Did The Sweat Sickness Epidemic Just Disappear?

avatar

Have you heard of the sweat sickness? Between 1485 and 1551, England was hit with episodes of this sickness. The sickness was terrible with patients experiencing fatigue, aches, and excessive sweating, which could lead to death within hours. With each episode, hundreds of people died but after 1551, the sickness suddenly disappeared.

A century after the black death killed about one third of the population of Europe, England began to experience the sweating sickness. At this time, medicine was still very crude and people were just learning about a lot of things. So many unethical things that were ethical at the time were done including pulling of hair, teeth, and other parts of the body, not forgetting blood letting.


worldhistory

The 15th and 16th centuries were not the best time to fall ill because there was a lot of vibe-based medicine. So that time was not the best time to suffer from sweating sickness.

Researchers who looked into the sickness learned that it had a whole lot of names including sudor Anglicus, the sweat, and English Sweat. Researchers think there are five summers between the years when the epidemic struck hard. The sickness was said to spread faster from June to August but at a time one began in April and another ended in December.

Death at the time could be quick probably as a result of dehydration with death ranging from 5% to about 90%. The causes could also be a result of physicians giving things that made it worse like wanting the patient to sweat out the disease by giving them hot drinks, pilling clothes on them to make them warm, and so on, including trying to keep them awake by making them smell vinegar and rosewater, and continually pulling parts of their body to keep them awake.


rawpixel

At the time, people blamed bad air (MIASMA), others thought it was religious, and others were just confused. After 1551, the disease disappeared and it is normal for this since humans can over time build immunity against disease, also microorganisms could mutate making it not a disease-causing one for humans again, or maybe the sickness still exists only with another name and has gotten a cure, we wouldn't know since history is still a little sketchy.

In recent times, researchers have looked into reasons why the disease could have occurred and have put out a list of microbes that could have caused sweating such as influenza, Bacillus anthracis, and Hantavirus since the epidermis happened after the wet spring. Scientists still tend to Hanta virus and believe it is carried around by rodents which are vectors. In fact, the disease symptoms recorded are similar to Hamtavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS). So did the sweat sickness disappear or has its name just changed?

Read More

hive-196387 science health history stemgeeks proofofbrain neoxian waivio cent ocd
0
0
0.000
3 comments
avatar

Thanks for your contribution to the STEMsocial community. Feel free to join us on discord to get to know the rest of us!

Please consider delegating to the @stemsocial account (85% of the curation rewards are returned).

Thanks for including @stemsocial as a beneficiary of this post and your support for promoting science and education on Hive. 
 

0
0
0.000
Reply
avatar

I hope the sweat sickness is gone, I can actually picture all the discomfort accompanied with it, it isn't funny at all.
This is really enlightening. Thanks for sharing

0
0
0.000
Reply