The Sweating Sickness in England

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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.

There are few subjects which exhibit more points of interest to the epidemiologist and medical historian, than that series of epidemics, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which went by the name of English Sweating Sicknesses. We are chiefly indebted to a learned German professor, Dr. Hecker, and to his translator Dr. Babington, for the acquaintance we in the present day have with these events; and we would here observe that, in whatever light we may view Professor Hecker’s deductions and theories, there can be but one opinion as to his faithfulness and diligence as a medical historian. As his work, however, is published by a society, and is therefore of somewhat limited circulation, we have thought a short historical sketch, embodying, and in some instances slightly amplifying, Professor Hecker’s researches on the subject of the ravages of the disease in England, might not be uninteresting to our readers; who will then be in a position to follow us on some future occasion in a discussion of the nature of a malady, which five times within a hundred years devastated our island, and once, and once only, spread its ravages amongst the Teutonic races on the continent of Europe.
We may preface our historical resumé by noticing that the disease, in the form in which it then presented itself, was unknown before the year 1485, and that it has never reappeared since its last outbreak, in 1551. Its novelty gave it one of its appellations; it was called by the common people the “new acquaintance”; whilst its limitation to British soil gained for it on the continent the names of the King of England’s Sickness, the English Sweating Sickness, Sudor Britannicus .