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Sweating sickness, also known as "English sweating sickness" or "English sweate" (Latin: sudor anglicus), was a mysterious and highly contagious disease that struck England, and later continental Europe, in a series of epidemics beginning in 1485. The last outbreak occurred in 1551, after which the disease apparently vanished. The onset of symptoms was dramatic and sudden, with death often occurring within hours. Although its cause remains unknown, it has been suggested that an unknown species of hantavirus was responsible for the outbreak.
Signs and symptoms
The symptoms and signs, as described by physician John Caius and others, were as follows: the disease began very suddenly with a sense of apprehension, followed by cold shivers (sometimes very violent), giddiness, headache, and severe pains in the neck, shoulders and limbs, with great exhaustion. After the cold stage, which might last from half an hour to three hours, the hot and sweating stage followed. The characteristic sweat broke out suddenly without any obvious cause. Accompanying the sweat, or after, was a sense of heat, headache, delirium, rapid pulse, and intense thirst. Palpitation and pain in the heart were frequent symptoms. No skin eruptions were noted by observers including Caius. In the final stages, there was either general exhaustion and collapse, or an irresistible urge to sleep, which Caius thought to be fatal if the patient was permitted to give way to it. The malady was remarkably rapid in its course, being sometimes fatal even in two or three hours, and some patients died in less than that time. More commonly it was protracted to a period of twelve to twenty-four hours, beyond which it rarely lasted. Those who survived for twenty-four hours were considered safe.
One attack did not offer immunity, and some people suffered several bouts before dying. The disease tended to occur in summer and early autumn.
Cause:
The cause is the most mysterious aspect of the disease. Commentators then and now put much blame on the generally poor sanitation, sewage and contaminated water supplies of the time, which might have harbored the source of infection. Others attributed the disease to the English climate with its moisture and its fogs, or to the intemperate habits of the English people, and to the frightful want of cleanliness in their houses and surroundings. But we must conclude that climate, season, and manner of life were not adequate, either separately or collectively, to produce the disease, though each may have acted sometimes as a predisposing cause. The sweating-sickness was in fact, to use modern language, a specific infective disease, in the same sense as plague, typhus, scarlet fever, or malaria.
The first outbreak at the end of the Wars of the Roses means that it may have been brought over from France by the French mercenaries whom Henry VII used to gain the English throne. However, the Croyland Chronicle mentions that Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby used the "sweating sickness" as an excuse not to join with Richard III's army prior to the Battle of Bosworth.
Relapsing fever has been proposed as a possible cause. This disease, which is spread by ticks and lice, occurs most often during the summer months, as did the original sweating sickness. However, relapsing fever is marked by a prominent black scab at the site of the tick bite and a subsequent skin rash.
Noting symptom overlap with hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, several scientists proposed an unknown hantavirus as the cause. A critique of this hypothesis included the argument that, whereas sweating sickness was thought to be transmitted from human to human, hantaviruses are rarely spread in this way. However, infection via human-to-human contact has been proven in hantavirus outbreaks in Argentina.
History:
Sweating sickness first came to the attention of physicians at the beginning of the reign of Henry VII in 1485. There is no known definitive statement that the sickness was present in troops landing at Milford Haven. Soon after the Battle of Bosworth, Henry arrived in London on 28 August, where the disease first broke out on 19 September 1485. There, it killed several thousand people by its conclusion in late October that year. Among those killed were two lord mayors, six aldermen, and three sheriffs.
This alarming malady soon became known as the sweating sickness. It was regarded as being quite distinct from the Black Death, the pestilential fever or other epidemics previously known, not only by the special symptom that gave it its name, but also by its extremely rapid and fatal course.
The sweating sickness reached Ireland in 1492, when the Annals of Ulster record the death of James Fleming, Baron of Slane from the pláigh allais, newly come to Ireland. The Annals of Connacht also record this obituary, and the Annals of the Four Masters record "an unusual plague in Meath…" of 24 hours' duration; and any one who survived it beyond that period recovered. It did not attack infants or little children. However, Freeman in his footnote to the Annals of Connacht denies that this "plague" was the sweating sickness, despite the similarity of the names. He thought it to be "Relapsing or Famine Fever"—possibly typhus.
The most remarkable fact about this epidemic is that it spread over the Continent, suddenly appearing at Hamburg, and spreading so rapidly that in a few weeks more than a thousand persons died. Thus was the terrible sweating-sickness started on a destructive course, during which it caused fearful mortality throughout eastern Europe. France, Italy and the southern countries were spared. It spread much in the same way as cholera, passing, in one direction, from north to south, arriving at Switzerland in December, in another northwards to Denmark, Sweden and Norway, also eastwards to Lithuania, Poland and Russia, and westwards to Flanders and Holland, unless indeed the epidemic, which declared itself simultaneously at Antwerp and Amsterdam on the morning of the 27th of September, came from England direct. In each place which it affected it prevailed for a short time only — generally not more than a fortnight. By the end of the year it had entirely disappeared, except in eastern Switzerland, where it lingered into the next year; and the terrible "English sweat" has never appeared again, at least in the same form, on the Continent. England was, however, destined to suffer from one more outbreak of the disease, which occurred in 1551, and with regard to this we have the great advantage of an account by an eyewitness, John Kaye or Caius, the eminent physician.
- This site has two translated extracts written in June 1528, by Monsieur du Bellay, French Ambassador to the court of King Henry VIII. They offer a contemporary account of the onset and course of the Sweating Sickness epidemic of that year; the fourth major outbreak of the disease. Du Bellay details the members of court who suffered or died from it and comments on the King’s relationship with Anne Boleyn, who had the sickness at her father’s house.
Sources & Further Reading:
- Wikipedia - Sweating Sickness
- The Conversation - What was sweating sickness- the mysterious Tudor plague of Wolf Hall?
- The Sweating Sickness
- Encyclopaedia Britannica - Sweating sickness disease
- Discover Magazine - The Sweating Sickness Returns. June 1997
- Luminarium Encyclopedia Project - English Sweating Sickness
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