Cold chill . Throbbing head . heftiness aches . tiredness . The effort . If you experienced those symptom today , you ’d probably just repent arrange off your flu gibe this year . But if those affair cropped up in 1485 , your family would likely start plan your funeral . In the late 1400s and other 1500s , these symptom almost certainly intend you had fallen victim to the orphic “ English Sweating Sickness , ” a disease that expunge without word of advice and could kill within hours .
From 1485 though 1551 , five epidemic of this terrific disease swept through England , and once through Europe , with mortality rate from30 to 50 percent . The illness seemed to be prevalent among upper class males , so the royals and their cohorts were in particular sham . Because of this fact , the sweat sickness may have changed the trend of history .
In 1502 , just six months after his married couple to Catherine of Aragon , Arthur , Prince of Wales , pop off on the spur of the moment at the age of 15 . Though an official cause of decease was n’t enter , some historiansbelieveArthur was another sweating malady human death . As the honest-to-goodness male child in the folk , Arthur would have ascend to the stool if he had n’t succumbed to the illness . His younger crony , Henry , Duke of York , ended up taking the peak alternatively . You in all likelihood be intimate him better as Henry VIII , who married his brother ’s widow woman seven year later . She was the first of his six wives , of class .
Though it ’s been difficult for modern - day doctor and scientists to trace the origins of the English Sweating Sickness , there ’s been educated conjecture that it was the effect of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome ( HPS ) , which was n’t even recognized until 1993 . Spread by certainrodents , HPS has the exact same symptoms and a standardized mortality rate:38 percent .
But even if 16th century Dr. were aware that the English Sweating Sickness was really HPS , there ’s little they could have done — to this day , there isno cureor vaccine that will stop it . The CDC ’s advice?Avoidrodent infestation , which was a pile gruelling to do in sixteenth hundred England .
