|
We started with a simple Yahoo! search on "medical journals," surmising that one of the well-known journals would have information on the disease. We were directed to the Yahoo! Medicine > Journals category; we scrolled down the page and clicked on the New England Journal of Medicine. From the site's front page, we clicked Search Past Issues and typed "sweating sickness" into the search field. Only one result was returned, but it was exactly what we wanted: an article originally published in 1997, titled The English Sweating Sickness.
"In the summer of 1485, a rapidly fatal infectious fever struck England... Sudor Anglicus, later known as the English sweating sickness, was characterized by sudden headaches, myalgia [muscle pain], fever, profuse sweating, and dyspnea [labored respiration]. Four additional epidemics were reported in the summers of 1508, 1517, 1528, and 1551, after which the disease abruptly disappeared." The article goes on to investigate the cause of the disease and draws some tentative conclusions about a viral cause. However, the authors then explain that without molecular confirmation from the tissues of victims, any hypothesis about the cause of English sweating sickness remains speculative. We looked up sweating
sickness at Britannica.com to see if they had additional detail or more current speculation. Here we learned that John Caius, an English physician and author of a 1552 account of the epidemic, attributed it to dirt and filth, although one 20th century writer notes its resemblance to infectious "relapsing fever," which was transmitted by lice and ticks.
|
