However, none of these fully shares the symptoms described by Caius. Since sweating sickness tended to occur only in random years, and mainly in summer, it may have been conveyed by a vector susceptible to climate change. One candidate would be a mosquito-borne viral disease similar to dengue fever, although dengue itself — as we all know from the current problems in West Africa — usually lasts for more than 24 hours and tends to be accompanied by a rash, which Caius does not mention.
Medical researchers are still searching old documents for clues, but we may never learn the cause of sweating sickness. Access provided by. Although he is often viewed as stridently self-confident, Henry VIII was one of the greatest hypochondriacs ever to sit on the English throne. He ordered the royal physicians to examine him thoroughly on an almost daily basis and kept a medicine cabinet filled with potions to cure any ailment.
Any sign of illness at court would send him into a wild panic. Meanwhile, his mistress Anne Boleyn went into quarantine at Hever Castle, her family home in the Kent countryside. For all his declarations of undying love, Henry stayed well away and instead dispatched his second-best physician, William Butts, with a love letter. Some of the symptoms match the flu pandemic of , coming in waves over two years and then disappearing. But most experts don't believe the sweating disease was the flu.
Others suggest an outbreak of anthrax. Viruses that may have been similar could have caused other epidemics, such as the Picardy Sweats, which hit part of France in the 18th century, and more recently, a disease of unknown origins that hit the Navajo reservation north of Gallup, New Mexico, in Researchers at the Queen Astrid Military Hospital in Brussels listed similarities to hantavirus in an article in , asserting it was a form of hantavirus.
No one knows for sure. Meanwhile, according to an English folk song, with her head held underneath her arm, the ghost of Anne Boleyn still stalks the bloody tower. Register or Log In. The Magazine Shop. Login Register Stay Curious Subscribe. Credit: Yale Center for Public Art. Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. Sign Up. Already a subscriber? Why did English sweating sickness occur in random summers? The answer could be climate change. Heyman and his colleagues found reports that outbreaks may have followed years when crops were damaged by floods.
Regarding vectors of a potential hantavirus, rodent numbers increase during the summer and spike in mast years, when trees are particularly productive. Heyman says, "it probably only needed certain circumstances to provoke large-scale outbreaks.
Heyman, P. Viruses 6: — McSweegan, E. Anthrax and the etiology of the English sweating sickness. Medical Hypotheses — Jared Bernard Published in 15 May
0コメント