A Tudor plague that killed within hours, then vanished after 1551
The English sweat arrived in 1485 and moved fast, with death or recovery often coming within 8 to 10 hours. It flared in five major epidemics, struck rural areas hard unlike most outbreaks of the age, spared nobody by rank, and then disappeared for good. Nobody knows what caused it.
Most of what is known comes from John Caius, a physician in Shrewsbury during the 1551 outbreak, who published a treatise on the disease in 1552. It began abruptly with dread, then violent shivers, dizziness, headache and pains in the neck, shoulders and limbs. After half an hour to three hours came the hot phase: a sudden drenching sweat with delirium, a racing pulse, raging thirst and palpitations, but no rash. Victims then collapsed or felt an overwhelming urge to sleep, which Caius believed was deadly if indulged. Surviving one attack gave no protection, and some people endured several.
The first confirmed outbreak came in August 1485, just as the Wars of the Roses ended, prompting speculation that French mercenaries brought it. The Croyland Chronicle says Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby, used the sickness as an excuse not to join Richard III before Bosworth, and the Ricardian scholar John Ashdown-Hill has even guessed that Richard himself caught it on the eve of the battle. Crowds gathered in London for Henry VII's coronation may have helped it spread. In some places half the population died.
Accounts suggest men aged 30 to 40 died at the highest rates, and the rich were as exposed as the poor, earning the disease nicknames such as Stoop Gallant. It struck mostly in summer and early autumn.
Suspects keep changing. Ergotism was dismissed because England grew little rye, and relapsing fever fits the season but not the tick-bite scab and rash. Many researchers favour an unknown hantavirus carried by rodents, given overlapping symptoms and seasonal patterns, though modern hantaviruses rarely spread between people and do not simply vanish. In 2004 Edward McSweegan proposed anthrax from raw wool or carcasses. Genetic tests have got nowhere for lack of DNA or RNA.
Source: Sweating sickness
