A quiz question · hard
In January 1962, at a girls' boarding school in newly independent Tanganyika, three students began to laugh and could not stop. Within months, how many schools had been forced to close because of the contagious laughter?
The Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 affected 14 schools in the Bukoba District over about 18 months and around 1,000 students. The standard modern medical diagnosis is *mass psychogenic illness* — a real condition with a long European history (the medieval dancing plagues, the early-modern convent crises, the 1518 Strasbourg episode). The episode was published in the *Central African Journal of Medicine* in 1963 by the Mwanza district medical officer and is the best-documented modern case. There was no organic cause; the affected children were physically healthy.
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The Laughter That Closed Fourteen Schools In January 1962 three students at a Tanganyikan girls' school began to laugh and could not stop. By the end of the year a thousand others had joined them.
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