The Epidemics of the Middle Ages

by J. F. C. Hecker; John Caius

The visitation was so very general in Shrewsbury and the places in its neighbourhood, that every one must have believed that the atmosphere was poisoned, for no caution availed, no closing of the doors and windows, every individual dwelling became an hospital, and the aged and the young, who could contribute nothing towards the care of their relatives, alone remained unaffected by the pestilence[383]. The disease came as unexpectedly and as completely without all warning as it had ever done on former occasions; at table, during sleep, on journeys, in the midst of amusement, and at all times of the day; and so little had it lost of its old malignity, that in a few hours it summoned some of its victims from the ranks of the living, and even destroyed others in less than one[384]. Four and twenty hours, neither more nor less, were decisive as to the event; the disease had thus undergone no change.

In proportion as the pestilence increased in its baneful violence, the condition of the people became more and more miserable and forlorn; the townspeople fled to the country, the peasants to the towns; some sought lonely places of refuge, others shut themselves up in their houses. Ireland and Scotland received crowds of the fugitives. Others embarked for France or the Netherlands; but security was nowhere to be found; so that people at last resigned themselves to that fate which had so long and heavily oppressed the country. Women ran about negligently clad, as if they had lost their senses, and filled the streets with lamentations and loud prayers; all business was at a stand; no one thought of his daily occupations, and the funeral bells tolled day and night, as if all the living ought to be reminded of their near and inevitable end[385]. There died, within a few days, nine hundred and sixty of the inhabitants of Shrewsbury, the greater part of them robust men and heads of families; from which circumstance we may judge of the profound sorrow that was felt in this city.

Sect. 2.—Extension and Duration.

The epidemic spread itself rapidly over all England, as far as the Scottish borders, and on all sides to the sea coasts, under more extraordinary and memorable phenomena than had been observed in almost any other epidemic. In fact, it seemed that the banks of the Severn were the focus of the malady, and that from hence, a true impestation of the atmosphere was diffused in every direction. Whithersoever the winds wafted the stinking mist, the inhabitants became infected with the Sweating Sickness, and, more or less, the same scenes of horror and of affliction which had occurred in Shrewsbury were repeated. These poisonous clouds of mist were observed moving from place to place, with the disease in their train, affecting one town after another, and morning and evening spreading their nauseating insufferable stench[386]. At greater distances, these clouds being dispersed by the wind, became gradually attenuated, yet their dispersion set no bounds to the pestilence, and it was as if they had imparted to the lower strata of the atmosphere a kind of ferment which went on engendering itself, even without the presence of the thick misty vapour, and being received into men’s lungs, produced the frightful disease everywhere[387]. Noxious exhalations from dung-pits, stagnant waters, swamps, impure canals, and the odour of foul rushes, which were in general use in the dwellings in England, together with all kinds of offensive rubbish, seemed not a little to contribute to it; and it was remarked universally, that wherever such offensive odours prevailed, the Sweating Sickness appeared more malignant[388]. It is a known fact, that in a certain state of the atmosphere, which is perhaps principally dependent on electrical conditions and the degree of heat, mephitic odours exhale more easily and powerfully. To the quality of the air at that time prevalent in England, this peculiarity may certainly be attributed, although it must be confessed, that upon this point there are no accurate data to be discovered.

The disease lasted upon the whole almost half a year, namely, from the 15th of April to the 30th of September[389]; it thus passed but gradually from place to place, and we do not observe here, that it spread with that rapidity, which, in the autumn of 1529, had excited such great wonder in Germany. It is much to be regretted, that contemporary writers either gave no intelligence respecting the irruption or course of the epidemic Sweating Sickness in individual towns, or, if they did so, that this has not been made use of by subsequent writers. Doubtless, a very considerable diversity of circumstances would here present themselves, and the very peculiar manner in which the corruption of the atmosphere spread on this occasion, might perhaps have been estimated from certain facts, and not from mere suppositions. Thus the only fact that has been handed down is very remarkable; namely, that the Sweating Sickness required a whole quarter of a year to traverse the short distance from Shrewsbury to London; for it did not break out there until the 9th of July, and in a few days, according to its former mode, reached its height, so that the rapid increase of deaths excited terror throughout the whole city[390]. Yet the mortality was considerably less than at Shrewsbury, for there died in the whole of the first week only eight hundred inhabitants[391], and we may consider it decided, although all the contemporaries are silent on this very essential question, that the pestilence nowhere lasted longer than fifteen days, and perhaps in most places, as formerly, only five or six.

The deaths throughout the kingdom were very numerous, so that one historian actually calls it a depopulation[392]. No rank of life remained exempt, but the Sweating Sickness raged with equal violence in the foul huts of the poor and in the palaces of the nobility[393]. The piety which, in the general dejection, was displayed by the whole nation, giving birth to innumerable works of Christian benevolence and philanthropy, whereby undoubtedly many tears were dried up—many orphans and widows protected from distress and want, is hence explained: for this phenomenon, highly delightful as it is in itself, occurs only under great afflictions and a general fear of death, as we are taught by the universal history of epidemics. We are willing to believe, to the honour of the English, that the religious impulse which they derived from their ecclesiastical reformation, may have had no small share in its production; yet, unfortunately, such is the nature of human society, that no sooner is the calamity over, than virtue relaxes. Scarcely were the funeral obsequies performed, when every thing returned to the usual routine[394]; in like manner, the Byzantines once, during a great earthquake, were seized with a fear of God, such as they had never before felt; day and night they flocked to the churches; nothing was to be seen but Christian virtue, self-denial, and works of benevolence, but these only lasted until the earth again became firm[395].

The very remarkable observation was made in this year, that the Sweating Sickness uniformly spared foreigners in England, and, on the other hand, followed the English into foreign countries, so that those who were in the Netherlands and France, and even in Spain, were carried off in no inconsiderable numbers by their indigenous pestilence, which was nowhere caught by the natives.

Not a single French inhabitant[396] of the neighbouring town of Calais was affected, and neither the Scotch inhabitants of the same island, nor the Irish, were visited by the Sweating Sickness, so that we cannot get rid of the notion, that there was some peculiarity in the whole constitution of the English which rendered them exclusively susceptible of this disease. To make this out accurately would be so much the more difficult, because, in the original year of the Sweating Sickness, foreigners were the very persons among whom the English disease broke out; and again, because English persons who had lived a year in France, on their return home in the summer of 1551, became the subjects of Sweating Sickness[397]. Contemporaries, indeed, find a cause in the gluttony and rude mode of life of the English. In short, in all those remote causes with which we have already become acquainted, and which, doubtless, also had their part in preparing the same scourge for the Germans and Flemings in 1529. Kaye, the most efficient eye-witness, even brings in proof of this view, that the temperate in England remained exempt from the Sweating Sickness, and on the contrary, that some Frenchmen at Calais, who were too much devoted to English manners, were seized with it[398]. To this alone, however, this susceptibility cannot be attributed, unless we would be content with the antiquated system of giving too much weight to remote causes, opposed to which we are met by the striking fact, that the Germans and Netherlanders, who had scarcely much improved in their manners since 1529, were not again visited by their old enemy.

Sect. 3.—Causes.—Natural Phenomena.

It is easy to perceive, or rather we have no alternative but to suppose, an unknown something in the English atmosphere, which imparted to the inhabitants the rheumatic diathesis, or, if we will, so penetrated their bodies, overcharged as they were with crude juices[399], that their constitutions had the so-called opportunity, that is, were changed in such a manner as to fit them for the reception of the Sweating Sickness. Under such a condition, the common and more peculiar causes of this disease were not absolutely necessary, in order to induce its attack in a constitution thus long prepared for it, but the general causes of disease were sufficient of themselves to give it its last stimulus, although this should be in an entirely different climate, as in the present instance was the case with the English who were living in Spain, and with the Venetian ambassador Naugerio, who, in the year 1528, fell ill of the petechial fever, when far from Italy, and living in France[400].