A Rehearsal of Hell: The Mysterious English Sweating Sickness of Summer from 1485 to 1551
Soon thousands of victorious soldiers and vanquished prisoners of war would arrive in London and swell this teeming mass of humanity, which already numbered perhaps in the tens of thousands, even further. And already, even prior to the climactic Battle of Bosworth Field, many soldiers on both sides had been deemed too sick to fight on account of a new and mystifying disease that both armies simply dubbed, “The Sweat”.
“The Sweat” first arrived and struck without warning during the heat of high summer and it painfully killed thousands that it infected within a mere matter of hours. It mowed down soldiers and healthy young men and women like a scythe from Hell. And worst of all, just prior to King Henry VII’s coronation in August of 1485, “The Sweat” was about to arrive in London.
From about the end of July until the end of October 0f 1485 “The Sweat” is thought to have been responsible for taking the lives of upwards of 15,000 Londoners out of a total population of just under 60,000 for a staggering mortality rate of one in four that had not been approached by any disease since the Infamous Black Death of 1348-1352, which may have killed up to one third of England's total population.
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| Battle of Bosworth Field 1485 |
For almost three generations from 1485 to 1551 a mysterious illness, whose origins and true nature remain unknown, ravaged England several times, about every 20 years or so causing unimaginable death and suffering in the summertime, and then, after that, it seemed to vanish from the pages of history like a ghost carried away by time.
The mysterious disease known to history simply as “The English Sweat”and called simply “The Sweat” by those contemporaries fortunate enough to survive the dreadful illness left such an indelible and horrific mark on England’s collective consciousness that even over fifty years after it’s last outbreak in 1551, in the year 1604 William Shakespeare in his play Measure for Measure had one of his characters, when speaking about all of the tragic and deadly ills that life has to offer utter the line, “Thus, what with the war, what with the Sweat, what with the gallows and what with the poverty…”
In Latin called Sudor Anglicus, The English Sweat first appeared in early summer of 1485 and thanks to the ongoing Wars of the Roses and then the Coronation of King Henry VII, and the mass crowds and frequent travel of large groups of people that both of those events caused, the English Sweat spread rapidly across the country. Ironically, since King Henry’s son was to become England’s first Protestant King, many contemporary historians who were apologetic towards Catholicism claimed that “The Sweat” was God’s punishment visited upon the English people for Henry VIII’s many wives and eventual break with the Roman Catholic Church.
But in 1485, when Sudor Anglicus first arrived in London, England’s break with the Church was still year’s away and it seemed as if Hell itself, in the form of a disease that suffocated its victims from within had been unleashed upon the entirety, rich and poor, young and old, of the English population.
The onset of “The Sweat” was swift and sudden and it usually came at night while the victim attempted to sleep. It would cause chills and tremors followed by a high fever that would leave the victim profusely sweating and far too weak to stand or even sit up. Within a few hours, usually, the victim would be dead.
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| Death Bed of the English Sweat |
Noted humanist, writer and venerated Catholic Saint, Thomas More who is most famous for writing Utopia a renowned work on the nature of government that many view as a forerunner to the modern novel, lived from 1478 to 1535 and witnessed several outbreaks of the dreaded “English Sweat” in and around London during his lifetime.
When describing what it looked like to observe a patient fall victim to Sudor Anglicus, Thomas More wrote, “The patients were placed instantly to bed….covered in clothes, windows being closed….the patient, finally, in his rehearsal of Hell, being bathed in an agonizing sweat, gave up the ghost…”
More also referred to The Sweat as, “More harmful than the sword.”
And unlike other prior periodic pandemics, like the Black Death of the 14th century, which had befallen England during the Middle Ages and seemed to take a greater toll on the country’s many rural peasants and urban poor than on anyone else, Sudor Anglicus appeared to make no distinction between rural or urban, rich or poor.
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| Sir Thomas More |
A physician named John Caius, who practiced in the town of Shrewsbury near the border with Wales, and was extremely active in treating the sick during the final outbreak of The English Sweat in 1551 wrote that, “They that had The Sweat sore, with peril of death, were either men of wealth, ease or welfare--or of the poorer sort such as idle persons, good ale drinkers or tavern haunts.”
Caius, one of the most quoted and cited authorities on The English Sweat, whose eyewitnesses accounts of the 1551 outbreak were widely read and were, most probably even familiar to William Shakespeare himself in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, seemed to believe that it was a dissolute sort of lifestyle, whether that be rich or poor in nature, which caused one to be afflicted with Sudor Anglicus.
Obviously, though John Caius’ moral assertions have no scientific validity whatsoever when it comes to the transmission of airborne disease, his firsthand accounts of the illness are some of the most detailed and harrowing documents available, even to this day, to historians and medical researchers investigating the nature and causes of the mysterious English Sweat.
Caius’ contemporary report which he wrote in 1552 and called A Book or Counsel Against the Disease Commonly Called the Sweat or Sweating Sickness described the disease as, “Beginning very suddenly, with a sense of apprehension,” followed by a “cold phase”, as he termed it, which consisted of chills that were followed a severe headache, dizziness and then total exhaustion.
After the initial phase, according to Caius, came delirium, high fever and then the infamous drenching sweat that gave the disease its name. If the patient gave way to the near complete exhaustion that accompanied the Sweat, then as John Caius observed, the said patient would almost inevitably die within a couple of hours. It was also observed that being infected by “The Sweat” once and surviving, did not offer any immunity to the disease whatsoever, with many victims being infected twice, or even thrice within the span of a few weeks and often dying on their second or third time being infected.
The outbreak of Sudor Anglicus observed and recorded by the physician John Caius in the summer of 1551 was the last, and most severe, outbreak of the English Sweat to occur. It was the only outbreak of the sweating sickness that affected not only the British Isles, but also spread to continental Europe and caused high mortality rates in both France and Germany.
England was ravaged by “The Sweat” during multiple summers. In the summers of 1485, 1508, 1517, 1528 and lastly 1551 Sudor Anglicus killed tens of thousands, suddenly and unexpectedly, in both rural and urban England. And then, after 1551, just as unexpectedly and inexplicably as it had arrived, Sudor Anglicus “The English Sweat” simply disappeared--never to return again--we hope!
Astonishingly, even to this very day after centuries of historical research and countless advances in medical knowledge, no one is quite sure exactly what “The Sweat” was, or where it came from or even why it disappeared just as suddenly as it had arrived.
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| Pulmoonary Damage caused by a Hantavirus |
Most researchers and scientists believe today that “The English Sweat” was caused by an, as yet unknown form, or species, of hantavirus. A hantavirus is a virus transmitted from animals to people that attacks the pulmonary organs (lungs) in human victims and is very often fatal. Many researchers today believe that Sudor Anglicus was a hantavirus that was transmitted from rodents to humans during the summer months of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in England. Though this theory is the most plausible, it is simply conjecture, and the true origins of the dreaded English Sweat still remain a mystery.
All we can do today is continue to pray that it never returns…
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