![]() ![]() Last January, they published their review article in the journal Viruses. Medical researchers at the Queen Astrid Military Hospital in Brussels have been poring over the medieval reports and comparing them to current epidemiology. During those summers, physicians struggled madly to understand the disease, notably Thomas Forrestier in 1485 and John Caius in 1552. The outbreaks were mostly contained within England, where they occurred during the summers of 1485, 1508, 1517, 1528, and 1551. Intense chills were followed by a hot phase involving sweating so profuse that the disease soon became known as, simply, “the Sweat." Death came swiftly after profound weakness and agonizing shortness of breath culminated with chest pain, rapid pulse, and cardiac palpitations. The disease began abruptly with fever, extreme aches in the neck, shoulders, and extremities, and abdominal pain with vomiting. Holinshed's Chronicles, published in 1557, described English sweating sickness as "so sharp and deadly that the lyke was never hearde of to any manne’s remembrance before that tyme." This was written by men whose grandfathers saw the Black Death. Now modern researchers have proposed two possible pathogens that could have caused it, both of which still kill people today. Science has identified the pathogen that caused the plague and current cases are treatable with antibiotics, but no one knows what caused the sweating sickness. Although this disease claimed many fewer lives than the plague, it gained infamy because its victims were killed within 24 hours by sweating to death. ![]() Yet there was another medieval epidemic that took many thousands of lives, known as the English sweating sickness. Most people have heard of the Black Death, which obliterated 60% of Europe’s population during the mid-14th century. ![]()
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