The Sweat That Emptied a Town
Few diseases have arrived so abruptly, killed so quickly, and then vanished so absolutely as the English sweating sickness.
OK, no towns were actually completely depopulated but the epidemic of English sweating sickness had a significant and devastating effect upon the communities it affected. The 1551 outbreak was centred around the town of Shrewsbury from where it spread, locally at first to Oswestry, Presteigne, and, a bit further, to Chester, eventually reaching London in after about three months. T the time of the outbreak, the population of Shrewsbury is thought to have been between 3,000 and 5,000. The sickness claimed 1,000 of those lives, with many more people fleeing the area. The town population fell significantly.
This pattern was to repeat throughout England.
English sweating sickness surfaced in 1485, in the weeks around Henry VII’s seizure of the English throne, and struck in a series of epidemics before disappearing for good after 1551. In between, it left a trail of sudden death and a puzzle that medicine has never solved.
Contemporaries described a horrifyingly rapid illness. A person could feel perfectly well at dinner and be dead by morning. The symptoms began with a sense of apprehension and dread, then cold shivers, aching limbs, headache and dizziness. This gave way to the phase that named the disease: a drenching, malodorous sweat, a pounding heart, breathlessness, and collapse. Survival or death was often decided within a single day. Those who lived through twenty-four hours generally recovered; many were dead before the day was out.
The sweat had odd characteristics that still baffle historians and epidemiologists. Unlike most epidemics of the era, it seemed to prefer the young, the fit, and the affluent — striking robust men in their prime rather than the old and frail. It ravaged England while largely sparing Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. And in its final major appearance in 1528, it leapt across the Channel to sweep through the German lands, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries, while curiously bypassing France and Italy almost entirely, before receding again.
Its reach touched the highest levels of Tudor society. Anne Boleyn is said to have caught and survived it in 1528, while others in Henry VIII’s circle were not so fortunate, and the king himself fled from residence to residence in fear of it. The last outbreak, in 1551, produced the one detailed medical account we have, from the physician John Caius, who set down its symptoms and course in a short treatise.
Then the sickness simply was gone.
There are many theories. Some researchers favour a hantavirus carried by rodents, pointing to the sudden respiratory collapse that hantaviruses can cause. Others have proposed a relapsing fever spread by ticks or lice, an unknown strain of influenza, or even a form of anthrax. The trouble is that no theory accounts for all the disease’s speed, social selectivity or its limited geography and, crucially, no physical trace survives.
From a modern view, the symptoms are consistent with sepsis, but what was the cause?
The sweating sickness therefore remains a genuine cold case: a lethal illness that shaped the anxieties of Tudor England, then slipped out of the historical record just before medicine developed the tools that might have caught it.