2024 Author: Adelina Croftoon | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 02:07
Scientists still cannot identify this strange infection, which remained in history under the name of sweating disease or English sweat
An incomprehensible infection spread throughout Europe, but it was mainly sick in England during the Tudor times - in the years 1485-1551.
This disease was extremely dangerous and often led to death. Moreover, it was not the flu, not the plague, not smallpox, but something completely different, judging by the symptoms described by contemporaries.
The disease originated initially among the soldiers of Henry Tudor, who lived in Brittany. In August 1485, he landed with his army in Wales, defeated the English king Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, came to London and became King Henry VII.
By that time, in just two weeks, several thousand people had died from a mysterious infection, mostly those who had contact with the soldiers. And in six weeks, 15 thousand people died.
After that, the disease subsided, but the people perceived it as a curse and a bad omen. In 1492, under the name "English plague", this disease came to Ireland, and in 1507 and 1517 returned to England with renewed vigor. These epidemics wiped out half the population of cities such as Oxford and Cambridge.
A new English epidemic came in 1528 and killed thousands of people across the country. Even the king (and then Henry VIII ruled, since the direct heir to the throne - the son of Henry VII, Prince Arthur just died from this disease) was forced to flee from infection, often changing his place of residence.
Death of Prince Arthur
This year, the epidemic spread to the rest of Europe and even the Novgorod lands of the Moscow principality suffered from it. Epidemics subsided only by 1551.
Modern doctors are only a little closer to the mystery of this disease, but they still cannot understand what the inhabitants of the Middle Ages faced. The mortality rate for this infection reached 30% -50% and the disease was very transient. Feeling unwell in the morning, by the evening the patient could already die.
The only consolation was that if a person survived the first 24 hours of the illness, then most often he would continue to remain alive.
What is even more curious, "English sweat" did not hit mainly the old and the poor - the first victims of plague or smallpox epidemics, but brought down young, strong, healthy and rich people. Those people who ate well and lived in good houses with access to adequate water.
The illness began with a fever, the person covered with profuse sweat, he shivered, then pains in the neck, back and abdomen appeared. Then nausea and vomiting began, his heart ached, the person really wanted to sleep and sweat began to stand out even more profusely. The dying people were literally wet from streams of sweat, and this sweat had an extremely unpleasant odor.
The survivors of the English sweat were not immune to it and could become infected again and this time die. There were many such cases.
Scientists noted that each wave of the epidemic occurred either at the end of summer or at the beginning of autumn, that is, in a specific 1-2 months. True, this fact has not yet led to any clue.
According to one of the versions, it all began on the battlefield of the Bosphorus, it is possible that somewhere in the ground there was a pathogenic bacteria or virus, which then fell on the fighting soldiers.
In an attempt to find traces of this pathogen, scientists exhumed the remains of 16-year-old Prince Arthur in 2002. Pieces of the bones of a teenager who died of a sweating disease were carefully examined by doctors, but alas, no dangerous pathogen was found in them.
According to another version, the disease was spread by rats and mice, which bred a lot after the end of the War of the Roses, which happened just before the start of the first epidemic. Then the country's economy began to rise, they began to build many barns, houses and cut down forests for them. Or maybe the disease came just from the forests.
"They cut forests on a huge scale and could have stumbled upon something in old trees. In my opinion, they found a rare virus there," suggests a medical historian from Israel Yossi Rimmer.
At the same time, according to the version of the same Rimmer, the epidemics ended not because the virus was overcome, but because it mutated into something less dangerous.
Other doctors believe that English sweat may have been a variation of the flu, like the Spanish flu, which killed 50-100 million people worldwide in 1918-1919.
More exotic versions suggest anthrax or particularly brutal tuberculosis.
In 2013, researchers at the Queen Astrid Military Hospital in Brussels concluded that the symptoms of English sweat are very similar to hantavirus, which causes hemorrhagic fevers.
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