In this same year, a new kind of sickness came suddenly through the whole region, even after the first entering of the King into this aisle, which was so sore, so painful, and sharp, that the like was never heard of to any man's remembrance before that time. For suddenly a deadly and burning sweat invaded their bodies and vexed their blood, and with a most ardent heat, infested the
stomach and the head. Grievously. By the tormenting and vexation of which sickness, men were so sore, handled and so painfully pained, that if they were laid in their bed, being not able to suffer the importunate heat, they cast away the sheets and all the clothes lying on the bed. If they were in their apparel and vestures, they would put off all their garments, even to their shirts. Others were so dry that they drank the cold water to
quench their importunate heat and insatiable thirst. Others that could or at the least wood, abide the heat and stink. For indeed the sweat had a great and strong caused clothes to be laid upon them as much as they could bear to drive out the sweat, if it might be all in manner, as soon as the sweat took them, or within a short space after yielded up their ghost, so that of all of them that sickened, there was not one amongst a hundred that escaped, insomuch that, beside
the great number which deceased. Within the city of London, two mayors successively died of the same disease within eight days, and six aldermen. And when any person had fully and completely sweat twenty four hours, for so long did the strength of this plague hold them, he should be then clearly delivered of his disease, yet not so clean rid of it, but that he might shortly relapse and fall
again into the same evil pit. Yeay again, and twice again, as many a one indeed did, which after the third time died of the same.
Huh. I was trying to like listen for clues. And this is gonna be a fun episode, Aarin, It.
Is gonna be a very fun episode. I am so excited. So that was a contemporary account of the sweating sickness. I'm not sure actually which epidemic, but I found it in a paper by flood from two thousand and three. Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh.
And I'm Erin Ollman Updyke.
And this is this podcast Will Kill You.
And today we're talking about sweating sickness.
Sweating sickness it is. I'm like so excited because a lot of people have suggested this over the years as we've been doing this podcast, and I was like, okay, yeah, that sounds really interesting. And I was like, yeah, I know about sweating sickness, like you know, people sweat and they died and that was it. And then like I started to read more about it and I was like, what, I'm.
Excited because I know literally nothing about it. Like when people have suggested it, I've been like, okay, yeah, sure, I have no idea what it is.
I am very excited. So the way that we did this episode, and I think it's like the way that we did the dancing plague episode, Yeah, is where I like research the historical epidemics. And by the way, sweating sickness is a mystery, so this is like a mysterious epidemic episode.
Right, It's going to be like our encephalitis lethargica and our dancing plague episode. So a little different than tradition.
Yeah, and so yeah, I did all the research for like the history of it as usual, but instead of of Aaron taking on, oh, this is the biological cause and the epidemiology of it, I was like, hey, research these five things that people think it was right, and.
So then we'll go through them and look at the biology of these you know, possible explanations and try and figure out what we think.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think this will kind of be like an episode of Unsolved Mysteries where you're like, oh, this is so exciting, like what's going to happen, what's going to happen, and then ultimately like you're not really going to get a very fully satisfying answer.
Do you mean you think that, like, because this has been how many hundreds of years that we have yet to figure out exactly what caused it? You don't think we're gonna solve it on this podcast today?
We're not. I mean I feel like with some exhumations of some royal bodies or something and then testing some DNA, that is possible, but also yeah, that has like not that has been tried, and no permission has ever been granted.
So well, yeah, all right, we'll do our best.
We'll do our best, so Aaron, Yeah, it's a very special time.
It is. I checked, it is quarantin any time.
It is quarantiny time. This week we are drinking sweat it out, Sweat it out, and in sweat it out is it's going to be like a little bit of a spicy and smoky situation of course to.
Like really give you that sheen exactly.
We want you to. We want to see those beads of perspiration on your dewey forehead. We have mes call lime juice, Habanero, simple syrup, mango juice, and orange liqueur yum.
And we will post the full recipe for that quarantini as well as our non alcoholic place Brita on all of our social media channels and this podcast will kill you dot Com.
We will do.
We have any other business to talk about.
We do have one small piece of business. We have a correction.
Actually yes we do so.
In our last episode, which was on Rubella, one of the terms that we used was differently abled and a bunch of people have reached out to let us know that that is actually not the preferred term, and we apologize for doing that, and we will do better in the future.
Yeah, and thank you, honestly, thank you for pointing that out and people pointing it out in a way that makes it easy for us to learn, and so now we can teach everyone else too. So the preferred term is disabled, not differently able.
Yes, and we appreciate it. Do we have any other business to take care of?
We have merch which is amazing created by incredible artists, available on this podcast We Kill You dot Com. Under merch, we have a bookshop link as well as a Goodreads list if you're interested in finding or purchasing books that we recommend on this podcast.
Ooh, and we're getting transcripts yay.
So you can read more. Yes, we're very excited. These have been very long awaited and we'll be available on this podcast We Kill You dot Com. Just click on transcripts. We're super excited. Heck yeah, I think that's enough business.
Well, should we dive into this episode?
Erin, I can't wait. I really like, I'm not kidding when I say I know nothing about sweating sickness and I want to learn all about it.
Excellent, Well, I will dive right in right after this break ready. Oh yeah, sweat go.
Oh erin.
I feel like planned and rehearse jokes are probably the best, right.
Definitely, yeah, absolutely, I mean I didn't see it coming.
Suntana is overrated, quick wit, absolutely not, who needs it? Okay? But for real? The English sweating sickness was basically a series of five epidemics occurring in fourteen eighty five, fifteen oh eight, fifteen seventeen, fifteen twenty eight, and fifteen fifty one, primarily in England and only England.
Huh.
Its entire history takes place within that not quite seventy year timeframe. It caused nowhere near the same level of population devastation that plague epidemics did. And and I'm not talking just about the Black Death, but I mean the outbreaks of plague that continued across England and the rest
of Europe for centuries after. And if it wasn't a plague year, people were still no stranger to deadly illnesses that would burn through a city or a village and wipe out one side of a family tree within a matter of days. Life was precarious. Death was all always hovering at the edge. Hence, like all the rad metal art from that time, all the skeletons. So with, so with these epidemics of plague, typhoid, malaria, influenza, smallpox, et cetera,
constantly on rotation. What made sweating sickness so remarkable to
people in that time? What was it about sweating sickness that led to such terror and panic that Henry the eighth, for example, fled with his members of court to avoid the sickness somewhat in vain, I might add, And what is it about this mysterious yet very isolated and short lived illness that still leads people in the twenty first century, five hundred years later to talk about it, publish articles about it, highlighted in novels and TV shows.
Let's find out, Yeah.
England in fourteen eighty five was at a bit of a turning point, the War of the Roses finally drawing to a close, with Richard the Third losing his life and his army defeated at the decisive Battle of bosworth Field, which led to Henry, Earl of Richmond taking the throne as Henry the Seventh and kicking off a one hundred and fifteen ish year rule by the House of Tudor in England. Okay, and like all of that stuff about the history of the English royal families and succession and
blah blah blah. I think is really interesting, but like that's not what we do in this podcast. I'm not equipped to do it, and so that's all I'm going to say about that. But the reason that I mention it is because the year fourteen eighty five was not
just this end of the War of the Roses. We care about it because that's when we first see sweating sickness, and the exact date within that year of the earliest cases is a little bit controversial because some early chroniclers claimed that it was brought over at the time of the battle by Henry's French mercenaries, but that's actually unlikely for a number of reasons, among them the fact that there aren't any descriptions of this disease in France during
that time, and that there were sporadic cases reported elsewhere in England prior to this battle, which took place in late August August Okay, but where there may have been scattered cases throughout England earlier in the summer of fourteen eighty five. Later it had erupted into a full on outbreak. In early September, the mysterious sweating sickness had spread to Oxford. By late September, it had reached London, and by October it was in most of the western and southern counties.
One contemporary chronicler reported that it had killed fifteen thousand people in London, which is surely an exaggeration because that would have been about a third of London's population at the time, But that does just further illustrate the impression that it left on the people who were witnessing this illness sweep through and with this impression was just of
total helplessness and devastation. But what were they seeing? Yeah, Okay, so I guess maybe before I go through the next few epidemics, I should probably describe sweating sickness a little more detail.
I am like on edge, right, you know, I can tell you literally as you're talking, so that I can try and figure out what's going on.
Okay, Okay, this is great because I get to pretend to be you in this In this episode, it starts with a fever.
With a fever.
Yes, I never get to say that, and it actually does. It actually starts with a fever okay, cool, and it comes on quickly. One minute, you're doing whatever it is people were doing in England in the fourteen hundreds and fifteen hundreds, like maybe you were rolling out some rye dough, or you were tending to your crops, or you were writing a sermon denounce it Martin Luther and his ninety
five THESS or whatever. Just casual, just cash stuff. And the next minute you feel this slight fever coming on, and along with that fever an intense sweat. Okay, this isn't any old, heavy after workout type sweat. This is unprecedented, not only because of the volume of moisture leaking from your armpits and beating up all of your skin, but
also from the vile stench accompanying it. What fetid, corrupt, putrid, loathsome These are just some of the words that contemporary physicians or scholars use to describe this sweat.
Okay, but can I already take a time out and ask a question? Of course, this is a Roles reversed sarre, and now I know how you feel. Okay, are people stinking? Like is it the sweat that is stinky or is it just that like it's fourteen eighty five. People don't have great hygiene, and so when you sweat, you smell yourself, and so everyone's sweating, and so now they stink, Like is it more stinky than other illness sweat? I'm confused.
Well, so I can't answer that except for the fact that the horrible smell was noted in like all of the descriptions, okay, which like would lead me to believe that there is something special about this sweat, because how do you avoid smelling yourself? Like you know, We'll bit. I don't know.
I'm just going through what you asked me to research, Aaron, and already I'm like, well, no idea.
I mean, maybe it is possible. Like so there are some modern scholars that say, well, perhaps the excessive sweat was due to anxiety, because the fever wasn't all that high, it wasn't all that burning, or it didn't seem to be It seemed like a slight fever, and so the successive sweat seemed strange. But it also was incredibly notable, like it was it's in the name.
It's in the name.
They called its sweating sickness. Yeah, so I can't answer you about the smell part. But I would have to believe that, like at a certain point you would have gotten accustomed to how much you and everyone around you stank.
Right, and so then this is above and beyond fourteen eighty five stink.
It seems to be. Okay, that's the sense I got from this, right, Okay, Okay, So this sweating, which never seems to cease, brings on an unquenchable thirst. Okay, your heart starts racing, your back and arms and legs ache, You feel stabbing pains in your stomach and bowels, and oh my god, does your head hurt so badly that you're having a hard time keeping a grasp on reality. If you're lucky enough to have been close to home when the symptoms began, you find yourself unable to crawl
out of bed. And if you weren't so lucky, you lay on the ground where you stood when you first felt the illness coming on. As you lay there, sweating rancid sweat, guts oiling, body aching, head absolutely pounding, delirious, your breathing starts to become more and more shallow, and a great heaviness seems to settle on your chest. Maybe you pile on more and more blankets or clothes to try to keep the sweat in, which might have been prescribed by your quote unquote doctor. Or you drink as
much lukewarm liquid as you can get down. But what you really want to do, what your body really wants you to do, is sleep, and so you close your eyes and give in. But just like your insatiable thirst, there never seems to be an amount of sleep that's enough to make you feel rested. If you can endure the first twenty four hours of this sweating, aching, burning, breathlessness,
you're probably in the clear. The relapses leading to death were common, but according to writings from the time, few escape the illness, and most succumb to death within a few hours. A few hours of symptom on the set. If you are well at lunch, you could be dead by dinner quote But all alike died either as soon as the fever began or not long after, so that of all the persons infected, barely one in one hundred
escape death. Whoa The precise cause of death was unclear still is unclear, but there are some isolated reports of people recovering after being given an enema, which suggests along with the list of symptoms, that severe dehydration may have played a major role.
Okay, okay, okay, yeah, okay.
So now, after hearing this description of sweating sickness, which I based off of a few contemporary accounts by Thomas Forrest Jeer and John Keyes who lived through the fourteen eighty five and fifteen fifty one epidemics, respectively, I think we can mostly answer my earlier question as to why sweating sickness left such an a depression on people at that time, even though you know, epidemics of sweating sickness were nearly as widespread or devastating as something like the plague.
This was a terrifying, rap and rapid disease that would kill you within a few hours.
Everyone's dying from it. I need to know more.
Yeah, Okay, Well here we go. Okay, So what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk first a little bit about the characteristics of sweating sickness and then sort of go through each of the epidemics, and then I think, and then I want to hear from you about the different diseases that you have, and we'll try to like symptom match. Yeah, and then at the same time, like I have sort of at the end of my notes, like an epidemiological breakdown of things like who had affected,
where it happened, when it happened, et cetera. Yeah, okay, And the rapid thing I mean, like how quickly people died. It doesn't seem to be just you know, the exaggeration or drama of the fourteen and fifteen hundreds, like one of the authors or one of these scholars wrote that quote. We saw two priests standing together and speaking together and saw both of them die suddenly. Also in the last day, we see the wife of a tailor who suddenly died.
Another young man walking by the street fell down suddenly what immediately? Some were killed opening their windows, some in playing with children in their street, some in one hour, many and two. It destroyed as it found them. So it took them, some in sleep, some in wake, some in mirth, some in care, some fasting, and some full, some busy, and some idol.
What Aaron, I know, I know, and what you're telling me too, is like the number one symptom is the fever and sweat fever.
Sweat, rapid death. There's also seems to be difficulty breathing, so.
Okay, but how much of that is just because you've been sweating so much and your heart rate is so high that now you're just like to kipnik because your body is like on overdrive, which is what it sounds like. More than like that you're a veterinary. Any pulmonary issues, right, there's no cough, there's no spuedum, there's no oh my gosh, airin it.
I mean, yeah, there doesn't seem to be a cough. There's no rash like I no rash, Yeah, what I know, I know, Okay, Okay. The people living in England during the time of the Sweat were no stranger to a quick and unexpected death, but this was shocking, like even to them. Yeah. And another reason that it may have stood out was not just how rapidly it seemed to descend on a village or town, but also how quickly
it left. So within let's say, like five days, you might see the same number of burials you would normally see in several months. It's just this big blip on the radar, whereas outbreaks of plague and influenza and smallpox and other infectious diseases would show up in more of like this rolling wave fashion, slow build sustained intensity and then a gradual decline, And sweating sickness was like a rogue wave, just like boom right in the middle.
Right.
And this character and this characteristic of sweating sickness is also super useful for a present day analysis or investigation into the disease because it allows researchers to identify likely outbreaks of sweating sickness using parish registers which recorded baptisms, marriages,
and burials among other things. Okay, and so even if a parish register didn't note that it was specifically the sweat that was responsible for a burst of death, you can use information from nearby registers to note likely outbreaks and to estimate the impact that an epidemic of sweating sickness had on a particular village or a town, and
to also study geographical variation in outbreaks. So not only was the sweating sacness deadly and lightning fast, it also appeared to be brand new and unknown outside of England, at least at the time of the fourteen eighty five epidemic. And so, like we heard in the first hand account, a new kind of sickness came through the whole region, which was so sore, so painful, and sharp that the like was never heard of to any man's remembrance before that time.
I'm really having a hard time with this.
I know, I love it. And this this newness also played into the explanations put forth by scholars who lived during that time. So remember, germ theory is hundreds of years away at this point, and so superstition or meteorological or celestial explanations really took kind of front and center.
Honestly, I'm not surprised, like I'm leading that way right now.
I know, I know. Maybe it was punishment for supporting Henry the seventh, or maybe it was the way that the planets were aligned, or maybe it was just bad air, bad air. What did seem clear was that there seemed to be no way to predict or control when it emerged and when it disappeared, which it only did a handful of times, never to be seen again.
Or was it I don't know, Erin you tell me.
Okay, So now I'm going to go through these sweating sickness epidemics briefly, just finish up the timeline, and then I want to hear from you, okay, all right, So the fourteen eighty five epidemic of sweating sickness arrived in mid to late summer and disappeared within a few months, and it wasn't until fifteen oh eight that the sweat showed up again. And there isn't a whole lot of information about this particular outbreak, maybe because it seemed to
be less extensive than the previous one. But one important thing to note is that it began, like the previous one, in summer, so June fifteen oh eight, and burned out by October that same year. Okay, And again this epidemic seemed to be restricted to England, and I mean just England, like, not even Wales or Scotland.
What okay?
Yeah, And next we have fifteen seventeen, again beginning near the end of June and stopping by the end of October, at which point it was overshadowed by an outbreak of the plague that was apparently much more devastating, so which is why we probably don't know a whole lot about
that one. And like the previous two epidemics, this one was again constrained to England and primarily in London, although nearby areas were affected, so like Oxford and Cambridge were said to have become ghost towns during this outbreak, and four hundred students at Oxford reportedly died within a week. What there is a lot.
Four hundred students, So we're talking young people. Yep, yeah, okay, that's an important piece of information.
It is. And the fourth epidemic, which occurred in fifteen twenty eight, broke with the established pattern of epidemics in that this one also seemed to cross the English Channel to continental Europe the following year, and this outbreak also seemed to be particularly devastating, with some reports of up to forty thousand people in London becoming infected, although only
two thousand dying. And this nineteen twenty eight epidemic is the one that Henry the eighth fled from with many members of his court, although several of them died, some only after like an hour or two of symptoms appearing. What and just like just to further illustrate how quickly this came on and how rapidly devastating it could be. At the Archbishop of Canterbury's house, eighteen members of the household died of the sweat in just four hours.
What I'm losing it erin.
I know, I know.
It's eight died within four Okay, I mean this doesn't even sound like an infectious disease.
Well, okay, interesting that you should say put a pin in that. Okay.
Yeah.
Also Anne Bolin became infected but recovered.
Okay. I feel like, okay, because I remember you saying that this was in the Tutors and I was like, oh, should I watch that season? But then I didn't because I didn't want to learn about it. But also it was in the first season, wasn't it.
It was in the it was Yeah, I watched, like, I didn't manage to watch the entire episode. But it's season one, episode seven.
Okay, I definitely have seen it, but it was long enough ago that I don't remember anything except like a vague running down the halls being sweaty or something.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure how representative it was. I also started reading Wolf Hall, which also apparently portrays like sweating sickness epidemics because it takes place during the same time, covers the same people, et cetera, et cetera. But I also that book is a lot bigger than I thought it was, so didn't quite make it all the way through anyway. And so again with this fifteen twenty eight epidemic. The disease emerged in June and disappeared
in September. But the following year, fifteen twenty nine, is when we see a similar disease appear in continental Europe, beginning in July in Germany and Austria and then spreading to the Netherlands, Poland, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Lithuania, Russia and elsewhere. So like all over and by September it was gone. And there's been some discussion as to whether or not this disease on continental Europe was the same as the English sweating sickness, but it seems like
they were because the description of symptoms are similar. And maybe the biggest clue is that it was referred to as the English sweat or pseudor angelicus or the English bath or other names that clearly place its origin in England.
Did they talk about how bad they lay stunk?
Yeah, so perfect, Thank you for asking that I have a quote. In fifteen twenty nine, a terrible disease spread in the Lowlands at Cologne, Antwerp, Frankfurt, reaching as far as Strasbourg, so that in these places a great many people died. And they called this disease the English sweat because it came from England. And whoever was affected by this disease went from life to death in twenty four hours.
For when one was afflicted with the disease, it came with a great poisonous sweating, and one sweated to death forthwith, so that countless people died of the disease everywhere. Some people sat down to table in good health and were carried away dead.
What erin?
I know? Are you going to devote your the rest of your life to study the English sweating section?
Yeah, that's it, that's my career, okay, For I feel likedicine.
It's inevitable.
It's sweating sickness all the time.
And so after this fifteen twenty eight and fifteen twenty nine epidemic, which seems to be the only one that spread to content mental Europe, the sweating sickness made only one more appearance in fifteen fifty one, again in England.
And this a long time later.
Yeah, yeah, we'll talk about the intervals. So keyes describes this last epidemic as beginning in April in fifteen fifty one and spreading over the country over the next few months before dying out in September. London's death toll peaked at over seven hundred people in a week in the middle of July, and some towns reportedly lost half of their population. After fifteen fifty one, sweating sickness seems to have just like dropped off the face of the earth.
Entirely isolated cases of a similar disease may have shown up in parts of Germany, France, northern Spain, northern Italy and Holland over the next couple hundred years, but no large epidemics, and these isolated cases aren't often mentioned in
histories of sweating sickness. What is commonly mentioned, however, is Piccardi sweat I'm hoping I'm saying that right, another infectious disease of unknown cause that first emerged in seventeen eighteen in northern France and later spread to Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy. And the last extensive outbreak of this disease occurred in nineteen oh six in France, and there were so there seems to be two forms of the Picardy sweat, one very mild resembling Nephropathia epidemica.
Is that one of the hauntaviruses, uh huh okay, yeah.
And another more severe version that more closely resembled the sweating sickness but was still much more mild. There were also some like fairly substantial differences between the two diseases in terms of their symptoms. So, for instance, the Piccardi sweat was often accompanied by a rash and subsequent peeling of the skin, as well as noseblas, neither of which seemed to be symptoms of sweating sickness.
But is it just because everyone died so quickly that they didn't show any other symptoms? That's I meaning, I'm wondering.
Yeah, that's possible. I don't know how quickly the rash came on, but definitely the more severe version of the Piccardi sweat does seem to be like extremely rapid onset. Okay, But the mortality rate of the Piccardi sweat ranged from like zero to twenty percent, while the sweating sickness was much much more fatal like estimates put it at thirty
to fifty percent. Okay, So the two diseases probably weren't the same, but I think that they were probably or a lot of people think that they were probably linked, like may may have been caused by the same vector or reservoir, or may have similar ecological origins actually, like.
A similar type of pathogen or something like that. Maybe.
Yeah, yeah, So.
I have a lot of ideas.
Aaron, Yeah, I mean I don't know. So now at this point, it's like, is it time to go through?
Can we love to?
Okay?
Reiley would love to?
So what are the things I even told you to research? Because I don't remember.
There's several. It's actually fun because some of these things we've already covered, and some of them were going to cover. So you told me to research ergot relapsing fever, hauntavirus or a type of hantavirus, and anthrax, and then also peripherally influenza. But I feel like we can say it's not influenza.
Yeah, And the reason so I will say that, like I told you these before I really started doing extensive research, and this was I pulled those those wikipedias is from Wikipedia being r liked these are what scholars have put forth as possible explanations.
Yeah, so let's go through them. And I have a favorite already.
Oh what's your favorite?
Well, we'll go over it last. Okay, let's just take a quick break. I feel like we need to breathe.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, and sweat.
And sweat Okay, yeah, I have a favorite already, erin. But the thing is it's not perfect. I guess that's the point of a medical mystery, is like nothing really fits perfectly. Yeah, but based on the ones that you told me to look up because Wikipedia said, we can very quickly eliminate several of them and we can talk about why, and then we can go through the one that I think seems like the best option.
Okay, perfect, Okay.
So influenza. If you haven't listened to our very first episode of this entire podcast, you can learn all about influenza on that episode. But basically, this does not sound anything like influenza.
It does not. And so that was one of like the that was one of the earliest explanations put forth, and I think that it was very popular and retained popularity for a while because the nineteen eighteen influenza had a similar like pattern in that it attacked who seemed to be like the youngest and healthiest with a real predominance.
Yeah, right, And certainly it's not out of the question that you would have a brand new strain of influenza, and it could be much more deadly like the nineteen eighteen pandemic. But otherwise symptoms wise, like this sudden onset of fever and fever being the one and only like major symptom that just doesn't really fit with what we
see with influenza. Even if it's a different strain, like influenza is usually a slightly more gradual onset, You're definitely going to have some kind of respiratory symptoms a lot of times because it is a respiratory pathogen, and usually when we see the more severe forms, it's because it's causing like a viral pneumonia rather than just you know,
sweating and then dying. Right, So I think we can pretty confidently say it's very unlikely that this was an influenza, especially an influenza strain that like remained localized to only England and then didn't spread to anywhere.
Else, Right, what does that tell us about transmission or Yeah, probably wasn't respiratory.
Okay, another one I think we can pretty quickly eliminate is actually going to be ergot, Yes, for sure. So ergot we talked a lot about in the Dancing Plague episode. This whole episode is actually just like see previous episodes.
I know, I know, I know, but we will.
Go through it. So Ergot, a fungus, produces a number of different alkaloids, including ergotamine, which if you ingest or gotamine or any of these other alkaloids, that's when you get these type of symptoms. What I like about this as an explanation is that ergot is not an infectious disease, right. It's like you're ingesting this alkaloid produced by this fungus,
and so the onset can be really rapid. And from what you're saying, the onset of this is so rapid that it's it's hard to believe this is an infectious disease because it's so very rapid like that.
Well, yes, and it also affected like members of a household, Okay, in clusters.
Right, so I could see that as well.
Right, But there are a lot of things against ergot too.
Yeah, Like, for example, the symptoms are nothing.
Like correct that would be the number one thing.
Yeah, So the signs and symptoms of ergot generally how to do with Like it causes vasoconstriction, So depending on where that vasoconstriction is, you're either going to have like tissue death and limbs falling off, or you have like a convulsive form where it's affecting your central nervous system, so you have like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions, all kinds of weird sensations, but nothing like this super high fever sweating,
Like that's just not something that you really see. Certainly hallucinations and delirium like you were talking about, but because of the ergotomy, not because of the fever and sweat.
Yeah, I think maybe not ergot, but a food born type of thing. Ye was also like, I know botulism was briefly proposed at some point, but I don't that again doesn't fit.
It doesn't fit. Yeah, symptoms wise, it doesn't fit. I agree that like cluster wise in a household and onset wise, some kind of pre formed toxin or a food borne something.
I could see that fitting with some of the epidemiological characteristics, but there aren't a ton of those I mean there are some that cause fever, but really actually no, they're not a ton that really caused this kind of fever that you would see because fever is indicative of inflammation, which is something that we see more with you know, infection, rather than I don't know right well.
And I think there's also the matter and I kind of I mean, I definitely have withheld some key points.
Oh great things a lot, Aaron.
I just think that it would be I think that we can back and forth this so like so like when we're talking about how sweating sickness seemed to be spread,
it doesn't really fit food board pathogen. It does seem to have traveled along roads, so like if it took fifteen days to travel between one village and another, that is often the interval that was seen, the interval between outbreaks in particular villages or towns, And that bit of information I think is really interesting because it points towards
human to human transmission. But the pattern geographically of epidemics is that rural areas seem to be hit hard and cities maybe not as hard as you might expect if it were something like a crowd disease or a transmitted person to person. So what it seems to be is that there was another source of infection, but that human to human was also possible.
Okay, okay, So another one that you had me research that I don't think that it is, even though I do think there are a number of things that I understand why this is a common proposition is hauntavirus. Ooh, see, your face tells me that you think countavirus is the best fit.
I do.
Yeah. I mean you're withholding a lot of information, so maybe that information is going to tell me that I agree. But I actually this is a spoiler, but I think relapsing fever fits really well.
Okay, interesting, and there's a few.
Reasons why I think that could be the case, even though there are some symptoms that don't really fit relapsing fever. But okay, so let's go through hantavirus then, or do you want to go through anthrax because I don't think it's anthrax.
I don't think it's anthax either.
Okay, So do we want to talk about why or should we just wait until we do anthrax as an episode?
I think we should talk about why just briefly.
Okay, So anthrax is a disease caused by a bacterium kind of called Bacillus anthrasis. This is a gram positive, aerobic spore forming bacterium. So that is important because what it means is that when this bacteria senses a change in their environment such that it becomes unfavorable, like a low neutrient environment, they form this spore which is very environmentally hardy, much like Claustridium species do, like we talked about in botulism, and so it can survive in the
soil for years. So anthrax is kind of global in distribution, like this bacteria lives and this spore can persist in the soil for like decades potentially. But what happens is if you get exposed to the spores in a couple of different ways, either through your skin like a break in your skin, or through your gastrointestinal tract, or the
worst form is if you inhale the spores. What happens is those spores get engulfed by our macrophages, which are white blood cells, and then within our white blood cells as they travel like to our lymph nodes, they can like reactivate into the live bacteria and these bacteria produce a number of different exotoxins that cause a lot of problems.
So I mean, and really none of the symptoms of cutaneous like which is skin, or gastrointestinal or inhalational anthrax, none of those symptom wise really fit with the description of the illness that you gave for sweating sickness. Certainly. One thing that does fit is that this is something that, like these spores could be transmitted on an animal. For example, it's very common for people who work with animals or livestock to become infected either with inhalational or gastrointestinal anthrax.
So kind of the travel and like that kind of distribution. Maybe if you had anthrax in one area and then it moved, you know, with I don't know, livestock or something to another area, maybe you could see that. And also, inhalational anthrax is very deadly and very rapid. You start with like a pretty non specific fever, feeling cruddy, having muscle aches you especially because we're talking about inhalational here,
you usually have a cough. Right, this is something that's causing inflammation in your lungs, so you might have abdominal pain, but also chest pain and then over a couple of days, you get a further fever, but also more shortness of breath,
a lot of trouble breathing. This occurs over a couple of days, and then like at that point, especially if this crosses your blood brain barrier and causes meningitis, then very rapidly you progress to shock, hypothermia and death within like a number of hours, like twenty four hours or something. But that's after a few days of feeling cruddy and having a fever and that kind of thing. So that doesn't really fit. And then cutaneous and gastrointestinal wise, like absolutely doesn't fit well.
And also the fact that like anthrax was known and is still like was around, it didn't disappear, whereas this really does seem to be this incredibly unique disease that then disappeared.
That's interesting. That's why I can't there I'm gonna make an argument still for relapsing fever.
No, that's totally fine. I'm curious because this is the thing is that like maybe I feel like I'm leaning more towards hantavirus A because of the papers I've read, but be because I already know more about hauntavirus. I don't know really anything about relapsing fever except it's transmission route.
Right well, And I mean i'd like I dove into all of these, but I don't think I dove as deeply as I would have if we were doing a full length episode on it. So I also feel like I don't know everything there is to know about relapsing fever, and I definitely feel like I know more about hantavirus. But yeah, I mean, okay, let's talk about hantavirus. Yeah, So if you want even more deep dive on hantavirus, it's all the way back in season two. We did a whole episode on it. But there's a whole bunch
of different hauntaviruses. They all are RNA viruses. They're commonly found in rodent and moles and shrews. That was Aaron hauntavirus was the episode when I learned that moles and shrews are not rodents.
I think I just relearned that when you said that.
The most deadly of hantaviruses is the synombree virus, which causes hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which has the highest case fatality rate of like forty to fifty percent. But there are a number of other hantaviruses that we know of, including soul virus, hantan virus, Pumla virus, and Dobrava virus, which tend to cause a disease that we call heemorrhagic fever
with renal syndrome. So if we're talking about like hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, you definitely get fever, you definitely get muscle aches, headache is certainly one of those symptoms, abdominal pain, diarrhea maybe, And importantly, you don't have those upper respiratory symptoms, which is in because even though this is a pulmonary illness, at the first part of this disease, you don't really
have any kind of pulmonary like lung symptoms. But this is a long like it's a longer disease, like the first phase usually lasts three to five days, but even up to two weeks. And then after that first phase where you're just kind of feeling cruddy, then you start to have these heart and lung symptoms, and within twenty four to forty eight hours of that is when you
could die. But even still you have a longer period of feeling not good and having a fever and having all these other symptoms before you die.
I don't know, erin okay, I feel like we have pretty successfully ruled out a few of them, yes, okay, and we are now left with like what we think and what has been commonly reported as like the two
leading you propose explanations. What if you briefly laid out just the very basic characteristics of hantavirus, the hantavirus pulmonary syndrome and relapsing fever, just like how they're transmitted, you know, table form type stuff, and then I'll go through the epidemiological characteristics of sweating sickness, and we'll kind of talk about each point for each of them.
Okay, that sounds fun, Okay, Okay, So focusing on hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, So hantavirus pulmonary syndrome has a case fatality rate about thirty thirty to fifty percent.
Sounds familiar.
It does sound familiar. Relapsing fever, first of all, importantly, there are two different forms of relapsing fever. There's lousborn relapsing fever, and there's tickborn relapsing fever and They're very different in terms of their epidemiological characteristics, and I think this sounds much more like loosborn relapsing fever, which is more common in groups. It's more common in epidemics and has a case fatality rate of between ten to forty percent.
Okay, okay, okay.
So hantavirus transmission. Hantavirus is transmitted by aerosolized mouse poop. Essentially, it's transmitted by aerosols, but not person to person.
However, there is an asterisk next to that not transmitted person to person because there have been instances reported in Argentina that suggest person to person transmission since there.
Is some possibility of at least one specific strain, but most hauntaviruses have not ever been shown to be able to be transmitted person to person. Now, what about relapsing fever. This is fun. First of all, relapsing fever is caused by Brellia species, so these are spirokeet bacteria not too distantly related to lyme disease, but different species. And there's a number of different species of Burrellia that can cause
relapsing fever, which I think is important. And while tickborn relapsing fever is transmitted from the bite of a tick, much like many other tickborn diseases. Louse born relapsing fever is transmitted from the hemolymph, which is the blood of a louse. That means that if a louse is living on you and you know, biting you, and so you're itchy, and then you scratch you like smoosh that louse and then you scrape it open and you scrape their blood
into your skin, that's how you become infected. And I'm pretty sure that there have been some suggestion that there might be for LuSE born relapsing fever, that there could be person to person transmission based on eptymilogical characterism.
Okay, cool, interesting, I.
Got so excited that I couldn't finish that word. Some other characteristics. So incubation period I think is probably important because, like you said, if this was moving kind of like village to village or area to area in about the time it takes for someone to travel, then you're probably not looking at something that has a super long incubation period. So for hantavirus, it's actually quite a long incubation period.
It's usually like two to three weeks incubation period after exposure to symptoms relapsing fever, there's a pretty big range. In general, it's about seven days, but it can be as low as four or as high as like eighteen, okay.
And then duration of illness. And this is the part where honestly none of these fit really well, because with hantavirus, especially hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, you have a first phase of kind of fever, malaise, not feeling great, headache, and that usually lasts three to five days, but even up to
like twelve days where you're just feeling bad. And then when you get to the second phase where you have shock and pulmonary edema, so like fluid in your lungs, that usually happens really quickly, within like twenty forty eight hours, and then you might die. But in general you're feeling
creddy for at least three to five days before that. Yeah, Okay, Now with relapsing fever, I mean you said this, sometimes people relapse saren So relapsing fever does start very abruptly with a very abrupt onset of a really really high fever along with shaking, chills, headache, and delirium. Interesting, and you often also have very severe joint pain, muscle aches, nausea and vomiting, and extreme weakness, like you can't even get up and walk because you're so weak and feel
extremely lethargic. Okay, like you said, all you want to do is sleep. Yeah, and then you can also get like a very profound anorexia, feeling so bad like you just don't want to eat. You might have weight loss. But and this is where it just falls apart, Aaron. The first fever, this really high onset fever. Your skin
is usually hot and dry. It's like a very classic description, It's a hot and dry Which the reason that this is like outlined in all of these clinical descriptions is because a lot of other diseases that cause a fever, especially a relapsing fever like malaria, you usually are sweating quite a lot in association with the fever, right, But with this one, your skin is described as hot and dry.
Yeah, that does not sound.
Like sweating, but it also doesn't I mean, hanta doesn't sound like that either.
So I have a question about relapsing fevers. Okay, how diverse is this group or, like, you know, how many different bacterial species cause relapsing fever, and how much variety in symptoms is there among those species.
Very good question. So there's I saw, and I didn't write down every single species, but loos born relapsing fever is mostly one species, and that's Burrellia recurrensis. Okay, but there are at least like three or four other species of Burrellia that cause tickborn relapsing fever. Yeah, and there's a number of different tick species that also can transmit so hard ticks and soft.
Ticks, okay, which is fun. It is fun.
Yeah, I know we never talk about soft ticks, but they do. So tickborn and louis born relapsing fever look a little bit different. So like the length of illness is different, the mortality rate is different. Tickborn relapsing fever is not as deadly as lousborn relapsing fever. Loosbourne usually lasts a little bit longer, like five and a half days of symptoms rather than three days. And then the interval between relapses is also longer for loosborn relapsing fever,
and you generally have fewer relapses. You have like maybe one maybe two relapse. But with tickborn relapsing fever. You often have like three or more relapses of symptoms. Okay, Okay, now you do often have a rash. It's not uncommon. But and this is why I mentioned that in the French epidemic where people did have a rash, the rash can look a lot of different ways, Like there's a lot of different kind of presentations of a rash, but it usually happens after the first set of symptoms while
you're otherwise asymptomatic. So if people survived long enough to get to that point, maybe they would have had a rash.
Okay, okay, but.
This is getting off of the epic characteristics a little bit. But I want to get into the path of physiology of how relapsing fever works because this is part of what makes me think that maybe it was like a certain subtype of Burrellia that caused these particular epidemics. Because what I think is really interesting is like what causes
this relapsing disease? Right, The reason that you have a relapsing fever and symptoms in tickborn or lousborn relapsing fever is that the bacteria that caused this ary their surface antigens, so they change out those proteins that are on their surface that our body is responding to in order to kill them, and they do so during cycles of disease.
They change them so well that so you get infected. Right, the bacteria enter your bloodstream, either by use scratching them in or by a tick spitting them into your bloodstream. They replicate. Our body reacts, which is why you have all these symptoms, fever, feeling crappy, and then our immune system tries to kill them off, but the bacteria go, Okay, well you figured out this antigen so we'll just change our outer proteins and then our bodies like, oh we
did it. These bacteria are gone and they don't recognize these anymore, so then they can start to replicate all over again. You have a huge amount of bacteria in your blood again, and it's like a whole new infection.
That is unbelievably cool. I am very that is fascinating.
It's so fascinating.
Wow.
And so I wonder could it be that there was, you know, a particular antigenic subtype that was present in England at this time that happened to cause a slightly different presentation of this disease. I don't know. I just don't know here, I know, I know, I know, Okay.
So I have a few more questions about like the epicharacteristics of relapsing fever and hantavirus or hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. So, first of all, is there any general pattern in who, like whether it's age group or whatever that is most susceptible or seems to have the most outcomes with either of these.
I don't think so, at least nothing that stands out in the research that I did. It's not like young people only die from this or old people only die from.
This, Okay. And then what about like any seasonal or temporal aspect.
So with tickborn relapsing fever, it certainly is something that's going to be more common when people are outside and when ticks are outside, which is going to be in the summer months, laoisborne, it tends to be a more epidemic disease. It doesn't tend to be sporadic the way that tickborn relapsing fever does. But these are human body lice, and so there doesn't tend to be like a specific seasonal variation necessarily because human body lice live on us
all of the time. With hantavirus, I think I remember it being something where it's just depends on when you're in contact with mice.
Well, for hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, it was summer summer.
That makes sense because that's when you're in contact with mice.
Right, Okay, one final question okay, immunity. Do you gain immunity after infection?
Oh?
And are there asymptomatic infections?
Really good question erin I'm going to guess with relapsing fever, no, you don't gain immunity because already they're changing up their intigens so much that that's why you're having relapses to begin with. For hantavirus, there is a vaccine that's available, at least in some parts of the world, so I would think that there's immunity for at least some portion of time. Not sure how long that immunity would last.
Ok Okay. So I feel like now that we know a bit more about the two leading you know, potential causes, let's go over the EPI characteristics of sweating sickness. Okay, okay, let's take a quick break first. All right, So I've grouped the epi characteristics into five basic sections. Okay, so you know what was sweating sickness, so like symptoms, case fatality, right, et cetera. Number two, how it seemed to spread, number three where it occurred, Number four who had affect it,
and number five when it happened. Okay, Okay, So starting with what it was, it was rapid onset fatal disease characterized by excessive foul smelling, sweating, fever, body aches and pain, stomach pains, headache and delirium, heart palpitations, and breathing that was shallow and labored. Death often occurred within the first few hours of the first symptoms showing up, and case
fatality rates very among epidemics and affected regions. So like, sometimes it was seemed to be very low, sometimes it was really high, but overall it does seem that it was a very high mortality rate, and most estimates put it at like thirty to fifty percent.
Okay.
The only epidemic where mortality could actually be somewhat reliably calculated was the fifteen fifty one one. And because that's because like, by that point but not for the previous epidemics, pair registers actually began to be in use, and so we get an estimate from some guy's amazing analysis of parish registers that around fifteen thousand deaths were due to
sweating sickness from in the fifteen fifty one epidemic in England. Okay, but let's compare that to thirty thousand deaths from the plague in fifteen sixty three in a plague epidemic year, and one hundred and eighty thousand deaths from influenza epidemics in fifteen fifty seven, fifteen fifty eight, and fifteen fifty nine. So although it was deadly, it wasn't nearly didn't cause nearly the same loss of life as some of these other diseases. Yeah, okay, all right. Number two, how it spread?
And we talked a little bit about this, but this is very challenging to nail down. So basically, it does seem that human to human transmission was possible, but that that may not be the only route through which a pathogen was transmitted.
See this is why I lean Lausborn because like lice, move from person to person and thereby move the disease. Right, So it's not directly person to person, but it is person to person in that sense. Right, It's not, it's not it doesn't need an animal reservoir. It's it's a human disease.
It doesn't, right. But I think what makes me lean away from Laos are a number of things, Like one is the seasonality, which was very pronounced, like it was summer months and then it emerged suddenly, disappeared suddenly, So that to me implies some sort of like ecological characteristic of this disease. And the second thing is and I didn't really go that into it yet, and I will right now. I'll skip ahead to number four is who
it affected? So who sweating sickness mostly affected? And so you know, like I said, it seemed to primarily impact England only even respecting political boundaries. And I don't really know what to make of that, Like maybe contemporary writers were just being a bit dramatic and wanting to play up the role of England as a victim, or maybe it was real, in which case I wonder if there was some sort of like cultural or behavioral difference that
prevented it spread. So like maybe one type of grain was more commonly grown and stored in England, thus providing more food for rodents, or maybe it was stored in a particular way or a certain place that would have changed how rodents and humans or arthropod vectors and humans
interacted with one another. And while some of the names for the disease highlight how sweating sickness seemed to be an English thing, so like pseudor angelicus the English sweat, others seemed to raw attention to the type or class of person that was commonly affected, So stoop gallant, stoop nave and no thay master, which is like, basically it seemed to affect wealthy, well to do healthy young men, primarily so between the ages of like fifteen and forty.
And that would lean kind of away from a lousporn just because lice usually it's in more crowded conditions, more lower cysio economic status, when you don't have access to able to clean yourself and get rid of lice.
Right, And I talked a bit about the urban to rural difference as well, where it did seem to be predomint like would hit hard rural areas, but it also was in urban areas as well, I don't know, but not to the same degree as it was maybe in rural areas, okay, And so then the final thing is when it happened. And by this I mean two things. So one is this very sporadic nature of the epidemics. So these like the years separating them are twenty three, nine eleven, and again twenty three.
So that's weird.
It's very strange, you could say. So some people suggest that it's an eleven year a ten year gap, and that there are just two missing epidemics. Whether they're missing to our knowledge or missing to like whether they actually happened or not, it's not known. But there's also this
very strong seasonal pattern to infection. And if we're going along with the hauntavirus thing, some current or modern scholars suggest that there were wet years that preceded these epidemics, were very wet summers, which is what happened in the nineteen ninety three four Corners in Nombree outbreak that led to like a much higher mouse population, right exactly. But I think that like, I don't know, I mean, if we're talking about louseborn relapsing fever and we're talking about
hauntavirus pulmonary syndrome, those are two very different roots of transmission. Yeah, and so I think that's one, and also exposure patterns. So like in putting together these pieces, you have the strong seasonality, which puts it more in the column of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which is when like you would have very distinct times of year during which you would be in contact with rodents.
And certain years where you're certainly going to have a higher risk of transmission because of ecological factors.
Definitely, right, exactly, And you also have this urban to rural variation and infection that does not seem to be mediated by like other roots of transmission. I guess. Yeah, the symptoms are a whole nother thing.
Yeah, and that's where for me it falls apart. Like for me, the symptoms really do not sound like.
HPS like the I mean, well, but here's here's something that I mean, obviously I have a little like you know, pet pet theory. Yeah, it's not my theory at all. I found it in papers. But before the nineteen ninety three four Corners outbreak of se nombervirus, we didn't have like,
we didn't know about hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. We didn't know that that's how it could manifest in your body, and then you know, they do in the descriptions of sweating sickness, they talk about how, oh, you were well at luncheon or you sat down to dinner and then you were carried off, like.
Right, And I do wonder like, because you also have to take into account that this was like the late fourteen and early fifteen hundreds, their definition of someone who's well might not be the same as our definition of someone who's well, so they might actually be kind of miserable, but like that's normal for them, right right, So then yeah, so then maybe it does seem as though you were fine and now you're dead when really like they've been feeling cruddy for a couple of days, but they you know,
they just thought that they didn't get enough sleep, or they're always kind of feeling cruddy, whatever it is. So in that case, you do have very rapid death once you hit that particular phase of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, and even with you know, the other hauntaviruses that are a lot less deadly that now circulate in Europe and other parts of the world, when you do die from those, you die pretty rapidly, right, it's either like you recover over a very long period of time or you die
pretty dang quick. So so yeah, I guess that does there are things that fit.
It's just.
I don't know. I mean, I think, like I said at the beginning of this, this is like an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. I hope you go into it.
And it's just it's also so bizarre that that it would be only in England, even if it was a hauntavirus, because whatever mice populations or whatever that would be high in England, like, why wouldn't they also be high in Scotland and Wales. I don't think that the ecology is I don't know ecology all that well, but I would assume that there are a lot of similar rodent species.
Right in those areas. Yeah, definitely, and I think there were people have looked in the in like writings of the time and found no evidence or nothing to suggest that there were massive either population booms or massive die offs of rodents, like anything unusual about rodent populations. But that's where I was wondering whether grain was stored in a different way or in a different location in the
house in England. I mean there's also like there could be a wet summer in certain parts of England and it could have missed Wales or Scotland entirely. And also how much of that is just a little bit of like, oh the English are being punished for our support of Henry the seventh or something. Yeah, So going over like what what do we know? What can we say about this? Do we think it was an infectious, contagious transmissible pathogen?
Maybe?
I think yes, based on the how it seemed to travel along roads or along like common roots, So.
It seems more like an infectious and like there's some component of person to person.
There's some component of person a person, but it's not driven by that. And there's a strong ecological component. Yeah, so that points towards either arthropod or rodent, the two most likely I mean engineerian In all likelihood, this is something that we don't have anymore like why did it disappear? No idea which.
Is even more fascinating, like if this was a virus, whether a haunted virus or some other virus or a bacteria that caused these specific outbreaks across an entire country.
And then disappeared, Yeah, where did it go well, unless it unless it didn't unless it really was the piccardy sweat, which but what's that they don't know, right.
So then where did it go? It caused one.
Outbreak nosed, it caused outbreaks starting from seventeen eighteen all the way through nineteen o six was the last outbreak. The last diagnosed case was in nineteen eighteen.
That's even weirder arian.
Is What is the case though, is that most people seem to believe that piccardy sweat and sweating sickness were different diseases. It didn't like sweating sickness didn't turn into piccardi sweat, but that they were probably caused by the same thing, whether that was like a rodent, a rodent reservoir, some sort of arthropod transmitted virus, or like relapsing fever where there is no rodent reservoir.
Fascinating. Yeah, and there's still like there's still no consensus. Is that correct?
There's still no consensus if you look at the at the evolution of thought as to what caused sweating sickness. It started out started out influenza and relapsing fever, and then it kind of morphed into some sort of arbovirus so virus transmitted by an arthropod, But that was kind of discarded even by the authors themselves because they were like, we don't see any bites or rashes like that would have been noted. They feel like it would have been noted.
And then following the nineteen ninety three four Corners Sonombrite outbreak, that is when hantavirus, pulmonary syndrome became the leading cause.
Interesting, Yeah, even though there's still no pulmonary symptoms.
I mean they I guess that what they view as pulmonary symptoms are the like shallow breathing, difficulty shallow breathing, and the heaviness on the chest.
Interesting.
Yeah, But you know, I think that it's interesting to think about why do we care about this still? Like why are we still talking about it?
Well? I feel like do we have to explain the answer to that question when we're living through a pandemic of a brand new virus?
I yeah, exactly exactly, But I think like it is, this is such a bizarre and terrifying and fascinating illness, sweating sickness in these diseases that we think could be related to it, that exists today, like they're still around. Does that mean that there's the potential for something like this to happen again?
No?
Really, I mean yeah, I think I think it all boils down to the fact that like understanding the nature and the cause of epidemics, whether they're present or especially those in the past, can help us just prevent future ones from happening.
So right, and trying to understand too, like, like I think we went through like the ecological characteristics of this disease as well as the you know, temporal characteristics and the epimialological Like understanding all these different facets can really help you to narrow in on what you think might be the cause.
You can't just compare symptoms, right, you have to consider the context.
Yeah.
So yeah, I mean, I don't know, sweating sickness. It was a deadly, mysterious, probably infectious, contagious disease with an equal component fascinating.
Aron. I learned so much. I mean I also learned nothing, but I learned so much.
I know, I know it's interesting if anyone has any other thoughts on what it could have been or wants to vote for their favorite.
Yeah, I mean I really really felt like I wanted for it to be relapsing fever, but I agree ecologically it just doesn't quite fit. And even symptoms wise, it doesn't quite fit. You know, none of these symptoms wise really quite fit perfectly. M hmm, because obviously if they did, then we'd have an answer. But some kind of haunted virus, I mean, I could see it. I understand that argument. Yeah, we may never know, we may never know, but I think I could live with that.
Yeah. Yeah, Okay, Well there you have it. Everyone, There you go. We could both be okay with it being hauntavirus some kind.
Well, all right, then I bet you have a ton of sources.
Do a lot of sources, Okay, So I'll call out a few of them. One by Eric Bridson from two thousand and one, and that was the first one to propose hauntavirus pulmonary syndrome as the cause of the English sweat. Then there was another incredible paper from nineteen ninety seven by Alan Dyer called the English Sweating Sickness of fifteen fifty one and Epidemic Anatomized. And then there were some
other pretty good ones. So I read one by Flood from two thousand and three, safer on the battlefield than in the city and by taverner at all from nineteen ninety eight the English sweating sickness a viral pulmonary disease.
Awesome. If you'd like to do a deeper dive on any of the illnesses that we talked about on this podcast, I will have sources from previous episodes as well as a few more for diseases that we haven't touched on yet. And you can find the sources from every single one of our episodes on this podcast will kill You dot com under the episodes tab.
That's right. Well, thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes.
Thank you to the Exactly Right Network, of which we are proud to be a part.
Yes, thank you, and thank you to you listeners for listening. We hope that you don't hate this unsatisfying episode.
I hope that you had fun. I had fun.
Yeah, I had a lot of fun. And if you have any ideas as to what it could be.
Yeah, let us know. Or if you have other medical mysteries you'd like for us to not be able to solve.
Ooh yes, okay, Well until next time, Wash your hands.
You filthy animals.
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