A closer look
Frau Troffea stepped into a street in Strasbourg in 1518 and began to dance uncontrollably, kicking off a mystical mass psychogenic illness that eventually compelled hundreds of people to dance until they collapsed from exhaustion or died. The local authorities, operating with flawless medieval logic, decided the best medical cure for this mysterious exhaustion was to hire professional musicians and build a wooden stage so the victims could just dance the demonic sickness out of their system. Unsurprisingly, giving a live soundtrack to a bunch of highly superstitious, starving peasants experiencing a collective nervous breakdown only made the problem astronomically worse. It remains one of history’s most baffling events, proving that when faced with a terrifying, inexplicable psychological crisis, humanity's default response has always been to just turn up the music and hope the problem aggressively shuffles away
