DURING THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 103 



for a long period entirely confined to this country, though at 

 last it broke out in Northern Germany and the Low Countries. 

 Its appearance was at well-defined and fixed periods, which 

 were generally somewhat brief. But during the time in which 

 it lasted it was peculiarly destructive. So local was it that it 

 did not reach Scotland or Ireland. 



The Sweating Sickness broke out in the ranks of Henry the 

 Seventh's army on its march from Bos worth to London. It 

 appears to have had its origin, according to the chroniclers who 

 lived so near the time that they might easily remember the 

 traditions, in the Welsh mountains. The disease was a violent 

 inflammatory fever, accompanied by great prostration, general 

 disorder of the viscera, and a profuse fetid perspiration, which 

 flowed from the patient in streams. So deadly was it, says 

 Holinshed, copying the older annalists, that not one in a 

 hundred recovered. The course of the disease was singularly 

 brief, the crisis being always past in a day and a night. Men 

 who had been in perfect health at night, were dead before the 

 morning. It attacked robust and vigorous men more frequently 

 than the weakly, and it spread all over the kingdom rapidly 

 from east to west. Two lord mayors and six aldermen were 

 victims of the sweating sickness in one week. It is said at the 

 first visitation to have lasted from August 28 till New Year's 

 Day. The German annalists, quoted by Hecker, describe the 

 summer as wet. But the infallible proof of a wet summer in 

 England, a high price of corn, is wanting, for in 1485-6 the 

 price of wheat is a good deal below the average. 



Hecker considers the disease to have been inflammatory 

 rheumatic fever, accompanied by great disorder of the nervous 

 system, and especially of the eighth pair. One naturally accepts 

 the inferences of this learned writer without hesitation ; but it 

 does not seem from the description which Dr. Keyes (the Dr. 

 Caius of Cambridge) gives of it, that it was accompanied by 

 acute pain, or that it was followed in cases of immediate 

 recovery by that tendency to heart disease, which is so con- 

 stantly the sequela of acute rheumatism, while it was accom- 



