What was sweating sickness

About years later, a seeming variant called the Picardy Sweat popped up in France, but neither strain has reappeared. That makes it difficult for modern-day scientists and historians to study.

They must rely on accounts of the time and primitive public health information to reconstruct the epidemics. Some scientists think it was a form of hantavirus , a rare disease also known as Seoul virus, others wonder if flu, food poisoning or a condition called relapsing fever were to blame.

No matter what its cause, sweating sickness left its mark. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland.

Henry VIII. Large households needed large staff, and large numbers of people need large kitchens full of large deposits of grain and other foodstuffs. Shortly after the people moved in, the rats and mice followed. The Four Corners outbreak was due to the presence of Sin Nombre virus within the droppings of deer mice living in the vicinity of the Navajo dwellings.

Aerosolisation of the virus when the droppings were disturbed, for instance when a broom passed over them to sweep them away, created an environmental airborne infection. Whereas nowadays rodents plague the poor, in post-medieval London they were a feature of all levels of society. Rather than try to remove the rats, an almost impossible task, Tudor housekeepers, fastidiously brushing their droppings away, may have released a cloud of hantavirus-loaded dust , triggering the sweating sickness across England.

All this assumes, of course, that the sweating sickness was an early variant of HPS. Other candidate pathogens have generated other explanations and scenarios. Sweating sickness had disappeared by late Elizabethan times. Its reign of terror barely lasted a century. If indeed it was an ancient variant of HPS, we can perhaps speculate about what led to its demise. The virus may have mutated to a less virulent form, perhaps in the process acquiring the capacity to be passed between humans as a more benign feverish illness, rather than being just a sporadic environmental hazard.

Or perhaps its evolutionary trajectory took it in the other direction, becoming more fatal to its rodent hosts, thereby reducing the quantity of infected droppings around human habitations. There is a third possibility — we know that the climate of Europe was becoming progressively colder from the late middle ages onwards.

Perhaps some subtle change in rodent ecology made life harder for the virus. Wherever it emerged, outbreaks tended to last for only a week or two. It died away by the end of So what was sweating sickness? In a book published the following year, an eminent physician, John Caius, recorded that the disease began suddenly with a sense of apprehension, followed by violent cold shivers, giddiness, headache, exhaustion and severe pains in the neck, shoulders and limbs.

After sometimes as little as half an hour, profuse sweating broke out suddenly, accompanied by a sense of heat, headache, delirium, rapid pulse and intense thirst. After 24 hours they were either dead or clearly recovering. Modern-day suggestions for possible causes include relapsing fever, hantavirus infection and anthrax.