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THE
SWEATING SICKNESS
IN ENGLAND.
BY
FRANCIS C. WEBB, M.D., F.S.A.,
PHYSICIAN TO THE MARGARET STREET DISPENSARY FOR
CONSUMPTION, ETC.
Reprinted from The Sanitary Review and Journal of Public Health, for July 1857.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY T. RICHARDS, 37 GREAT QUEEN STREET.
M.DCCC.LVII.
THE SWEATING SICKNESS IN ENGLAND.[A]
There are few subjects which exhibit more points of interestto the epidemiologist and medical historian, than that series ofepidemics, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which wentby the name of English Sweating Sicknesses. We are chieflyindebted to a learned German professor, Dr. Hecker, and to histranslator Dr. Babington, for the acquaintance we in the presentday have with these events; and we would here observethat, in whatever light we may view Professor Hecker’s deductionsand theories, there can be but one opinion as to his faithfulnessand diligence as a medical historian. As his work,however, is published by a society, and is therefore of somewhatlimited circulation, we have thought a short historicalsketch, embodying, and in some instances slightly amplifying,[2]Professor Hecker’s researches on the subject of the ravages ofthe disease in England, might not be uninteresting to ourreaders; who will then be in a position to follow us on somefuture occasion in a discussion of the nature of a malady, whichfive times within a hundred years devastated our island, andonce, and once only, spread its ravages amongst the Teutonicraces on the continent of Europe.
We may preface our historical resumé by noticing that thedisease, in the form in which it then presented itself, was unknownbefore the year 1485, and that it has never reappearedsince its last outbreak, in 1551. Its novelty gave it one of itsappellations; it was called by the common people the “newacquaintance”; whilst its limitation to British soil gained forit on the continent the names of the King of England’s Sickness,the English Sweating Sickness, Sudor Britannicus.
Characterised by the suddenness of its seizure, by its short anddefined course of twenty-four hours, by its great fatality, by theprofuse and fetid perspiration in which the patient was bathed,and from which the disease derived its most common name, bythe frequency with which it attacked the same individual severaltimes within a short period, or perhaps, we should more correctlysay, by its relapsing tendency, by its selection of strongand robust men in the prime of life as its victims, by theequality with which it invaded the palaces of the rich and thecottages of the poor, we cannot wonder at its producing amarked effect on the national mind, and being long held in remembrance.Even as late as the days of the great rebellion,occasional references may be found to it