancing.
Fun fact: there is a thing called conversion disorder where stresses/anxiety/ptsd of the world just suddenly creates physical symptoms and it can spread rapidly to others. It’s a theory what was happening to the Salem girls (which they blamed on “witches”), a Tanzania girls school had a laughing plague in 1962, and a notable case happened in a small dying upstate NY town in 2011 to a bunch of cheerleaders (yes, there’s a reason why girls are usually the patient zero for it)
Germ theory was late 1800s Late 1800s
I love how I woke up to this post. Real classy "so this happened. Now have a good day folks."
Ah yes, tha dancing plague, one of the most notable cases of mass hysteria in human history. If anyone wants a fun diving off point for more of these incidents, i would recommend the sam O'Nella video about this exact topic.