“In some places,” says Boekel, “the sick fell into sweats, flowing more copiously in some than in others, so that a suspicion arose in the minds of some physicians of that English sweat which laid waste the human race so horribly in 1529;” and again, “the bodies were wonderfully attenuated in a short time as if by a malignant sudden colliquation, which made an end of the more solid parts, and took away all strength[549].” The season of it was the summer.

The outbreak attracted much attention from its universality, and was described by many abroad.

Boekel says that it was of such fierceness “that in the space of six weeks it afflicted almost all the nations of Europe, of whom hardly the twentieth person was free of the disease, and anyone who was so became an object of wonder to others in the place.... Its sudden ending after a month, as if it had been prohibited, was as marvellous as its sudden onset.” It came up, he says, from Hungary and Pannonia and extended to Britain. The principal English account of this epidemic comes from Ireland[550]. In the month of August, 1580, during the war against the Desmonds, an English force had advanced some way through Kerry for the seizing of Tralee and Dingle; “but suddenlie such a sicknes came among the soldiers, which tooke them in the head, that at one instant there were above three hundred of them sicke. And for three daies they laie as dead stockes, looking still when they should die; but yet such was the good will of God that few died; for they all recovered. This sicknesse not long after came into England and was called the gentle correction.”

This outbreak among the troops in Ireland is said to have been in August, before the sickness came to England. But it can be shown to have been at its height in London in the month of July. The year 1580 was almost free from plague in London; the weekly deaths are at a uniform low level (a good deal below the births) from January to December, except for the abrupt rise shown in the following table,—the kind of rise which we shall see from many other instances to be the infallible criterion of an influenza[551]:

Weekly Deaths in London.

1580.

Week
ending		 Deaths by
all causes		 Dead of
plague		 Baptised
June 23 55 2 59
"30 47 4 57
July7 77 4 65
"14 133 4 66
"21 146 3 61
"28 96 5 64
Aug.4 78 5 73
"11 51 4 53
"18 49 1 72

As in 1557-58, the English references are to agues, both before and after the Gentle Correction of July-August, 1580. Cogan says that for a year or two after the Oxford gaol fever (1577) “the same kind of ague raged in a manner all over England and took away many of the strongest sort in their lustiest age, etc.” And he seems to have the name “gentle correction” in mind when he says: “This kind of sickness is one of those rods, and the most common rod, wherewith it pleaseth God to brake his people for sin.” Cogan’s dates are indefinite. But there is a letter of the Earl of Arundel to Lord Burghley, 19th October, 1582, which shows that “hot ague” was epidemic as late as the second autumn after the influenza proper: “The air of my house in Sussex is so corrupt, even at this time of the year, as when I came away I left twenty-four sick of hot agues.”

Two such epidemics in England as those of 1557-8 and 1580-82, of hot agues or strange fevers, taking the forms of simple tertian or double tertian or quartan or other of the classical types, would have made ague a familiar disease, and its name a household word. For not only were there two or more aguish seasons (usually the summer and autumn) in succession, but to judge by later experience there would have been desultory cases in the years following, and in many of the seizures acquired during the height of the epidemic, relapses or recurrences would have happened from time to time or lingering effects would have remained. Hence it is unnecessary to assume that the agues that we hear casual mention of had been acquired by residence in a malarious locality. They may have been, and most probably were, the agues of some epidemic prevalent in all parts of the country. These epidemics were the great opportunities of the ague-curers, as we shall see more fully in the sequel. It is to the bargaining of such an empiric with a patient that Clowes refers in 1579: “He did compound for fifteen pound to rid him within three fits of his ague, and to make him as whole as a fish of all diseases.”