There are many humorous and hilarious diseases we can feel free to mock these days, for example, The Simpsons made it okay to laugh at leprosy and hysterical pregnancy. But there is one affliction which was funny right from the moment it took hold of the Alsace city of Strasbourg in 1518; dancing mania. What initially began as one woman dancing vigorously in the street quickly began to spread throughout a surprisingly large amount of the local populace. After a month of near continuous dancing, the crowd of gyrators had swelled to roughly 400, and some began to fall victim to fatigue, heart attacks and strokes. There are still no real scientific explanations as to why the epidemic started, spread or even how it happened in the first place, but there are very real records from cathedral sermons and the like which say that the plague was very much a real thing. What makes this even more bizarre is that the physicians of the time recommended building a giant wooden stage in order for the afflicted to dance themselves to health again, kind of like suggesting a reality TV personality's fitness DVD to the morbidly obese. The result, as you can imagine, was spectacularly disastrous, with untold numbers succumbing to exhaustion.
