Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: The Dancing Plague

Episode Date: February 11, 2015

This week on Sawbones, Dr. Sydnee and Justin revisit a horrifying, real-world case of Boogie Fever. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers (http://thetaxpayers.net)

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books! One, two, one, two, three, four! We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We pushed on through the broken glass and had ourselves hot like our own.

Some medicines, some medicines that escalate my cop for the mouth. Wow! Hello everybody and welcome to Saul Bones bones a marital tour of misguided medicine. I'm your coach just Macaroi and I'm Sydney Macaroi Sydney I have a question for you. Hit me. I watched the Grammys on Sunday I didn't watch the Grammys on Sunday. I watched some of the Grammys on Sunday Okay, I watched some of the Grammys from Sunday on Tuesday. This is not a great start When would it be my turn to dance in a sea of video? Oh, well, honey, I didn't know you wanted to dance in a sea of video.

Of course I do. Kristen Wigg got to. Shilobov. Shilobov got to. That little girl gets to be in like everyone. And I just wanna know when is it my turn to be in a sea of video, Sid? Well, I don't, yeah, okay, I figure you're either going to

have to be friends with Sia, right? Or check. You're, you're already friends with Sia. Well, I bought her first album. I don't know that that counts. I'm a lot of us did. Yeah, I did too. Fair.

But okay, or maybe you could audition. I don't audition. Have you seen me audition. I don't audition. Have you seen me move? I don't audition. You could be on what, what is the little role was on dance moms? Is that the show she's from? Yeah, I could get on dance moms.

That's a possibility. If you get on dance moms, that's an in. Either that, or are you friends with shy of buff? I am not. That is a shame. I am bitter enemies with shy of buff. You are? I cut him off in traffic once. It's a long story. That bums me shame. I am bitter enemies of Charlotte. Charlotte buff you are I Kind of often traffic once it's a long story. That bugs me out. I loved even Stevens everybody just wants to dance

You know everybody's just looking for their shot and for a lot of people. It's in the sea of music video Well, that that's true Justin a few people I think get a chance to dance in a sea of video, but a lot of people do love to dance So many people sometimes that it's even considered like an illness Well, how do you mean? Well, there've been dancing plagues like Boogie fever Not well sure you could call it boogie fever. Why not okay? There's been there have been outbreaks of boogie fever throughout the year. Okay. I like that

So do you do you want to hear some more about? Yes, you're gonna be for tell me all about boogie fever. So the real thing the real bug the real the real not the dark side of Book lurking beneath the surface of boogie fever lies a dark truth Here with that story Giefy verlyze a dark truth. Here with that story, Sydney McElroy. What is this, am I on date line or? Welcome to date line. I don't think that's the intro to date line.

The man of her dreams became the man of her nightmare. Now we're on lifetime. Yeah, on lifetime she kills him in the end. There we go. That's the way life depends. Okay, nobody's gonna get, well, nobody's gonna get murdered anyway. We're gonna talk about the dancing plague of 1518.

And then dancing plagues in general, cause it's such a rich vein, dancing plagues. I wanna thank a couple people, Alexander and Ryan, who both suggested this topic. And I'm glad you did, cause I had not heard of the dancing plague. And now that I know about it, my life is better. So 1518 was a rough year in Strasbourg, France. It was just things had been hard. There had been famine. Diseases were running rampant. Leprosy and the plague were still,

you know, a big problem as they were throughout most history. But only recently, syphilis had kind of joined the crew. So all these people were getting this horrible thing that they didn't know at the time was syphilis and dine and there was a horrible economic depression. Bread prices were the highest they had been in years. Basically, it kind of sucked to live there. So what happened next seems like kind of sucked to live there. So what happened next seems like kind of a nice thing. This seems like a, I don't know, like a chicken soup for the soul story at first.

In July of that year, a woman, a frow trofoo stepped out into the streets of Strasbourg, France and started dancing. Okay. Just go, just dancing. Now. Cut and started dancing. Okay. Just go, just dancing. I love that. I love that. Now, cutting footloos. Just go, going crazy right there in the stone streets. I'm assuming, I'm trying to paint a picture.

I'm assuming it's like stone. We didn't have like paved streets. Yeah, this is a good picture. I can really visualize something sort of like stone. Oh man, it's like I'm there. So she's dancing. She's going crazy. Now it should be noted, she didn't look particularly happy about it. She didn't look like she was just, you know, feeling the rhythm. She was just dancing because she had no other choice. She just couldn't stop. She kept on going and a weird

thing happened by the end of the week, about 30 more people had joined in. Okay. In her in frow's dance party. All right. This continued. And by the end of the month, 400 people were dancing in the streets. See this was. That's it. And that's true.

This is the problem with early flash mob asbs. They took too long to start. You can't ramp up your flashmob that slowly. It has to be like, oh, is the waiter dancing? He is. Those people getting off the subway, are they dancing? They are like boom, boom, boom, boom, roll it up. One Bruno Mars song later, you got yourself a flashmob going. You can't take a month to get a flashmob up and run it. And then then but I will say that what they lacked in I don't know momentum. They made up for in just sheer tenacity they dance day and night. They did not stop which is bad as you can imagine right you know I know that that's a horrible thing to say that dancing is bad because it's so wonderful, but they begin dropping dead from exhaustion, dehydration, people who weren't in great shape

started having heart attacks and strokes, and heck, by the end of a month, even if you were in great shape, you may have a heart attack or stroke for a dancing stop. And it's July. So it's France. It's France. What does that mean? France, July and France with those streets that may or may not be stone, can you imagine?

I don't know. Is it particularly hot in France and July? Who knows? I'm trying to pay the war, but I think so. I think that it's a temperate climate, right? Oh my God. What could be less interesting to talk about? I think so. I think that it's a temperate climate, right? Oh my God. What could be less interesting to talk about?

Anyway, so city authorities got concerned because many of their citizens were dancing. And nobody could stop them. People tried to talk them out of it, but they seemed to be like in a trance. Like nobody would answer questions. They just kept dancing and more people were dancing. So they started getting anybody involved. They thought could help. They got doctors.

They got priests. They were looking for what is this. They started with the, of course, the, you know, most common culprits, the supernatural. Right. Well, okay, listen, usually I think we give people a hard time for thinking there's something supernatural. This is pretty weird. Like, if I didn't know, I mean, right now I'm thinking like, maybe a curse. This does sound curse-esque. And I'm in 2015. And people thought that.

There was a St. Vitus is the saint of epilepsy. I don't know if we mentioned that in the epilepsy episode. Thanks so much. And some people thought it was a curse from St. Vitus because they were kind of moving against their will. And so that was seen as akin to epilepsy. They thought about, is it something from the planets? Is it something astralogical?

Jupiter and Lyme, it was. Yeah, the moon causing us to do this. They decided not that. I think because it lasted a month, so whatever was causing it, you know, it was continuing. And finally, the best that the doctors came up with was, I think it's hot blood. I think they got hot blood. Hot blood, yeah.

I think it might be hot blood. Well, check and see, yeah. Got a fever of 103. Now typically when there's a problem with your blood, especially in the year 1518, what would people do? Get it out. Exactly. Usually bleeding is the cure.

It's not the cure, but that's what you know, you know, it's the treatment is what you meant to say. Treatment. What's strange is that they didn't decide to treat this with bleeding and this is all pretty well documented for multiple sources. So this is really what the city decided to do. The only cure was to keep them dancing until they just decided to stop. But they were literally dying,

so that wasn't gonna happen. No, but they wanted to encourage them to keep dancing. Okay. So this is the way they attempted to treat this outbreak of dance. They started opening dance halls in public spaces in like the grain market and other places that weren't typically used for dancing. They just opened them up and kind of hurted people into them and said, here, you can dance

here. They built a stage in the city square. What? They constructed a stage upon which one may dance. Should one shoot I guess if they were doing like the circle thing where one person gets in the middle and everybody's like Go jock go jock. Okay. What? How do you get them there? I mean will they take long enough dance breaks to like be heard in on to a stage

Or is it just like natural human compulsion like oh, there's a stage? I love the dance. I got to get up there I think that they were just depending on that like people cannot resist. Yeah, the stage they even Paid the city paid this guy out of the city budget, which is my favorite part for a band To play some music because I mean it was just irritating people that like at least get into a rhythm or some sort of Time or something like this kid over here's doing the jitterbug and this lady over here is waltzing, you're killing me. Which I like about that is that.

That won't be invented for 500 years. People were inventing dances left and right. So they started music, nothing helped. In fact, I think when they started playing music and opening up dance halls, more people started dancing was the problem. Yeah. And then after about a month, people just stopped,

or they died, but a lot of them just stopped. How weird. And nobody knew why they did it. Nobody could explain what happened. They just had to dance and then they didn't. The rhythm got them. We knew it was gonna get them and then it got them. It got them, yep. So this was called a dancing mania or

choreomania and it was actually named by Paracelsus who we talked about recently. Sure. He was the one who called it the dancing plague, which is what has now been known as. And it was also called St. Vitus' dance because of the association with St. Vitus. The question we have now, you know, a lot of people is why did this happen? And there have been a lot of theories as to why did a bunch of people in France in 1518 decide to just dance themselves to death for a whole month. Some had the theory that it had to do with the accidental ingestion of a bread mold. There's a specific mold that can grow on bread and it can cause

ergotism which is you can get seizures, you can get strange movements, you can hallucinate like a psychedelic kind of state. They thought, well maybe they all accidentally ate that and so they all started dancing, but typically it doesn't cause you to just dance. Like a seizure is pretty distinct from dancing for the most part. There were theories that it was just a religious ecstasy,

like that they all, it was around the time of the Feast of St. Vitis, everybody was just really in to him at the time and so religious furrestruck them, they started dancing. Some thought that this was the work of a dancing cult. And that they were like seducing everybody. Oh, okay, I got you. Like, like, like, Foulos.

Exactly, like, Foulos. Basically the Plot of Foulos. So some people thought this was the original Foulos. The first Foulos. Do you think Kevin Bacon was there? Yeah, he's, he is always anywhere. The first foot loose. Do you think Kevin Bacon was there? Yeah, he's always anywhere. There's mass dancing. Certainly, there is some way we can,

okay, real quick, link Kevin Bacon with frow, trifo. Real quick. Well, let's see. Usually I go somewhere and we're going to free him in. So frow, I'll try to fit maybe, I don't know. Is Paracelsis something? Is there something there?

Is there something we've talked about with him on this episode? Does that count? I don't know. Is Paracelsus something? Is there something there? Is there something we've talked about with them on this episode? Does that count? No, no. Anyway. But it was probably none of these things. It was probably a mass psychogenic illness. This used to be called mass hysteria.

But as we talked about in our episode about hysteria, hysteria is a word that's kind of falling out of favor for that. Right. Because it's not a real thing. But mass-seccogenic illness, meaning that for some reason, this is the way somebody was stressed, they were in a time of like, you know, like I said, famine, things were really hard, it was a harsh environment, people were very kind of at their wits in and they were starving and maybe a little confused and weakened anyway.

And so they manifested it in this odd way, dancing. And then a lot of other people started doing it because sometimes it's because of like the cultural milieu at the time. Like it is acceptable to get possessed or this is something that we accept happens sometimes. So maybe this is the way you kind of show your stress and anxiety by dancing. So you got chicken pox. So now I want chicken pox. I kind of do.

Sorta. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. It's cool. It's okay. And like this is the this is the culturally acceptable way to to display stress. For whatever reason, when we get stressed We're not allowed to just say man. Thanks really suck right now in France like breads really expensive and I have syphilis Like you can't say that you can go out the

And then and then blame it on St. Vitis And as people started looking into this we figured out that this has happened before. What? So the most famous dancing plague is 1518, and it's because it was so many people and it's really well documented. But there have been dancing plagues. The earliest one we know about was in 1020 in Bernberg, Germany. And all we really know is that it was around Christmas Eve.

There was like a church service going on, you know, probably like a Christmas Eve Mass, a very solemn, and everybody's, you know, in contemplation and very serious. And a small group of peasants just started dancing. I love it. And completely disturbed the Christmas Eve service. Yeah, they got it rock, and you mean? Yes. Okay.

No, it was the best Christmas Eve mass ever. But that's, that's really all we know about it. And it was probably only documented because it disrupted this church event. And so, and so we know that the, and I don't know what happened to the peasants. I shuttered a think. Probably something bad would be my guess. In 1237 something similar and small also happened. There's a group of children who started dancing and kept dancing all the way from Erfurt to Arnstatt, Germany. How far is that? Okay, I had to Google MapEx. I had no idea what that meant. And basically that would be about a four hour and two minute walk. Or a four minute and two minute dance.

If you're dancing at walking speed, which is typically the accepted conversion rate. Is that is that do people dance at walking speed? I would have thought maybe they got there a little faster. It's well, you know, sometimes you do, if you get like a little saturday night fever, struck going, sometimes you can cover some more ground. But every once in a while, you're going to have to put some cardboard out and do a B-boy spin on the ground and you're not moving anywhere then.

You're just getting a fresh spin going. It's not documented how many times they had to lay cardboard out. Do a B-boy spin? Yeah, or if there was cardboard for that matter. I even have been in cardboard, yeah. I don't think so. This actually, it's kind of similar to the Pied Piper myth here

because a bunch of kids just dance their way out of town. Oh, yeah. It's not documented if there was a guy with a flute or anything. Leading them. Maybe you got some guy with the flute just took credit for it, like they always do. You know those guys with flutes. You know those guys with flutes.

You know how they are. Floutists. Yeah, right. In 1278, there was a slightly larger event In near the river muse in Germany a lot of these are in Germany. Yeah, Germans love to dance I guess Surprisingly, yeah, they're not allowed to they have to blame it on a disease. I don't know I think they're allowed to do whatever they want now Well now yet, but well no I mean, now it's like societal,

just because they're a stoic people. You're a stoic people. You're probably late for something like that kind of thing. Oh, okay. I gotcha. By the way, I have one European accent. So I was gonna say, I'm trying to add you to it. I do the law, you know, it's gonna.

Trying to add you to doing more, so you can expose that bad. Okay, well, that's nice. That's a good supportive safety to have a co-host. Tell me about more about this dumb thing. You're talking about whatever. Ooh, there you go. There you go, man.

So 200 people started dancing near this river and ended up on a bridge. And I guess bridges were not built to sustain the weight of 200 dancing Germans. Regular German, 200 stationary Germans, who would ever be dancing. They'll stand still, right? But we don't need to build it for dancing. It doesn't have to be dance low bearing.

It just stand low bearing. What is this act? I made it more of a trace. Now it's more of a hit. He went, he was in Germany for many years. And then he's lived in America for me area. You got some Schwarzenegger It's a some thing. It's okay. Okay Sydney get me your German accent versus your Austrian accent Please tell me the subtle differences between those two accents as you would replicate them as a speaker

I I don't try to do accents. Then I don't either be a city, but it's the only thing I've created the show, so I'm just trying it, okay? Okay, we'll keep doing my best. You'll have some more chances. Keep working on accents. So it's a lower. So basically the bridge collapsed. Yeah.

From dancing. Which I'm assuming to end at the dancing plague. No, nothing stopped there. In 1374, that was probably other than the dancing plague. No, nothing stopped there. In 1374, that was probably other than the one in 1518, the next largest dancing plague. It started out in several different small towns all over Europe. Again, started out in a German town.

But then it popped up all over in these tiny little places, these isolated outbreaks of dancing, which is weird because they were all not related. I mean, maybe somebody was traveling around spreading it, so to speak, but as far as we know, they were all isolated events, and they started in 1374 and kind of continued for the next decade, but in Germany, in France,

in Luxembourg, Italy, Holland, and there was a monk that died in Chaffhausen, a bunch of women started to dancing frenzy in Zurich. It just continued for decades. People just in little teeny pockets all over Europe having these little dancing plagues. They related to, at the time, there was a great famine because there was a huge flood, I guess the Rhine had flooded, and there was a lot of destruction, a lot of people's homes, there were, I read one description of like dead horses floating in the streets and things, and so like it was a really gross time I guess to be alive, and so a

lot of people took to the streets and and danced. When we look at all of these different dancing plagues, we kind of see some common elements, again, they all danced. They tended to happen in times and places of stress, something that caused everybody a lot of hardship, and then they danced. But you see different elements depending on

where you are and what happened. Some, they say that people seemed to be completely in a trance, didn't know what they were going to enjoy it. In other places, people got naked and ran around the street, dancing naked. In some, they went and put on brightly colored clothes and put garlands in their hair and came out and danced.

Love it. Which is a very, like that's intentional. That's a very intentional. You really dialed into the experience to be like If that's just a trans like putting on some Valor and getting ready to shake it in some cases people were described as screaming while they danced in others They were singing in some cases. They were just laughing hysterically

Some some people had sex in the streets Sometimes the people dancing would try to get other people to join in and would become violent if they didn't. Holy crap. Sounds like the electric slide at middle school. What? Your friends being violent if you were an electric slide? Yeah, and I'm like, I don't know how.

You know. Oh, it's so easy. Teach me, teach me, teach me the electric slide. In some cases, there were people who it appeared had traveled long distances to join in these dances, which does make me wonder if the idea that there were just these guys going around like, let's get the next town going. Yeah, let's get them to dance them. Dancing Johnny Apples Zids.

There were a couple that were just one group. I'm a little bit more about that. It was just one guy dancing. Like that was the play. Which I don't think that's the, not dancing play. Just that one weird guy who's been out in the street dancing.

I got a nail in this. No, you don't. Stop it. You're embarrassing yourself. You just love to dance. And I mean, you look fantastic. You're amazing, but like, you don't have it on this. City, what the heck, pardon my language, but what the heck was causing this?

Well, Justin, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about dancing plagues, but before I do, why don't you head on down with me to the Billing Department? Let's go. The medicines, the medicines that I skilled at my cards before the mound. Okay, Sydney, please, I have have to understand dancing plagues. So again, as we're trying to understand what would cause this, we start to look towards some similar events throughout history. So a couple of things that are also examples of these mass-seccogenic illnesses.

And specifically, dancing plagues, there was something called tarantism. Have you ever heard of that, Justin? No. So it occurred in Southern Italy. It started in about the 13th century and continued until the 16th century. But I would guess that it is spider related. It is.

It is spider related. And the same root is like the Tarantella and tarantula. Right. Well, the Tarantella is not a spider. It's a spider-based dance. Spider-based dance. Yeah, you move like a spider. It's the same root. Okay. Well, it's kind of related. Yes. I'm saying it in that tone of voice that you sometimes

when I don't know if I'm right, but I'm saying it with enough confidence that you're going to buy into it for fear of will it get being wrong? No, you don't. Okay, the tarantelle is not named because you move like a spider. Okay, what's the name for? It's name because it was the dance that would cure you if you got bitten by a spider. So it's all all kitten cabila. So, Tarantism, there was this belief that somebody would get bitten by a spider. And I say that, and I'm saying it with quotes, you can't hear them, but they're quotes around it.

Because there's little evidence that people actually got bitten by spiders. I mean, I mean, sure, they did, but not all the people who had Tarantism. And the only way to cure it was to do this dance and you also had to have the right music or you would die. So you did the dance, you have to have the music, it would cure the spider bite and then you would dance or and and like other people would want to join in with you and so there were these events of Terrentism where like people were all dancing, but they say like, no, no, no, it's cool.

It's just that so and so got been by Spider. And they've got a dance to this music. And maybe since I once got bitten by Spider in the past, if I don't also dance, it'll come back up in my blood. So I better join in just to be on the safe side. Got it. You know, just to make sure. But when you look at the other cures that were listed in

addition to doing the dance and listening to the music and the music was vital, there were some other things that you could do to help get rid of the poison from the spider. You could drink large amounts of wine. Okay. You could jump into the sea. Sure. You could if there's two of you, you could if there's two of you you could tie each other up and whip each other with fines Okay, you could pretend sword fight. Okay. All right. Okay. Okay. All right, you just want a day off work You and your buddies just want to take a day off work. So you have made up this this crazy crazy disease that there is a feeling that perhaps unlike Crazy crazy disease that there is a feeling that perhaps unlike The dancing plagues where people were not we're not enjoying the dancing they dance themselves to death that maybe Tarantism was in response to an oppressive time period where you weren't allowed to do some of these things And maybe you maybe you were under stress, you know, financial year or illness whatever and so this is how you kind acted out. It was a cure, but it was also it was a cure. It was a cure for the, for the

blues. The blues. Shake this blues way. Yeah. There was also more recently, another example of a mass-deckage and a illness. There is in 1962, it was called the Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic. And this happened at a mission school in what is now Tanzania. There was a weird epidemic where three girls in the school started laughing. And then everybody else started laughing too. Just the students, it was not the faculty,

it was just restricted to the students, but they laughed so much and so long and couldn't stop that they had to shut the school down. It lasted for some up to 16 days, and it spread to many nearby villages and schools. All in all, 14 schools were affected, had to be shut down for some period of time. And over 1,000 people got this.

I know you don't mean to. Right now you sound like a Nickelodeon ad like Breaking news kids across the country have been have had to shut down school because they're laughing so hard. I love you It's tippy I really take me back. I feel like I feel like you're about to tell me when snick Starts. Oh, man. I wish I was No, unfortunately, this was this was a real thing where they had to I mean it really disrupted like village life in school Because the girls could not I say girls. They were male students as well

But it was mainly female students could not stop laughing it lasted over a period of six months all and all And if you look at the other symptoms, I think this is interesting in addition to the hysterical laughing there was pain fainting flatchelence, respiratory problems, rashes, attacks of crime, and random screaming. Okay, so just being a teenager, basically, you're just being a young person in the world. Exactly. Yeah, I know. That was kind of, they just described middle school, I think. Yeah, that's just all middle school are those basic symptoms.

You could also, in the same line, you could consider some of what happened during the Salem witch trials, a time of mass sacrogenic illness. What is a mass sacrogenic illness? Like I said, it's basically when a lot of, OK, so it usually starts with one person. And the idea is that there is some, like I said,

some time of stress or strife. So like in the Salem Witch Trials, it was a time when a lot of the people who were involved, for instance, had had family members who'd had negative interactions with the Native American population. They'd either been killed or had been involved in fights and people had been killed as a result or been captured.

So it was a stressful time for those people. So something to that effect. And the way that you experience that stress is consistent with the cultural beliefs of the time. So if you think about a puritanical society, if somebody is acting improper, if somebody is acting improper, a good way to explain that would be possession, right? Or that the devil had entranced them as in the Salem witch trials. And so that is the way that that expresses in that culture. Does that make sense? Do you see what I'm saying? So it's basically, it's basically explains our national obsession for Jersey Shore for like three months there whenever it was really in Jersey Shore, same basic principle. Exactly, exactly. That was a mass-secogenic illness. They usually have symptoms like that, like fainting and nausea, which I definitely had a lot of nausea in response to the Jersey Shore epidemic of what year was that 2000, 2000 something like that. There is now recently, there are still been outbreaks of things like this recently. A lot of them have to do with like I said like fainting or stomach pain, like a whole school, everybody gets stomach pain and passes out or something, which is in as exciting to talk

about as dancing. There is an epidemic that occasionally strikes parts of Southeast Asia where people believe that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Okay. If your genitals go all the way in, you will die is the belief. So you have to stop it by any means necessary, which could mean putting like a peg through

your penis in order to prevent it from going all the way back into your body. Yes. Okay. Which has been known to happen. And then again, it happens the same kind of way. Like one person has this fear and then a whole community will have this belief

that this is happening to them, men and women. Women think that their penises are going back in their mind. No, that they're, that they penises are going back in their mind. No, they're, that they're vaginas. Okay, got it. Wait, aren't they already... Well, we'll spare you the lesson on female anatomy and we'll talk about this. Oh, thank you.

Similarly. I'll spare you the accent. I was about to, if so, it all works. Come sound the wash. Thank you. The Southeast Asia accent. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That was definitely going to offend someone. It was either going to be Russian or I don't know. Polynesian. So it's one of those accents. It's kind of a blend. Okay. Kind of blend. Okay. Good. And we won't have you teaching geography to anybody. Sounds good.

Similarly in West Africa, their epidemic beliefs that someone is trying to steal your penis. Mr. Steal your penis. And they've even been cases of penis thieves who were murdered in different parts of Africa. Because there was a belief that... You got it. And again, as far as explanation for this.

We do hear that in a movie. This is about a group of penis thieves. They turn on each other. It's called reservoir dogs too. They're back and they're stealing penises. And again, it's one of those weird things. This is our best guess. We have a lot of records of what happened in 1518

in these various other dancing plagues, but we don't know exactly why, but we do know that this is something that we see even today where people kind of react to a stressor in a strange way. And like I said, it usually has to do with what the culturally accepted way of acting out is at the time. And if at the time it was not acceptable to dance in the street. That's what you did. So I mean, except for the whole, you know, dancing till you die thing,

it sounds like a pretty benign. Yeah, it doesn't seem that bad, except for, if you get killed for being a penis thief, but until that happens, you're fine. This was almost like we were going into like, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the musical episode. I was getting really close to entering into the Dancing Demon thing. Thank you for, for experiencing this.

I, I did my best. Uh, thank you so much for listening to our program. We hope you had a good time. Thanks to the Maximum Fun Network for having us on their, their, their family of programming. A lot of great shows to listen to. Uh, the flop house is a one I want to recommend this week. on their, their, their family of programming. A lot of great shows to listen to. The flop house is a one I want to recommend this week. I was listening to that with my, my brothers this past weekend,

a very funny, bad movie review podcast that you will very much enjoy. But there's a ton of other shows in the early join, Jesse Good, Judge John Hodgman, bullseye, one bad mother, memory palace, risk. My brother, my brother in me. Thank you, dear, so much. And we have risk. My brother, my brother in me. Thank you, dear, so much. And we have another, my brother, my brother in me, tight product called the Adventure Zone,

where we played D&D with our day ad. So a new episode of that comes out on Thursday. So get there. Thanks to the taxpayers for letting us use their song Medicines, is there intro and outro? And thanks to you at home for listening. We sure appreciate it. Thanks for all of your emails and tweets and subjects.

We're at solbones on Twitter and subones. Subones, you know, solbones at maximumfundadorgas or email address. And that's going to do it for us. Until next Tuesday, I'm Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And it's always don't drill a hole in your head. Alright!

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