Now modern researchers have proposed two possible pathogens that could have caused it, both of which still kill people today. The disease began abruptly with fever, extreme aches in the neck, shoulders, and extremities, and abdominal pain with vomiting.
The outbreaks were mostly contained within England, where they occurred during the summers of , , , , and Then this enigmatic disease vanished. During those summers, physicians struggled madly to understand the disease, notably Thomas Forrestier in and John Caius in Medical researchers at the Queen Astrid Military Hospital in Brussels have been poring over the medieval reports and comparing them to current epidemiology. Last January, they published their review article in the journal Viruses.
It reveals that English sweating sickness may be deeply entrenched in the history of England. The illness is first reported at the Battle of Bosworth, when Lord Stanley used it a convenient excuse for withdrawing his army, only to then betray the king and side with Henry.
Although the disease was first known in England, Heyman and his colleagues are exploring leads that it may not have originated there.
The mercenaries Henry Tudor commissioned from France for his coup may have unknowingly transported the disease to England after somehow acquiring it during their campaign against the Ottoman Empire at Rhodes in Only one outbreak traversed the English Channel. After 2, people died in London in , the Sweat travelled via ship to Hamburg, Germany, where over a thousand deaths occurred in a month. Heyman and his colleagues now conclude that a plausible suspect for this deadly disease is hantavirus.
This virus is transmitted by certain mice, rats, and voles, which never show signs of illness, and humans become infected by inhaling aerosolized rodent urine or faeces. Gant and Thwaites say they could conceivably test their hypothesis. Henry Brandon, duke of Suffolk, who succumbed during the epidemic of , was buried in a cemetery that still exists.
It would be possible to exhume the body and search for hantavirus RNA. People should not be blind to the possibility that things that are hailed as new may well be what has always been here. Register or Log In. The Magazine Shop. Login Register Stay Curious Subscribe. Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. Sign Up. Already a subscriber? Meanwhile, his mistress Anne Boleyn went into quarantine at Hever Castle, her family home in the Kent countryside.
For all his declarations of undying love, Henry stayed well away and instead dispatched his second-best physician, William Butts, with a love letter. Anne Boleyn survived, but the mortality rate was as high as 50 per cent in some areas. Only now, in the midst of a global pandemic, can we begin to appreciate the full terror that the Sweating Sickness must have wreaked.
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