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The sorry souls who danced til they dropped, literally
Posted on September 23, 2008
No matter how much of a raver you are, the idea of dancing and dancing until death by exhaustion no doubt sounds horrific. Tragically, that's exactly what happened to several victims of the dancing plague in Strasbourg in 1518. John Waller, who's written a book about it, described the events in the Guardian last week: In the year 1518, about 400 citizens of Strasbourg danced for days or weeks in succession. This time the authorities intensified the epidemic by encouraging the afflicted to keep dancing in the misguided belief that doing so would cure them. They had the dancers taken to a specia...
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