SWEATING SICKNESS, an extremely fatal epidemical disorder which ravaged Europe, and especially England in the 15th and 16th centuries. It derives its name "because it did most stand in sweating from the beginning till the endyng," and, "because it first beganne in Englande, it was named in other coun tries the Englishe sweat." It first ap peared in London in September, 1485, shortly after the entry of Henry VII. with the army which had won the battle of Bosworth Field on Aug. 22. It was a violent inflammatory fever which after a short rigor, prostrated the powers as with a blow, and, amid painful oppres sion at the stomach, headache, and leth argic stupor, suffused the whole body with a fetid perspiration. All this took place in the course of a few hours and the crisis was always over within the space of a day and night. The internal heat which the patient suffered was in tolerable, yet every refrigerant was cer tain death. It lasted in London from Sept. 21 to the end of October, during which short period "many thousands" died from it. The physicians could do little or nothing to combat the disease, which at length was swept away from England by a violent tempest on New Year's Day.
In the summer of 1508 it reappeared in London, and in July, 1517, it again broke out in London in a most virulent form, carrying off some of those who were seized by it within four hours. On this occasion the epidemic lasted about four months. In May, 1528—the year in which the French army before Naples was destroyed by pestilence, and in which the putrid fever known as Trousse-ga lant decimated the youth in France—the sweating sickness again broke out in London, and spread rapidly over the whole kingdom.
The following summer, having appar ently died out in England, it appeared in Germany, first at Hamburg, where it is recorded that 8,000 persons died of it, and shortly after at Liibeck, Stettin, Augsburg, Cologne, Strassburg, Hanover, etc. In September it broke out in the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Nor way, whence it penetrated into Lithuania, Poland, and Livonia ; but after three months it had entirely disappeared from all these countries. For 23 years the sweating sickness totally disappeared, when for the last time (March or April, 1551) it burst forth in Shrewsbury, spread rapidly over the whole of Eng land, but disappeared by the end of Sep tember. Since 1551 the disease has never appeared as it did then and at earlier periods. Its nearest ally is sudamina or military eruption, which has appeared in frequent, but usually limited, epidemics in France, Italy, and Germany (still called there "the English sweat"), dur ing the 18th and 19th centuries, some times, as in the department of Vienna in 1887, in so severe and even fatal a form as to suggest the older epidemic in minia ture. It was epidemic in France in 1906. The disease is allied to the influenza which broke out among the French troops in Picardy in 1917 and thence spread over the world.