English sweats, the often fatal sweating sickness,…

1578 CE

English sweats, the often fatal sweating sickness, has been epidemic in England six times between 1485 and 1578.

Apart from the second outbreak, all the epidemics have been severe, with a very high mortality rate.

It has been confined to England, except in 1528–29, when it had spread to the European continent, appearing in Hamburg and passing northward to Scandinavia and eastward to Lithuania, Poland, and Russia; the Netherlands also were involved, but the disease did not spread to France or Italy.

The illness began with rigors, headache, giddiness, and severe prostration.

After one to three hours, violent, drenching sweat came on, accompanied by severe headache, delirium, and rapid pulse.

Death might occur from three to eighteen hours after the first onset of symptoms; if the patient survived for twenty-four hours, recovery was usually complete.

Occasionally there was a vesicular rash.

Immunity was not conferred by an attack, and it was not unusual for patients to have several attacks.

Each epidemic lasted for only a few weeks in any particular locality.

A Boke or Counseill against the Disease commonly called the Sweate, or Sweatyng Sicknesse, written by prominent English physician and Humanist John Caius and published in 1552, is the main source of knowledge of this disease, which modern investigators think may have been a form of influenza.

Caius, who had been practicing in Shrewsbury in 1551 when an outbreak of the sweating sickness occurred, and who died in 1573, attributed the cause of the illness to dirt and filth.

All the epidemics occurred in late spring or summer, so it may very well have been spread by insects.

The disease seemed to be more severe among the rich than among the poor, and the young and healthy were frequent victims.

It is unlikely to have been a form of influenza or typhus.

One twentieth-century writer identified it with relapsing fever, which is spread by lice and ticks and has many characteristics in common with sweating sickness.

This explanation is certainly plausible.

It is improbable that sweating sickness should appear as a well-defined disease and then vanish altogether, although such disappearances, while rare, are not unknown. (Since 1578, the only outbreaks of a disease resembling the English sweat have been those of the Picardy sweat, which occurred frequently in France between 1718 and 1861. In this illness, however, there was invariably a rash lasting for about a week, and the mortality rate was lower.)