The plague, despite the death, can be used as a ‘cure’ for society. Epidemically new technologies are born that endemically hide the system (symptoms) from which they harvest. So many people died during the Black Death that timekeeping was created in order to efficiently make the most of the people left to continue agricultural production—cue watches, town clocks, bells, and whistles. With the Dance Epidemic, however, the doctors became the technology themselves. As a media of the day, Paracelsus was the voice of the system of the cure: dictating its terms and its future, taking over from the local practices of peasant women as doctors, and speaking for the dancers themselves. With mass dancing in public, wax tablets became replaced by the mass media of the printing press. Posters went up with warning signs; stories of ships of fools were circulated. And perhaps it is the most symbolic of all that the first known image of a printing shop was combined with that of the dance of death. (via dancing, technology, and the plague: cure | THE STATE)