The reign of Henry VIII was marred by an unprecedented outbreak of a disease that has been a mystery for the past 500 years. The Sweating Sickness was one of the most fatal diseases ever recorded, able to kill a person mere hours after showing symptoms. And the main symptom? Massive amounts of sweating.
TRANSCRIPT:
Henry the Eighth was a kooky guy. For lots of reasons, just one of which was he was an obsessive hypochondriac. In fact he was known to sleep in a different bed every night to keep from catching whatever disease might have been going around.
Yeah who would have thought the guy who beheaded all his wives might be a little paranoid?
But maybe… he had a reason to be?
After all, when he was born, Europe was still rebuilding after the Black Death, which killed 1/3 of the continent.
Keeping in mind, they didn’t have the germ theory of medicine back then so they still didn’t really know what caused it… meaning they didn’t know if it would come back.
And besides, his reign was a bit marred by a plague of its own. A disease that ranks right up there with ebola in terms of not just deadliness but in the speed of its deadliness. Once you started showing symptoms, you had literally hours to live.
The main symptom being, it made you sweat. A lot.
It killed thousands of people in multiple waves of outbreaks throughout Henry the Eighth’s reign. It became known as Sweating Sickness, or Sudor Anglicus.
The latin makes it extra creepy.
The Experience of the Sweat
Imagine you’re a sheep herder in late medieval England, say 1485. You wake up one morning, out in the field like you do, enjoy a quick snack of bread or barley, roll up your sleeping kit, and head out to tend the flock.
As you’re walking the field, seeing to your favorite lamb, enjoying a beautiful sunrise, you suddenly just feel this wave of apprehension come over you. Like a sudden sense of impending doom.
Within 30 minutes, you break into a shiver. And you don’t know why, you’re not cold, it’s the middle of June, but your body is shaking uncontrollably like you’re in a cold shower.
While you’re focusing on that, you start to notice a blinding headache that just takes over to the point that you’ve got to sit down, like you just can’t even think straight. And then, it travels, down your neck, into your shoulders and your limbs, your whole body starts to ache, just moving at all becomes agonizing.
So you lay down in the tall grass, just ignoring the sheep for a few hours, barely able to move aside from the full-body shivers that have taken over, despite the hot afternoon sun. And that’s when things get really bad.
You go from feeling inexplicably cold to inexplicably hot. Then the sweating begins.
Every pore of your body just begins gushing sweat. You’re like a sponge that’s being squeezed by a giant invisible hand. It’s literally just dripping off of every square inch, just soaking your clothes and leaving a puddle on the ground around you.
As your body tries to compensate, you develop an overwhelming thirst, so you drink all the water you have but it’s still not enough.
Delirium sets in as your pulse quickens, your racing heart pounding inside your chest as you gasp for air, until an all-powerful urge to sleep takes over, and before the sun begins to set, you close your eyes, desperate for relief. And never open them again.
As if that wasn’t enough, some wolves are now attacking your flock and the sheep have scattered to the wind – it’s a bad day, folks.
The First Outbreak
What I just described was a classic case of the Sweating Sickness, which because it mostly occurred in England, earned it the nickname Sudor Anglicus, or the English Sweat. Not to be confused with the other English Sweat, Tom Jones.
The Sweat appeared in England in 1485, which just happened to coincide with the end of the Wars of the Roses, so a lot of people think it came over with Henry Tudor and his army.
The Wars of the Roses were a house war between the Yorks and the Lancasters, it went on for like 30 years, it ended with the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 where Richard the third was killed. And the Tudors took over after that.
Henry Tudor had been kinda banished to France, but he raised an army there and it’s thought that whatever the sweating sickness was, it came over with them.
Henry Tudor, by the way, was also known as Henry the Seventh, Henry the Eighth’s father.
So Henry and his army came through all…
But it seems a few of them were all…
That is just a theory though, some people think that it was already in England before Henry got there, in fact, some records suggest that Richard the Third had fallen ill the day before the battle, and his symptoms kinda matched the Sweating Sickness.
Either way, Henry Tudor took the throne at the end of August, and the first cases were reported on September 19th.
And it spread like wildfire over the next month and a half, killing thousands of people in and around London. In some areas, half of the population was wiped out.
And it did not discriminate, it killed the lower and upper classes alike, including two lord mayors and six aldermen.
Being 1485 and they didn’t really understand how disease spread, a lot of people thought this was God’s punishment for those who supported Henry Tudor. And it didn’t win him a lot of fans in his new kingdom.
But luckily it ran itself out quickly and by the end of October, the disease vanished.
I imagine they really breathed a sigh of relief with the Black Death still so much in the cultural memory.
The Later Outbreaks
But luckily the disease stayed away for a couple of decades, with the exception of a random case here or there, but then in 1502, England was like…
With a series of outbreaks in 1502, 1509, 1517, and 1528.
The 1502 outbreak was not quite as noteworthy as the first one, but it did affect hundreds of people, including many royals. The 1507 outbreak was relatively small, but the third outbreak in 1517 reached epidemic proportions.
And for the first time, some cases appeared in mainland Europe over in Calais, which was English territory at the time.
But interestingly, it only seemed to affect the English. Like the only cases in France were English people living there. But even back home, foreign dignitaries commented on how it hardly affected foreign visitors. This has never really been explained.
But it was the 1528 outbreak that really took things up a notch.
I mean this outbreak came along like…
Do you know how much you have to sweat before you start to sweat blood? It’s not good.
The 1528 outbreak swept across the entire country of England, stopping only at Scotland, because of the bagpipes.
It did jump the waters to Ireland, where it killed their Lord Chancellor, Hugh Inge.
This by the way is when Henry the Eighth was bed hopping to avoid the disease, in fact he bailed out of London and constantly traveled between homes and castles, which credit where it’s due, was kinda smart. Considering he didn’t know what germs were.
And he had good reason to be paranoid, many people around him got sick, including Anne Boleyn, who was his mistress at the time. She obviously survived.
But this round of the Sweat managed to catch a real foothold in Europe, showing up in Hamburg in July 1529 and spreading north across Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway, and south into Strausberg, Cologne, and Marburg, eventually holding out in the Swiss Confederacy.
Thousands upon thousands died in this outbreak and it seemed to be dancing into plague territory, but it finally burned itself out, and disappeared forever.
I’m kidding, there was another outbreak.
The Final Outbreak
In 1551, the last of the major outbreaks occurred, 22 years after the big one, but this one was small by comparison.
It stuck to the rural areas and smaller cities, killing 1,000 people in Shrewsbury and Halifax. But what’s most noteworthy about this outbreak was how well documented it was.
This is where we’ve got to talk about a guy named Johannes Caius.
Johannes Caius
Johannes Caius was an interesting character, first of all his name wasn’t Johannus Caius, it was John Kays, he latinified his name to sound more impressive.
He realized that it was affecting the wealthy and the nobility and promoted himself to them as an expert in the disease, which he did have some experience as a physician, but it was mostly a cash grab.
But it was a move that worked, he became something of a celebrity, you might even consider him an influencer of his day.
And he used that fame and experience to publish a book, titled, The Sweating Sickness: A boke or counseill against the disease commonly called the sweate or sweatyng sicknesse in 1552.
This went on to become the definitive document in regards to the disease. Most of what we understand about sweating sickness came from this book, granted there were plenty of other writings and letters from that time period that talked about it, but this is what most people refer to.
For example, he described the various stages by saying, “The first is sodainnes, shewed in this, that it taketh a man sodainly, euen in perfect health, without any token or feeling of sicknesse past, shewed of any precedent cause, as heauines of minde or lothsomnesse.”
“The second is sweat, which is a continuall sweating without any rest, not by any way to be driuen away.”
“The third is a great heate, and an unquenchable burning, as it were, in all the body.”
The fourth is an intolerable thirst, and desire of drinke.”
“The fifth is a quicke pulse, and a strong, with great beating and paine about the heart.”
“The sixth is a shortnesse of breath, and an euill and difficult drawing of the same.”
“The seuenth is a drousinesse, and a desire to sleepe, with a maruelous heauinesse of the head.”
As for treating the disease, his recommendations were pretty simple, basically to rest as much as possible as early as possible and to let the sweating run its course, so he advised people not to try to cool themselves down, and to “”Eschew all cold ayre and wind”
He also said to avoid food and drink for 24 hours and to not fall asleep if possible.
And this advice actually was… awful. That’s terrible advice, if your body is purging fluids, you need to replace them, to avoid dehydration.
At least there wasn’t anything about bloodletting or leaches I guess.
This advice would go on to kill thousands of people. Or at least it probably would have, but what actually happened was it disappeared. The 1551 outbreak was pretty much the last one.
Picardy Sweat
There were a couple of minor outbreaks of diseases that seemed similar to the sweating sickness, but it’s not for sure that it was the same thing.
In 1644, an outbreak in the town of Tiverton killed around 400 people, and they called it “sweating sickness” but there are no records of the actual symptoms so it’s impossible to know if it was the same thing.
A bit more famously, the region of Picardy, France experienced a series of outbreaks between 1718 and 1918 that came to be known as the Picardy Sweat. And this is thought to have been a variant of the English Sweat.
It was far less deadly, but it tended to keep popping up over and over, it was kinda like whackamole with this one, and it had some symptoms that were different from the English version, for instance this one came with a really bad rash.
The upside of the Picardi sweat was that later outbreaks occurred at a time when we had a much better understanding of diseases, which might point to a probable cause of the original disease.
For example a 1906 outbreak that affected 6,000 people was studied by a French bacteriologist named André Chantemesse , and he noticed that it tended to affect people who lived on farms or people who slept closer to the ground, which suggested a rodent-borne illness like Hantavirus.
Which gets us into the theories around the Sweating Sickness, which there’s no shortage of.
Theories
Some have explained it away as a contaminated water issue due to primitive sewage systems and poor sanitation.
Another culprit is Relapsing fever, which is spread by ticks and lice, which it is thought that Sweating Sickness could have been a rodent-borne illness.
For one thing, rodent-borne diseases were pretty common back then, I mean that’s how the plague got around, so…
It also seemed to follow the kinds of epidemiological patterns one would expect if it was spread that way.
On the other hand, some symptoms of Relapsing fever don’t line up with Sweating sickness, like large scabs at the bite sites and skin rashes all over the body. That wasn’t reported with Sweating Sickness.
A researcher in 2004 suggested it could be anthrax?
Yeah I guess anthrax spores can get carried in raw wool and infected animal carcasses. But this is kind-of a fringe theory, it’s not widely supported.
What is widely supported is the original hantavirus theory.
Hantaviruses are zoonotic diseases, meaning they come from animals, like rodents and bats and some insect eaters. But they can also spread person-to-person, which the Sweat had attributes of both.
In fact that outbreaks tended to occur during seasons when the rodent population was high, and often corresponded to heavy rainy seasons, which would lead to larger than average rodent populations.
By the way when I say it comes from rodents, I don’t mean the fleas – that is how the Black Death went around – but with Hantavirus it’s in the animal’s poop. Which gets broken down and aeresolized and then you get it by breathing in those particles.
Yeah, you just get it by breathing poop, nothing gross like a bug bite.
Of course it’s not the virus that gets you, it’s the disease it causes, and with hantaviruses the disease is HPS, Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome.
And HPS has a lot of the same symptoms, it starts with fever and chills, muscle aches, and then a debilitating headache…
While profuse sweating isn’t a symptom, it does cause vomiting and diarrhea – which is a bit of a fluid purge.
And the disease eventually gets into the lungs leading to shortness of breath and irregular heart rate.
A much more recent example of a hantavirus outbreak is the Four Corners Outbreak of 1993.
It first caught the attention of the medical community when a young Navajo couple died within days of each other from a respiratory disease, and they were both really healthy, one of them was a marathon runner.
The cases piled up after that, of people who had fever and muscle aches for a few days and then suddenly had lot of trouble breathing and coughing and eventually just died of respiratory failure.
This did just follow an El Niño season, which meant there were more grasses and plants that supported more rodents, specifically the Eastern Deer Mouse.
It was eventually traced to a novel hantavirus that they named the Sin Nombre virus. Which actually cracks me up because Sin Nombre means “has no name”
The Four Corners Outbreak was thankfully kept to only 23 deaths, but a lot of it lines up with how the Sweating Sickness went down. Also it just goes to show how the hantavirus can mutate, which is what they think happened with the Sweating sickness.
It’s not a slam dunk, that whole, “it’s a mutated virus that does things that we’ve never seen” part is carrying a lot of weight there. But it’s the best theory.
So is it something we should be worried about?
I mean… it’s been 500 years and we’ve made it so far. I think we’ll probably be okay.
I mean we always need to keep an eye out for novel diseases but the return of Sudor Anglicus? I don’t know about that.
Whatever virus caused the English Sweat, it was kind-of a victim of its own success.
Like you could argue it was even deadlier than the Black Death. In that it killed faster, like I said, you died within hours of symptoms starting.
But it kinda killed so fast, there wasn’t time for it to spread to someone else. So it couldn’t propagate very far.
I mean a virus’ job isn’t to kill its host it’s to spread to other hosts.
That’s why Covid was so successful, it affected everybody differently. Some people died right away while others didn’t even have symptoms and could spread it around.
So while the Sweating Sickness was awful and obviously strikes a chord, it thankfully didn’t have the same impact as the Black Death, which killed 1/3 of Europe and led to massive societal changes.
Although… it may have actually had an outsized impact on England, a lot bigger impact than you may think.
Going back to Henry the Eighth, he had an older brother named Arthur, who was supposed to be king, but he died at age 15
That happened in 1502, which yes, there was a sweating sickness outbreak that year, and many in the court were apparently afflicted with it.
There’s no proof of this, so we don’t know for sure, but if he was taken by the sweat… Well that changed some things.
Henry the Eighth wouldn’t have been king, the Anglican Church would never have formed,
But also there wouldn’t have been a Queen Elizabeth, who would go on to transform the country and define a whole era of history.
Also Henry’s wives would probably have kept possession of their heads. He had a thing for blades apparently.
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