What was sweating sickness?

no, this was NOT the flu, and it didnt completely resemble any other sicknesses, it hit the healthy the worst, and it appeared and dissapeared so rappidly…

its not around today, and there are scientists who have thought about digging up a duke who died of this disease, but they say this type of genetic material is unstable and may not have survived..

this sickness is a mystery…

Considering that England had during that time, many moats and ponds of still water, why not from mosquitoes? And what viruses do them bugs carry?
England got it the worst and first.
It also has the most in the way of castles and swamps and bogs
It would affect the nobility because they did basically nothing in physical activity and would affect the farmers the least because they worked continuously not allowing skeeters to land on them and draw blood.
The disease may have disappeared entirely because farming practices changed over the course of time and swamps got filled in.

I caught the h1n1 flu and I did not sweat. I just had trouble breathing and coughed up my liver and other guts. But that was a 9 day virus(with no drugs) and it is gone.

I guess we will always speculate on what it was, since the invention of soap and chlorine that means today is not then.

One possibility only alluded to is the possibility of a “susceptible population”. The curious charteristic of this disease mainly affecting the nobility and then suddenly dying out may indicate a genetic ” survival of the fittest”. It could have been anything from a toxic mold to vector borne virus that killed off all the susceptible hosts at the time they were susceptible. One more theory!

Here is a thought, the water taste and color in 1400’s was quite bad and lead to the development of a cultural trend; the of flavoring of water. Another trend of tea time to remember to consume flavored water might lead one to conclude that the engish of this time were not well hydrated. Simply combining the cultual development with some other interesting symptoms like headaches and extreme abdominal pain, heavy sweats, may present a stronger case for cholera.

They figured it was a form of viral pnemonia.

There is no European hantavirus. There is no evidence there ever was a European hantavirus. There are strains native to the New World and to East Asia, and that is all. The hantavirus of Arizona is a purely native disease, though the American Indian tribes never identified it as a particular disease because it does behave somewhat mysteriously–it took until the 20th century for it to be identified at all.

It is possible that the hantavirus spread from merchants or soldiers returning from contact with the Islamic empire who had themselves become infected through exposure from trade, and because the rodents that hosted the disease didn’t do very well in England, it became extinct after some time.

But a viral meningitis seems more likely, with the feelings of enormous dread. Person-to-person contact also sounds more like a type of viral meningitis. Some of the most deadly diseases disproportionately effect young people between the ages of 10 and 30–a cytokine storm is caused when an immune system overreacts to an infection, and it can be incredibly deadly. The high death rate of the Spanish Flu among the healthiest portions of a population are often blamed on this effect. Viral meningitis is just a description of where the virus acts, not the name of a specific disease–many different viral infections can cause viral meningitis, and it’s usually not terribly dangerous TODAY, but this is simply because the brain is not a primary target of the modern viruses that cause viral meningitis.

Anyway, a lot of the assumptions here are wrong about living conditions in the past. People did not have effective mouse traps and rat traps, but they hired professional rat-catchers, mouse-catchers, and terriermen to control rodents. They washed not seasonally but daily–not deep baths in cold weather, but what we’d call sponge baths, and hands were washed before and after every meal. Houses didn’t have a bunch of rushes thrown all over the floor with dogs and bones in it–floors were kept clean-swept, and fragrant herbs and rushes were special-occasion additions, which were added to make the rooms smell nice before big events (probably with the understanding that people stank without deodorant in a hot room after a certain number of hours). Great washes of laundry were typically done on a very irregular basis, perhaps as rarely as once every three months, but dirty linens were stockpiled between these great washes, and personal linens would be done as required in between. It was very hard to avoid getting infected by some kind of parasite at some point, especially when traveling, as the provisions at inns were famously bad, but when an upper class household did become infected by bedbugs, for instance, they went half-crazy tearing apart the bedrooms and all the bedding to try to kill them all. Many people felt that fully immersing oneself in water was dangerous in cold weather, and was best reserved for hot days, but they were not against the sponge-bath in any weather–and even a fear of the bath in cold weather was a Renaissance idea that was defunct by the early 1800s, as the people of the Middle Ages were generally enthusiastic about baths, especially the royalty, who had special bath-houses constructed, and by the 1800s, the idea that cold baths were particularly good for the health was general, and people were told that their old feather beds made them weak by being too warm.

The references to those people who were proud of their filth comes mostly from the 18th century, and they are recorded by people who were disgusted by the behavior of those they condemned. The references to infested headdresses have a parallel with the accusations of the crazy behavior of some celebrities today. The anecdote about a noblewoman’s revolting fingernails was made because it was revolting–if it were normal, it would pass without notice, but there was, in that society, almost no one who had the moral authority to force her to conform to the hygienic niceties of that age, so she could do what she wanted, however outrageous. Pretty much the only thing she couldn’t get away with was insulting the king (probably) or sleeping around. Beating her maids wouldn’t even elicit a comment! Being gross and smelly would.

As for the silly Indian who was going on about “shampoo,” “shampoo” meant massage, not any kind of product, for centuries. The British had no tradition of body massages, and so they called it “shampoo” from Eastern languages, where boys were frequently hired to massage men. The motion of rubbing the skin was eventually applied to something that was rubbed onto the skin. The modern hair “shampoo” on Western shelves is entirely a product of modern Western chemistry, and it was used to indicate that it was not an alkaline soap (which destroys hair permanently) but rather an acidic detergent that was safe for hair and meant to be rubbed onto the scalp in a shampooing motion.

I have a question for everyone. Do you guys think the sweat is what kept Henry VIII from having more living children? Just think about it, two of his wives had the sweat and were only able to give him one living, healthy child. It just makes me wonder if it messed with fertility and it just wasn’t known because people just assumed it was a woman’s fault if she did not bear children.