Sweating Sickness: Getting Sweaty This Way was Never a Good Thing

You’ve probably heard of the Bubonic Plague that killed millions of people in Europe during the Middle Ages. But have you heard of the other equally deadly disease that terrified people in that era, known as “the Sweating Sickness”?

This mysterious  and highly contagious disease ran rampant in England in particular in the Tudor era with the first recorded instance in 1485 and reappeared at different intervals, claiming many lives. Death could come quite quickly once symptoms were present – with the time between onset and death being as little as just a few hours. It sounds like something out of a horror flick!

Symptoms

The Sweating Sickness started out suddenly with headache, rigors, giddiness and severe prostration, a sense of apprehension, cold shivers, and pains in the neck, shoulders and limbs. This cold stage could last from half an hour to three hours and was then followed by a stage of violent, drenching sweating with severe headaches, delirium and a rapid pulse. It was often fatal, with death occuring between 3 to 18 hours after this stage.

If you caught the Sweating Sickness once, that didn’t guarantee you immunity. Bad enough you had it once and survived, you could still catch it multiple times! Some people went through several bouts of it before it eventually killed them.

Causes and mystery

The cause of this disease and what it was remains mysterious. Historians believe that it is possible the general dirt and sewage conditions of the time were responsible for the disease.

Each epidemic took place in late spring or in summer and it is thought perhaps it was spread by insects and lice that were active at that time of year. Every single Sweating Sickness epidemic vanished when winter started.

Rich people were often more affected by it than the poor, and young healthy people more so.

Influenza and typhus have been ruled out as the modern-day explanation for this mysterious illness, and some scholars think that it may have been caused by hanta virus a disease a bit like Ebola.

Next Page: When Did It Start?