July 21, 2020 • 33 mins
Beginning in 1485, a mysterious disease swept in waves across England. No one was sure how it spread, no treatment existed, and the disease took the name of its most memorable symptom. The English sweating sickness seemed to have a taste for the wealthy, and the bulk of fatalities were English. The last widespread outbreak of sweating sickness was reported in 1551 -- after that, the disease vanished. Along the way, it made a king of Henry VIII.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Yeah,
(00:26):
welcome to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in during these our days of
pandemic that continue. Today's story is about another sort of infection.
But it's an infection. Uh. You know, we've been going
back and forth about this off the air. We will
(00:49):
quite enjoy the title of this. We're gonna call this
Henry d I and your Mysterious English Sweat. I am Ben.
I don't know, you know, I like to say switch
the Swits. That's a little more Australian maybe maybe New Zealand's. Yeah,
that's the sound watch out the bits swits, which which
(01:11):
for sweet swit switten bits. Never mind got off to
a smashing story here, But no, Ben, you had the
brilliant idea of the Henry the Eighth and the English
Sweats sounds like some kind of like new wave band
or like a band that might have played it like
C B G B S in the eighties. Like I
don't know, what do you think? I think you're spot
(01:31):
on with the time period. It maybe could have been
part of the earlier British invasion, some group that like
just never got out of Yorkshire. Yeah, like a skiffle band.
Perhaps you're reading the headlines about the Beatles and they
were like one day fellas one day MIT's uh. Speaking
of mates, we want to give a shout out of
(01:53):
course two our super producer, Casey Pegram case he has,
like the three of us, never suffered as far as
we know. From the notorious English sweats. I assume, right, Casey,
you're English sweat free. I had the American sweats a
few times, but not the English ones. I think when
(02:15):
I was over there it was like October, so you
know it was it was nice weather, sweating was not necessary.
That's a Casey on the case right there. When I
think of American sweats, when you first said that, Casey,
I was thinking of the meat sweats. Do you guys
know what that is? Right where we eat so much
barbecue or something that you're like, I'm sweating from the
(02:38):
physical exertion of eating. I have to lay down. That's
the American sweats right there. But yeah, we're not talking
about meat sweats though. We're talking about, like, you know,
pretty serious disease sweats that could lay you out and
then eventually kill you. Um and it was something that
very disproportionately affected like the wealthy, which is kind of interesting.
(02:59):
I sat, I gotta say there's a certain poetic justice
to that, you know, a disease that only affects the wealthy. Um,
And there's some reasoning behind that in this story about
this kind of strange pandemic that swept the land and
then Boo just blipped out of existence, like Trump thinks
the coronavirus is going to Yeah. Yeah, sweating sickness real thing,
(03:26):
also known as the sweats, the English sweating sickness. We'll
find out why in a second. Where English sweat or
for the Latin lovers in the crowd, sudor anglicus. You're right, No,
this is a mysterious infection. Uh. To to examine this story,
we're gonna have to start in the late fourteen hundreds.
(03:47):
We don't know whether there was a patient zero for
sweating sickness. We don't know first got it, but we
do know that there's a contingent of historians who believe
it originally was brought to land by mercenaries hired by
Henry the Eighth's father. Uh, they're the mercenaries were there
to seize the throne of England for Henry's line. This
(04:13):
move bringing in the mercenaries ended what's known as the
War of the Roses in fourteen eight seven. But as
as historians believe, again we're not on this. As the
historians believe the same importation of these foreign soldiers may
have ushered in the infection known as sweating sickness. That's right.
(04:38):
Some I'm gonna call them historical epidemiologists, but that might
not be a thing. They might just be regular historians.
But there's some theories, um that indicate that, uh in
that this this disease was brought to England by the French,
specifically mercenaries um in Henry Tudor's army. But there's a
lot of different theories behind this, and there aren't really
(05:01):
any reports of it affecting the Tutor army, which is interesting.
So Tutor arrived in London following the Battle of Bosworth Field,
which is the most British sounding name for a field
I could think of. That happened in the August five
and that's kind of the event that you know, you
(05:21):
can sort of mark as the beginning of this epidemic. Uh,
it's it's started about three weeks later, on the nineteenth
of September in fourteen eighty five. Uh, we don't really
know who patient zero was exactly, um, but it kind
of spread pretty widely, at least in the region where
(05:43):
it first appeared. It became it was it was remarked
upon as a new kind of sickness. Has it been
plague plague times? Not not plague time. But the people
were aware of these kinds of diseases. It was a
big deal. The plague killed an obscene number of people
in the uh hundreds, The Black Death, the bubonic plague,
(06:04):
you know the Do you know that they call those
things the pus filled boils? They call them bubas, yeah, bubos.
Yeah yeah. I've always found that comical sounding, but it's
obviously not comical at all. This is gonna sound weird
out of context. But when I was really going through
my black Plague phase, I had a fish named Bubbos.
Uh yeah, I was just I don't know my young
(06:25):
way connecting it. I love that movie A fish called Bubbos.
A fish called Bubbos, Yeah yeah, yeah. It's a spinoff
of the earlier film The Navigator. Uh so you're right,
between thirteen forty six and thirteen fifty three. This unprecedented
wave of bubonic plague devastated the known world, and it
(06:49):
had such an impact that people alive in the late
fourteen hundreds were very much aware of this. The world
population was still struggling to cover. Over twenty million people
in Europe alone died because of the bubonic plague. This
is serious, serious stuff, and as a better off fact,
(07:10):
a bit of a tangent, we can see the consequences
of the bubonic plague in twenty today. In fact, some
people in parts of Europe are born naturally genetically resistant
to uh HIV infection due to historians believe the bubonic plague.
(07:30):
But to your point, sweating sickness does not seem to
be related to the plague. You didn't get bubos with it,
you didn't have some of the same signs of transmission.
As far as medical authorities at the time could tell,
Sweating sickness just sort of popped up randomly in different locations,
(07:53):
and it was they found some patterns. They said, Okay,
it's always after a long period of rainfall, or it's
always after flooding, and usually it affects two demographics of people.
Either the very very wealthy or the very very poor. Okay,
my bad. I said it affected the wealthy, uh, disproportionately,
but apparently it was proportionately with the poor. Uh What
(08:17):
what about the middles? What? What? What? How they get
out of it? What's what's the deal with that? I
don't understand. Were they just spared by the sweat gods,
England soldiers on man, you know, England and doors or however?
How did they say that in v for Vendetta. Well,
if you're a fan, you know that what we're talking about. Yeah,
you're right. It is a bit of a mystery, isn't it.
For those historians of epidemiology, we know that the disease
(08:41):
was deadly. It killed thousands of people, and just like
parts of the world today with the coronavirus pandemic, people
were terrified. They were they were panicking, and they were
panicking because not only were people of the time very
unclear on how the disease spread, but we all also
knew that it could kill people at an incredibly quick rate.
(09:05):
Like if you traveled back to London in this time,
you could spend a day there and you would hear
multiple people just you would overhear them as you walk
by talking about how they saw someone drop dead in
the street with no no like, no preface, no pre
existing condition. Maybe they're just kind of sweaty. And then yeah,
(09:29):
like in the same way that like, you know, maybe
for coronavirus, the fever is a big indicator. With this one,
it was the sweat. So if you see someone sweating profusely,
you probably we're gonna steer clear. Uh. It's pretty interesting. Um.
It was like, like we said, it was really out
of control in London. Um. And we have this delightful
and that's the wrong word entirely. I say it's delightful
because it's written in this kind of old English style
(09:52):
account of one of these moments that you're describing, ben
by Thomas forrest here. Uh Forrestier, he's a Frenchman. Uh,
and he had this to say about such an encounter.
We saw two priests and this is me interpreting this
old English writing, so bearing with me it might be fun. Uh.
We saw two priests standing to gator and speaking to Gator,
(10:12):
and we saw both of them die suddenly. Also in
Dae Proximy, we saw see the whiff of a tailor
taken and saddenly died. Another young man walking by the
street fell down suddenly. That was a weird one. I
feel like I was lapsing into like Russian and then
(10:34):
like a little bit of Irish, and I don't know,
I was just reading it phonetically, but I think the
takeaways he saw two priests talking, uh, and then he
saw one of them die suddenly. Yeah, it makes you
think right close and a tailor as well, a tailor
nearby in proximy, I assume means in the same area,
(10:55):
there was a tailor who also suddenly died. I think maybe,
and maybe we all care, but I think it could
be proximity, as in a little bit later in time.
But either way, either way we know either like right
in the same location, that's probably right, it's probably the
same location. Well, then there's a third one. There's also
a young man walking by the street also fell down soddenly,
(11:17):
but we don't know if he died. Yeah, because at
that point we can only uh, we can only imagine
that our French physician decided caution was the better part
of valor and ran away. Yes, sir, so the symptoms
(11:39):
were incredibly swift. Okay, you I said there were no
pre existing conditions. What we mean by that is it's
not a situation where over the course of eight days
you would see someone steadily degrade. Instead, just a few
hours before they died. From what we understand, the them
(12:00):
would start having cold shivers, severe pains in the head
and their neck, and then that would be followed by
those notorious hot sweats and finally an overpowering urge to
take a snooze. And um it's it's strange because there
are also other symptoms that are reported. Right, according to
(12:23):
past medical history dot co dot uk, people said that
the sufferers smelled bad. I don't want to be rude,
but I do want to point out that in Europe
and in England in the late four hundreds, hygiene was
a different game. So for someone to smell noticeably bad,
(12:45):
it would be something that was incredibly apparent to someone
living in Right, we're just showering less often. We didn't
have a whole industry to make a smell less human. Yeah,
it was just a smelly time. Remember the stink of London.
I mean, this is a thing it was in general,
it was a smelly town, you know, there would be
(13:05):
there like, wasn't proper indoor plumbing yet, I mean there
was was there? The great stink of London is what
caused those uh advancements in plumbing, right, yeah, because at
the time before that, even after that, one of the
most common ways of disposing sewage or food waste from
(13:26):
your house was to throw it in the gutter, which
was in the middle of the street. So it was
it was rough. And we have the description from our
French physician about what the disease looked like. And remember
this is a learned individual and he, you know, is
(13:46):
still writing in that same language which we tragedy aside.
I think the three of us find it. It's somewhat delightful,
so he says, and the sickness coming with a great
sweeting and stinking. We read niece of the face and
the vould body, and of a continual fust with a
great hit and hi dick because of the fumes and
(14:09):
the venoms all over the place. With that, do you
see how what it makes you do? Though the fumes
he sound like inspector clus you know for a second there,
I love it. And we're not making fun of anybody
because these people aren't alive anymore, and nobody talks like
this anymore. So we've got Carte blanched to go to town. Yeah,
and and and you know, to be honest, not to
talk too much about the acting process here, but it's
(14:32):
a it's a French physician writing in old English. So
there's some layers. I'm kidding. That was just that was
just a garbage accident. But an even scarier thing about
this is that we know that this was not just
one phase, right, There wasn't just one epidemic, right, No,
(14:56):
And you know, and again it's interesting one to do
doing right now because we're in a we're in a
time right now where a lot of governors and a
lot of the states are like reopening and kind of
just talk about like, oh, let's just send kids back
to school. Uh, and uh, we haven't even seen the
second wave yet of our personal pandemic. And um, if
history is to be believed, and it should be and
(15:18):
often repeats itself, if it's not, um, then you know,
we could be looking at at a pretty nasty situation
with a second wave. And that's what happened here. Um,
much like the second wave of the Spanish flu of
nineteen eighteen. From fourteen eighty five through fifteen fifty one,
they had five epidemics of this uh very very dangerous
(15:40):
sickness UM that absolutely just burned its way through England
UM and then also made its way into Europe UM
and and it had like what are we looking at
for coronavirus? The mortality rate is super low compared to this.
This was thirty to fifty percent mortality rates. That's bonkers,
(16:01):
Like that's I mean, you know, you think we're living
in a panic situation right now. Can you imagine if
of the people that contracted COVID nineteen just dropped dead
on the spot. Yikes. And another difference here is that
the sweating and sickness, when it came on so fast
and so uh intensely, it also led to a quick recovery.
(16:25):
The idea was if you were one of the fifty
to seventy lucky percent who would not die in the
first few hours of exhibiting symptoms, once you got two
hour twenty four, you were kind of out of the woods.
They were guessing because nobody knew how to prevent this,
nobody knew how to treat it. They just knew people
(16:47):
started sweating, and then they died. That outbreak in five
lasted until late October and then it disappeared a kaiser
associated for several years. You would hear some aller reports
of smaller outbreaks at the you know, every so often
every blue moon until that is fifteen o seven. Don't
(17:11):
call it a come back, or do call it a
come back because the sweating sickness returned, and people who
were alive in four five and it lived through that
hellish time instantly knew that this was the same disease,
the same infection had come calling again. And then it's subsided.
(17:31):
And people thought, okay, second wave, we survived, right, But
they were wrong. Yeah, I think like you said, there
were five waves, um, and they were absolutely wrong. And
then the third wave in fifteen seventeen hit and that
was even more severe um. And that actually made it
across the English channel to Calais. I love Calais. I've
(17:54):
always loved when people talk about Calais, cal Calais, Oh
frept justus day. Isn't that from Alice in Wonderland? No? Wait, jabberwocky, Yeah,
there we go. But it still seemed to be that
the English were the ones that were bearing the brunt
of this UM that it was almost like a cursed
kind of situation in UM. It reached its peak epidemic
(18:16):
level proportions once again UM, this time spreading into Europe. Hamburg, Switzerland, Sweden,
Norway and Denmark were all affected, but none of them
got hit nearly as hard as England UM, and at
the time French ambassador named Cardinal du Belllet described it
(18:36):
as the easiest disease in the world to die of. Yeah. Yeah.
In June of he put the facts pretty plainly. He said,
you have a slight pain in the head and at
the heart all at once, you begin to sweat. There's
no need for a physician. They're taken off without languishing, uh. He.
(18:57):
He also talked about the escalation of the number of
deaths in the pandemic wave that you described. Noel, He says,
about two thousand have been attacked by in London. Twelve
years ago when the same thing happened, ten thousand people
died in the space of ten or twelve days, but
it was not so sharp as it's now beginning to be.
(19:19):
Everybody's terribly alarmed. He's almost like a he is almost
like one of those medical experts in the very end
of very beginning of who are telling us this is
going to be bad? Uh? He predicted a rise. The
last major outbreak of the disease sweating sickness, occurred in
(19:40):
England in fifteen fifty one, and after this it's disappeared
completely and hasn't been seen since so far. I hate
to do it. I have I have to drop so far.
Of course you do, um. And you know, I actually
posted a thing on my Instagram story a couple of
weeks ago that was just kind of like adding insult
(20:01):
to injury. It was an article from the New York
Times saying, bubonic plague found in Chinese herdsman. You know,
it's like, of course it was. It turns out they
find it every now and then, right, Yeah, it's certainly
it's a thing, Like so, I know it was. I
definitely was being alarmist about it, like, yeah, okay, great,
we got plagues of locusts and you know, disease and
(20:24):
uh famine and you know all of this stuff and
wildfires in Australia. Now we got bubonic plague again. Yeah,
I've got one closer to home for you. I did
a story for this on on Strange News Daily. So
those two Mongolian brothers who tested positive for the plague,
they were locked down. You're right, it does happen um
more often and gets reported. Squirrels in Colorado tested positive
(20:49):
for bubonic plague like this week, tight love that did
you say tight? I did say tight? But what's the deal?
So are we are we immune? Are we like inoculated
against that? Or I mean, I know you can just
treat it with like uh uh penicilla um, but with
like why why why is there why would that not
spread in the way that novel coronavirus is spread if
(21:12):
squirrels have it. Well, in the case of bubonic plague,
there's some good news which arrived too late to save
the millions of victims in the Dreds. There's like a
very small chance that you might get bubotic plague. And
if you did, humanity as a cure. Now, so we
(21:33):
can we can cure the plague. That's why when you
see those reports of like prairie dogs in the western
part of the US having plague, you shouldn't freak out.
I mean, animals are reservoirs of disease. Armadillo's can get leprosy,
which I think is just patently unfair to them. They've
got a lot going against them already. I did know that,
and you can probably catch it, right. Could you catch
(21:54):
it from touching an armadillo? I know, as leproty supposed
to be like intensely communicable. You know that. I don't.
I'm going to assume that you can and steer clear
of armadillas because they're weird little bastards. Anyway, I don't
think you should handle armadilla's general. I'm I'm a hands
off armadillo policy kind of guy. I want to go
(22:16):
to your point, Noel, because said something that I think
it mystifies me about this case, and I think we
kind of get to an answer about why this happens.
But as you said, one of the most mysterious aspects
of this mysterious disease, the English sweats, was that the
(22:38):
upper class of England, especially rich young dudes, seemed particularly
vulnerable to it. That's right, um, unlike you know the
plague which spared none, the bubonic plague, and seemingly much
like I hate to harp on it, keep coming back
to it, but here we are coronavirus. It seems to
(22:59):
spare the very young, um, well, not the very old
in the coronavirus case, but in this case it did.
It seemed to spare the very young and the very old, uh,
the English sweats. It also didn't ever spread to Scotland,
by the way, so that's why they call it the
English sweats specifically, or Ireland or Wales specifically, London, England,
and then a little bit in Europe some of these
(23:20):
other countries that we mentioned. It was very commonly seen
in rural areas, but very common as well in um
areas where nobility, uh we're kicking around, especially in London
and the student populations of some of these very high
prestige universities Oxford and Cambridge. Cardinal Wolsey UM actually had
(23:44):
a brush with the disease two times, and that he
got it twice uh and and luckily for him, he
was able to recover both times. But a lot of
the folks that were in his household, like his staff, uh,
did not end up being so lucky. A lot of
folks did flee to Ireland, Scotland and France just to
(24:05):
die there. You know, there's there's there's no uh, what
is it there's no geographical solution for a spiritual problem,
or in this case, you know, a deadly disease. Yeah,
and it started to take root in the zeitgeist, the
popular culture of the time. You know a disease is
(24:26):
serious when people start giving it street names, like coronavirus
has been called the rota. For instance, the sweating sickness
got the nickname stop Gallant, Stop gallant because it stopped
so many young gallants. Uh. And and monasteries seem particularly vulnerable.
(24:46):
You might think that monasteries are maybe not part of
the upper class. They occupy a unique position though, because
monasteries are centers for literacy, right, They're they're academic in
many ways. Um, but one outbreak didn't affect monasteries near
as much, not because they practice better hygiene, but because
(25:11):
monasteries were dissolved by then. There is one theory, and
I wanted to see what you thought about this, the
theory that people in the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder,
which were the majority of people there. Uh, there's this
theory that they were able to weather this storm of
disease a little bit better because they had just been
(25:34):
exposed to more disease kind of like to let your
kids get dirty theory, I guess mm hmm exactly let
him just go around licking door knobs and stuff. No,
definitely not anymore ever again oh boy um, but yeah,
it's I don't know. I wonder about this sometimes been
you know, we say, oh, I've got a strong immune system,
(25:56):
like because I'm you know, a filthy, disgusting man. Is
that true? What do you what do you know about
the science behind this idea of boosting your immune system
by like living in squalor. Well, I am not a doctor.
Neither you. Neither is Casey. So this is not medical advice.
You can't see the zoom, folks. But I'm waving my
(26:18):
hands yeah in an emphatic, furious way. So that is
not us saying go lick the floor or go get
your kids to play in horse poop or something. Those
are both just bad ideas. Both of those sound like
really solid insults, say go lick the floor or go
tell your kids to play in horse poop. Here we go,
(26:40):
just put just putting that out there. I don't know,
you know, I had a realization is thinking about places
that we can't go and this year and probably beginning
next year and and miss the Renaissance Fair festival or
whatever it's called. And uh, you know, proost is right
in remembrance of things past. The sense of smell is
our primary gateway into memory. And when I think of
(27:03):
Renaissance Festival, I smell, you know, like beer, and I
smell those nor miss delicious turkey legs. But I also
smell horsepoop with nostalgia totally. Um, yeah, no, absolutely is
a very powerful sense memory. I have that for the
circus as well. I can think of popcorn and uh
(27:25):
an elephant poop, which is pretty much the same as horsepoop.
It smells very similar. Uh. But we're not here to
talk about animal feces. We're here to figure out what
the hell happened to the English sweats. How could something
that had just ravaged the land and with no medical
answer of any kind just kind of sweated itself out?
O good turner phrase there, man. Uh we know that.
(27:48):
In eight one UH fellow named Dr Arthur board Year
wrote a paper that he sent to the Anthropology Society
of Paris, where he said he proposed a pretty racist
thing that maybe had the predecessor of genetic research in there.
(28:09):
His theory was the sweating sickness effects appeared to affect
people who were English, but really was affecting people who
were descended from Anglo Saxon's and people who were descended
from the Celts were spared because of some inherent inborn
resistance or because of some Anglo Saxon vulnerability. This is
(28:34):
the kind of stuff that that counted as a scientific
research back then. But you know, it's weird that Henry
the Eighth took the pole position. In our headline today
we mentioned that the actions of his father may have
led to I don't know, probably, I'm gonna say it
(28:55):
probably led to the sweating sickness entering England. But why
why are we talking about Henry the eighth? What what
on earth does he have to do with the English sweats? Well,
he is Henry the eighth, the as Henry the eighth,
the as he is. Uh And it actually there's a
theory that it possibly led to him becoming king because
(29:16):
uh um, you know, there was such high instance of
infection among the royal class it possibly affected or rerouted
kind of historical events. So in fifteen o two, Arthur,
who was the Prince of Wales died quite suddenly and
unexpectedly the age of fifteen. This was just six months
(29:38):
after he married Catherine of Aragon. That sounds familiar. Um, well,
we'll get to that. There was no official like record
of of what his cause of death was, but a
lot of folks in the historical circles believe that he
was another one of the long list of nobles that
succumbed to the sweating sickness. So he was the oldest
(30:00):
man in the family, and he would have become king
had he not died at fifteen, So his younger brother,
Henry the Duke of York got the job instead and
was crowned. Um. And that Henry the Duke of York
became the Henry the Eighth of legend that we know
so well. And he ended up marrying his brother's widow,
(30:24):
Catherine of Aragon. She was, in fact the first of
those six wives that that he uh you know, burned
through uh, much like the sweating sickness burned through the land.
Henry was not a good dude. Um. But yeah, if
it wasn't for potentially sweating sickness, he might never have
had the opportunity, yep, to be the full piece of
(30:48):
work that he ended up being hold the phone. Uh,
we we're doing we're doing that thing again. Um, where
we've already gone long, We're only halfway through the amazing
research materials that we have. We think this one deserves
a two parter. We're really not just trying to mess
with you, lovely, lovely listeners. Um, we just try to
we we try to have a standard. We try to
(31:09):
keep our episodes in the thirty five to forty minute range.
And um, this one is looking to be a doozy.
So we're gonna come back to you with a part
two of the English Sweats. Yeah, peek behind the scenes. Uh,
Casey starts indicating to us there's this sort of a
storm cloud that so slowly builds across his brow. We're
(31:30):
getting too long. So thanks as always to you, super producer,
Casey Pagraham. Thanks to Gabe Loes Yeah, our research north Star.
Thanks to Alex Williams, who composed the perfect soundtrack to
this story of the Sweating Sickness. If you wish, you
can follow us on social media. I think our favorite
place is the Ridiculous Historians fan page on Facebook, where
(31:53):
you can interact with your fellow ridiculous historians, and to
get in, you just have to say the magic word,
which is me been or top producer Casey Pegram's names,
or some little tidbit that indicates that you know what
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or really pretty easy hit us up on that Facebook group.
You can also find us as human beings individually on
(32:13):
social media. I am at how now Noel Brown exclusively
on the Instagram. Honestly, folks, Uh, it just make me
laugh with a pun and you're into ridiculous historians, or
just teach me a word. I don't know. I would
love to learn some more weird words. You can also,
while you're on the internet, find me on Instagram where
(32:34):
I am building. Uh, I'm building survival kits right now,
so find out more about that at ben Bullin. Or
you can find me on Twitter where I have hot
takes some plenty at Ben Bullen hs W. And finally,
thanks to Jonathan Strict on the Quister, Uh, we hope
to have you back very soon. Buddy. You promised you'd
bomb our zooms, but you haven't showed up yet. I'm
(32:55):
actually starting to miss you, and I hope you're Okay,
keep up that loot practicing. We'll see your next oplix.
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I
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your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Yeah,
(00:26):
welcome to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in during these our days of
pandemic that continue. Today's story is about another sort of infection.
But it's an infection. Uh. You know, we've been going
back and forth about this off the air. We will
(00:49):
quite enjoy the title of this. We're gonna call this
Henry d I and your Mysterious English Sweat. I am Ben.
I don't know, you know, I like to say switch
the Swits. That's a little more Australian maybe maybe New Zealand's. Yeah,
that's the sound watch out the bits swits, which which
(01:11):
for sweet swit switten bits. Never mind got off to
a smashing story here, But no, Ben, you had the
brilliant idea of the Henry the Eighth and the English
Sweats sounds like some kind of like new wave band
or like a band that might have played it like
C B G B S in the eighties. Like I
don't know, what do you think? I think you're spot
(01:31):
on with the time period. It maybe could have been
part of the earlier British invasion, some group that like
just never got out of Yorkshire. Yeah, like a skiffle band.
Perhaps you're reading the headlines about the Beatles and they
were like one day fellas one day MIT's uh. Speaking
of mates, we want to give a shout out of
(01:53):
course two our super producer, Casey Pegram case he has,
like the three of us, never suffered as far as
we know. From the notorious English sweats. I assume, right, Casey,
you're English sweat free. I had the American sweats a
few times, but not the English ones. I think when
(02:15):
I was over there it was like October, so you
know it was it was nice weather, sweating was not necessary.
That's a Casey on the case right there. When I
think of American sweats, when you first said that, Casey,
I was thinking of the meat sweats. Do you guys
know what that is? Right where we eat so much
barbecue or something that you're like, I'm sweating from the
(02:38):
physical exertion of eating. I have to lay down. That's
the American sweats right there. But yeah, we're not talking
about meat sweats though. We're talking about, like, you know,
pretty serious disease sweats that could lay you out and
then eventually kill you. Um and it was something that
very disproportionately affected like the wealthy, which is kind of interesting.
(02:59):
I sat, I gotta say there's a certain poetic justice
to that, you know, a disease that only affects the wealthy. Um,
And there's some reasoning behind that in this story about
this kind of strange pandemic that swept the land and
then Boo just blipped out of existence, like Trump thinks
the coronavirus is going to Yeah. Yeah, sweating sickness real thing,
(03:26):
also known as the sweats, the English sweating sickness. We'll
find out why in a second. Where English sweat or
for the Latin lovers in the crowd, sudor anglicus. You're right, No,
this is a mysterious infection. Uh. To to examine this story,
we're gonna have to start in the late fourteen hundreds.
(03:47):
We don't know whether there was a patient zero for
sweating sickness. We don't know first got it, but we
do know that there's a contingent of historians who believe
it originally was brought to land by mercenaries hired by
Henry the Eighth's father. Uh, they're the mercenaries were there
to seize the throne of England for Henry's line. This
(04:13):
move bringing in the mercenaries ended what's known as the
War of the Roses in fourteen eight seven. But as
as historians believe, again we're not on this. As the
historians believe the same importation of these foreign soldiers may
have ushered in the infection known as sweating sickness. That's right.
(04:38):
Some I'm gonna call them historical epidemiologists, but that might
not be a thing. They might just be regular historians.
But there's some theories, um that indicate that, uh in
that this this disease was brought to England by the French,
specifically mercenaries um in Henry Tudor's army. But there's a
lot of different theories behind this, and there aren't really
(05:01):
any reports of it affecting the Tutor army, which is interesting.
So Tutor arrived in London following the Battle of Bosworth Field,
which is the most British sounding name for a field
I could think of. That happened in the August five
and that's kind of the event that you know, you
(05:21):
can sort of mark as the beginning of this epidemic. Uh,
it's it's started about three weeks later, on the nineteenth
of September in fourteen eighty five. Uh, we don't really
know who patient zero was exactly, um, but it kind
of spread pretty widely, at least in the region where
(05:43):
it first appeared. It became it was it was remarked
upon as a new kind of sickness. Has it been
plague plague times? Not not plague time. But the people
were aware of these kinds of diseases. It was a
big deal. The plague killed an obscene number of people
in the uh hundreds, The Black Death, the bubonic plague,
(06:04):
you know the Do you know that they call those
things the pus filled boils? They call them bubas, yeah, bubos.
Yeah yeah. I've always found that comical sounding, but it's
obviously not comical at all. This is gonna sound weird
out of context. But when I was really going through
my black Plague phase, I had a fish named Bubbos.
Uh yeah, I was just I don't know my young
(06:25):
way connecting it. I love that movie A fish called Bubbos.
A fish called Bubbos, Yeah yeah, yeah. It's a spinoff
of the earlier film The Navigator. Uh so you're right,
between thirteen forty six and thirteen fifty three. This unprecedented
wave of bubonic plague devastated the known world, and it
(06:49):
had such an impact that people alive in the late
fourteen hundreds were very much aware of this. The world
population was still struggling to cover. Over twenty million people
in Europe alone died because of the bubonic plague. This
is serious, serious stuff, and as a better off fact,
(07:10):
a bit of a tangent, we can see the consequences
of the bubonic plague in twenty today. In fact, some
people in parts of Europe are born naturally genetically resistant
to uh HIV infection due to historians believe the bubonic plague.
(07:30):
But to your point, sweating sickness does not seem to
be related to the plague. You didn't get bubos with it,
you didn't have some of the same signs of transmission.
As far as medical authorities at the time could tell,
Sweating sickness just sort of popped up randomly in different locations,
(07:53):
and it was they found some patterns. They said, Okay,
it's always after a long period of rainfall, or it's
always after flooding, and usually it affects two demographics of people.
Either the very very wealthy or the very very poor. Okay,
my bad. I said it affected the wealthy, uh, disproportionately,
but apparently it was proportionately with the poor. Uh What
(08:17):
what about the middles? What? What? What? How they get
out of it? What's what's the deal with that? I
don't understand. Were they just spared by the sweat gods,
England soldiers on man, you know, England and doors or however?
How did they say that in v for Vendetta. Well,
if you're a fan, you know that what we're talking about. Yeah,
you're right. It is a bit of a mystery, isn't it.
For those historians of epidemiology, we know that the disease
(08:41):
was deadly. It killed thousands of people, and just like
parts of the world today with the coronavirus pandemic, people
were terrified. They were they were panicking, and they were
panicking because not only were people of the time very
unclear on how the disease spread, but we all also
knew that it could kill people at an incredibly quick rate.
(09:05):
Like if you traveled back to London in this time,
you could spend a day there and you would hear
multiple people just you would overhear them as you walk
by talking about how they saw someone drop dead in
the street with no no like, no preface, no pre
existing condition. Maybe they're just kind of sweaty. And then yeah,
(09:29):
like in the same way that like, you know, maybe
for coronavirus, the fever is a big indicator. With this one,
it was the sweat. So if you see someone sweating profusely,
you probably we're gonna steer clear. Uh. It's pretty interesting. Um.
It was like, like we said, it was really out
of control in London. Um. And we have this delightful
and that's the wrong word entirely. I say it's delightful
because it's written in this kind of old English style
(09:52):
account of one of these moments that you're describing, ben
by Thomas forrest here. Uh Forrestier, he's a Frenchman. Uh,
and he had this to say about such an encounter.
We saw two priests and this is me interpreting this
old English writing, so bearing with me it might be fun. Uh.
We saw two priests standing to gator and speaking to Gator,
(10:12):
and we saw both of them die suddenly. Also in
Dae Proximy, we saw see the whiff of a tailor
taken and saddenly died. Another young man walking by the
street fell down suddenly. That was a weird one. I
feel like I was lapsing into like Russian and then
(10:34):
like a little bit of Irish, and I don't know,
I was just reading it phonetically, but I think the
takeaways he saw two priests talking, uh, and then he
saw one of them die suddenly. Yeah, it makes you
think right close and a tailor as well, a tailor
nearby in proximy, I assume means in the same area,
(10:55):
there was a tailor who also suddenly died. I think maybe,
and maybe we all care, but I think it could
be proximity, as in a little bit later in time.
But either way, either way we know either like right
in the same location, that's probably right, it's probably the
same location. Well, then there's a third one. There's also
a young man walking by the street also fell down soddenly,
(11:17):
but we don't know if he died. Yeah, because at
that point we can only uh, we can only imagine
that our French physician decided caution was the better part
of valor and ran away. Yes, sir, so the symptoms
(11:39):
were incredibly swift. Okay, you I said there were no
pre existing conditions. What we mean by that is it's
not a situation where over the course of eight days
you would see someone steadily degrade. Instead, just a few
hours before they died. From what we understand, the them
(12:00):
would start having cold shivers, severe pains in the head
and their neck, and then that would be followed by
those notorious hot sweats and finally an overpowering urge to
take a snooze. And um it's it's strange because there
are also other symptoms that are reported. Right, according to
(12:23):
past medical history dot co dot uk, people said that
the sufferers smelled bad. I don't want to be rude,
but I do want to point out that in Europe
and in England in the late four hundreds, hygiene was
a different game. So for someone to smell noticeably bad,
(12:45):
it would be something that was incredibly apparent to someone
living in Right, we're just showering less often. We didn't
have a whole industry to make a smell less human. Yeah,
it was just a smelly time. Remember the stink of London.
I mean, this is a thing it was in general,
it was a smelly town, you know, there would be
(13:05):
there like, wasn't proper indoor plumbing yet, I mean there
was was there? The great stink of London is what
caused those uh advancements in plumbing, right, yeah, because at
the time before that, even after that, one of the
most common ways of disposing sewage or food waste from
(13:26):
your house was to throw it in the gutter, which
was in the middle of the street. So it was
it was rough. And we have the description from our
French physician about what the disease looked like. And remember
this is a learned individual and he, you know, is
(13:46):
still writing in that same language which we tragedy aside.
I think the three of us find it. It's somewhat delightful,
so he says, and the sickness coming with a great
sweeting and stinking. We read niece of the face and
the vould body, and of a continual fust with a
great hit and hi dick because of the fumes and
(14:09):
the venoms all over the place. With that, do you
see how what it makes you do? Though the fumes
he sound like inspector clus you know for a second there,
I love it. And we're not making fun of anybody
because these people aren't alive anymore, and nobody talks like
this anymore. So we've got Carte blanched to go to town. Yeah,
and and and you know, to be honest, not to
talk too much about the acting process here, but it's
(14:32):
a it's a French physician writing in old English. So
there's some layers. I'm kidding. That was just that was
just a garbage accident. But an even scarier thing about
this is that we know that this was not just
one phase, right, There wasn't just one epidemic, right, No,
(14:56):
And you know, and again it's interesting one to do
doing right now because we're in a we're in a
time right now where a lot of governors and a
lot of the states are like reopening and kind of
just talk about like, oh, let's just send kids back
to school. Uh, and uh, we haven't even seen the
second wave yet of our personal pandemic. And um, if
history is to be believed, and it should be and
(15:18):
often repeats itself, if it's not, um, then you know,
we could be looking at at a pretty nasty situation
with a second wave. And that's what happened here. Um,
much like the second wave of the Spanish flu of
nineteen eighteen. From fourteen eighty five through fifteen fifty one,
they had five epidemics of this uh very very dangerous
(15:40):
sickness UM that absolutely just burned its way through England
UM and then also made its way into Europe UM
and and it had like what are we looking at
for coronavirus? The mortality rate is super low compared to this.
This was thirty to fifty percent mortality rates. That's bonkers,
(16:01):
Like that's I mean, you know, you think we're living
in a panic situation right now. Can you imagine if
of the people that contracted COVID nineteen just dropped dead
on the spot. Yikes. And another difference here is that
the sweating and sickness, when it came on so fast
and so uh intensely, it also led to a quick recovery.
(16:25):
The idea was if you were one of the fifty
to seventy lucky percent who would not die in the
first few hours of exhibiting symptoms, once you got two
hour twenty four, you were kind of out of the woods.
They were guessing because nobody knew how to prevent this,
nobody knew how to treat it. They just knew people
(16:47):
started sweating, and then they died. That outbreak in five
lasted until late October and then it disappeared a kaiser
associated for several years. You would hear some aller reports
of smaller outbreaks at the you know, every so often
every blue moon until that is fifteen o seven. Don't
(17:11):
call it a come back, or do call it a
come back because the sweating sickness returned, and people who
were alive in four five and it lived through that
hellish time instantly knew that this was the same disease,
the same infection had come calling again. And then it's subsided.
(17:31):
And people thought, okay, second wave, we survived, right, But
they were wrong. Yeah, I think like you said, there
were five waves, um, and they were absolutely wrong. And
then the third wave in fifteen seventeen hit and that
was even more severe um. And that actually made it
across the English channel to Calais. I love Calais. I've
(17:54):
always loved when people talk about Calais, cal Calais, Oh
frept justus day. Isn't that from Alice in Wonderland? No? Wait, jabberwocky, Yeah,
there we go. But it still seemed to be that
the English were the ones that were bearing the brunt
of this UM that it was almost like a cursed
kind of situation in UM. It reached its peak epidemic
(18:16):
level proportions once again UM, this time spreading into Europe. Hamburg, Switzerland, Sweden,
Norway and Denmark were all affected, but none of them
got hit nearly as hard as England UM, and at
the time French ambassador named Cardinal du Belllet described it
(18:36):
as the easiest disease in the world to die of. Yeah. Yeah.
In June of he put the facts pretty plainly. He said,
you have a slight pain in the head and at
the heart all at once, you begin to sweat. There's
no need for a physician. They're taken off without languishing, uh. He.
(18:57):
He also talked about the escalation of the number of
deaths in the pandemic wave that you described. Noel, He says,
about two thousand have been attacked by in London. Twelve
years ago when the same thing happened, ten thousand people
died in the space of ten or twelve days, but
it was not so sharp as it's now beginning to be.
(19:19):
Everybody's terribly alarmed. He's almost like a he is almost
like one of those medical experts in the very end
of very beginning of who are telling us this is
going to be bad? Uh? He predicted a rise. The
last major outbreak of the disease sweating sickness, occurred in
(19:40):
England in fifteen fifty one, and after this it's disappeared
completely and hasn't been seen since so far. I hate
to do it. I have I have to drop so far.
Of course you do, um. And you know, I actually
posted a thing on my Instagram story a couple of
weeks ago that was just kind of like adding insult
(20:01):
to injury. It was an article from the New York
Times saying, bubonic plague found in Chinese herdsman. You know,
it's like, of course it was. It turns out they
find it every now and then, right, Yeah, it's certainly
it's a thing, Like so, I know it was. I
definitely was being alarmist about it, like, yeah, okay, great,
we got plagues of locusts and you know, disease and
(20:24):
uh famine and you know all of this stuff and
wildfires in Australia. Now we got bubonic plague again. Yeah,
I've got one closer to home for you. I did
a story for this on on Strange News Daily. So
those two Mongolian brothers who tested positive for the plague,
they were locked down. You're right, it does happen um
more often and gets reported. Squirrels in Colorado tested positive
(20:49):
for bubonic plague like this week, tight love that did
you say tight? I did say tight? But what's the deal?
So are we are we immune? Are we like inoculated
against that? Or I mean, I know you can just
treat it with like uh uh penicilla um, but with
like why why why is there why would that not
spread in the way that novel coronavirus is spread if
(21:12):
squirrels have it. Well, in the case of bubonic plague,
there's some good news which arrived too late to save
the millions of victims in the Dreds. There's like a
very small chance that you might get bubotic plague. And
if you did, humanity as a cure. Now, so we
(21:33):
can we can cure the plague. That's why when you
see those reports of like prairie dogs in the western
part of the US having plague, you shouldn't freak out.
I mean, animals are reservoirs of disease. Armadillo's can get leprosy,
which I think is just patently unfair to them. They've
got a lot going against them already. I did know that,
and you can probably catch it, right. Could you catch
(21:54):
it from touching an armadillo? I know, as leproty supposed
to be like intensely communicable. You know that. I don't.
I'm going to assume that you can and steer clear
of armadillas because they're weird little bastards. Anyway, I don't
think you should handle armadilla's general. I'm I'm a hands
off armadillo policy kind of guy. I want to go
(22:16):
to your point, Noel, because said something that I think
it mystifies me about this case, and I think we
kind of get to an answer about why this happens.
But as you said, one of the most mysterious aspects
of this mysterious disease, the English sweats, was that the
(22:38):
upper class of England, especially rich young dudes, seemed particularly
vulnerable to it. That's right, um, unlike you know the
plague which spared none, the bubonic plague, and seemingly much
like I hate to harp on it, keep coming back
to it, but here we are coronavirus. It seems to
(22:59):
spare the very young, um, well, not the very old
in the coronavirus case, but in this case it did.
It seemed to spare the very young and the very old, uh,
the English sweats. It also didn't ever spread to Scotland,
by the way, so that's why they call it the
English sweats specifically, or Ireland or Wales specifically, London, England,
and then a little bit in Europe some of these
(23:20):
other countries that we mentioned. It was very commonly seen
in rural areas, but very common as well in um
areas where nobility, uh we're kicking around, especially in London
and the student populations of some of these very high
prestige universities Oxford and Cambridge. Cardinal Wolsey UM actually had
(23:44):
a brush with the disease two times, and that he
got it twice uh and and luckily for him, he
was able to recover both times. But a lot of
the folks that were in his household, like his staff, uh,
did not end up being so lucky. A lot of
folks did flee to Ireland, Scotland and France just to
(24:05):
die there. You know, there's there's there's no uh, what
is it there's no geographical solution for a spiritual problem,
or in this case, you know, a deadly disease. Yeah,
and it started to take root in the zeitgeist, the
popular culture of the time. You know a disease is
(24:26):
serious when people start giving it street names, like coronavirus
has been called the rota. For instance, the sweating sickness
got the nickname stop Gallant, Stop gallant because it stopped
so many young gallants. Uh. And and monasteries seem particularly vulnerable.
(24:46):
You might think that monasteries are maybe not part of
the upper class. They occupy a unique position though, because
monasteries are centers for literacy, right, They're they're academic in
many ways. Um, but one outbreak didn't affect monasteries near
as much, not because they practice better hygiene, but because
(25:11):
monasteries were dissolved by then. There is one theory, and
I wanted to see what you thought about this, the
theory that people in the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder,
which were the majority of people there. Uh, there's this
theory that they were able to weather this storm of
disease a little bit better because they had just been
(25:34):
exposed to more disease kind of like to let your
kids get dirty theory, I guess mm hmm exactly let
him just go around licking door knobs and stuff. No,
definitely not anymore ever again oh boy um, but yeah,
it's I don't know. I wonder about this sometimes been
you know, we say, oh, I've got a strong immune system,
(25:56):
like because I'm you know, a filthy, disgusting man. Is
that true? What do you what do you know about
the science behind this idea of boosting your immune system
by like living in squalor. Well, I am not a doctor.
Neither you. Neither is Casey. So this is not medical advice.
You can't see the zoom, folks. But I'm waving my
(26:18):
hands yeah in an emphatic, furious way. So that is
not us saying go lick the floor or go get
your kids to play in horse poop or something. Those
are both just bad ideas. Both of those sound like
really solid insults, say go lick the floor or go
tell your kids to play in horse poop. Here we go,
(26:40):
just put just putting that out there. I don't know,
you know, I had a realization is thinking about places
that we can't go and this year and probably beginning
next year and and miss the Renaissance Fair festival or
whatever it's called. And uh, you know, proost is right
in remembrance of things past. The sense of smell is
our primary gateway into memory. And when I think of
(27:03):
Renaissance Festival, I smell, you know, like beer, and I
smell those nor miss delicious turkey legs. But I also
smell horsepoop with nostalgia totally. Um, yeah, no, absolutely is
a very powerful sense memory. I have that for the
circus as well. I can think of popcorn and uh
(27:25):
an elephant poop, which is pretty much the same as horsepoop.
It smells very similar. Uh. But we're not here to
talk about animal feces. We're here to figure out what
the hell happened to the English sweats. How could something
that had just ravaged the land and with no medical
answer of any kind just kind of sweated itself out?
O good turner phrase there, man. Uh we know that.
(27:48):
In eight one UH fellow named Dr Arthur board Year
wrote a paper that he sent to the Anthropology Society
of Paris, where he said he proposed a pretty racist
thing that maybe had the predecessor of genetic research in there.
(28:09):
His theory was the sweating sickness effects appeared to affect
people who were English, but really was affecting people who
were descended from Anglo Saxon's and people who were descended
from the Celts were spared because of some inherent inborn
resistance or because of some Anglo Saxon vulnerability. This is
(28:34):
the kind of stuff that that counted as a scientific
research back then. But you know, it's weird that Henry
the Eighth took the pole position. In our headline today
we mentioned that the actions of his father may have
led to I don't know, probably, I'm gonna say it
(28:55):
probably led to the sweating sickness entering England. But why
why are we talking about Henry the eighth? What what
on earth does he have to do with the English sweats? Well,
he is Henry the eighth, the as Henry the eighth,
the as he is. Uh And it actually there's a
theory that it possibly led to him becoming king because
(29:16):
uh um, you know, there was such high instance of
infection among the royal class it possibly affected or rerouted
kind of historical events. So in fifteen o two, Arthur,
who was the Prince of Wales died quite suddenly and
unexpectedly the age of fifteen. This was just six months
(29:38):
after he married Catherine of Aragon. That sounds familiar. Um, well,
we'll get to that. There was no official like record
of of what his cause of death was, but a
lot of folks in the historical circles believe that he
was another one of the long list of nobles that
succumbed to the sweating sickness. So he was the oldest
(30:00):
man in the family, and he would have become king
had he not died at fifteen, So his younger brother,
Henry the Duke of York got the job instead and
was crowned. Um. And that Henry the Duke of York
became the Henry the Eighth of legend that we know
so well. And he ended up marrying his brother's widow,
(30:24):
Catherine of Aragon. She was, in fact the first of
those six wives that that he uh you know, burned
through uh, much like the sweating sickness burned through the land.
Henry was not a good dude. Um. But yeah, if
it wasn't for potentially sweating sickness, he might never have
had the opportunity, yep, to be the full piece of
(30:48):
work that he ended up being hold the phone. Uh,
we we're doing we're doing that thing again. Um, where
we've already gone long, We're only halfway through the amazing
research materials that we have. We think this one deserves
a two parter. We're really not just trying to mess
with you, lovely, lovely listeners. Um, we just try to
we we try to have a standard. We try to
(31:09):
keep our episodes in the thirty five to forty minute range.
And um, this one is looking to be a doozy.
So we're gonna come back to you with a part
two of the English Sweats. Yeah, peek behind the scenes. Uh,
Casey starts indicating to us there's this sort of a
storm cloud that so slowly builds across his brow. We're
(31:30):
getting too long. So thanks as always to you, super producer,
Casey Pagraham. Thanks to Gabe Loes Yeah, our research north Star.
Thanks to Alex Williams, who composed the perfect soundtrack to
this story of the Sweating Sickness. If you wish, you
can follow us on social media. I think our favorite
place is the Ridiculous Historians fan page on Facebook, where
(31:53):
you can interact with your fellow ridiculous historians, and to
get in, you just have to say the magic word,
which is me been or top producer Casey Pegram's names,
or some little tidbit that indicates that you know what
this show is, or just something to make us laugh
or really pretty easy hit us up on that Facebook group.
You can also find us as human beings individually on
(32:13):
social media. I am at how now Noel Brown exclusively
on the Instagram. Honestly, folks, Uh, it just make me
laugh with a pun and you're into ridiculous historians, or
just teach me a word. I don't know. I would
love to learn some more weird words. You can also,
while you're on the internet, find me on Instagram where
(32:34):
I am building. Uh, I'm building survival kits right now,
so find out more about that at ben Bullin. Or
you can find me on Twitter where I have hot
takes some plenty at Ben Bullen hs W. And finally,
thanks to Jonathan Strict on the Quister, Uh, we hope
to have you back very soon. Buddy. You promised you'd
bomb our zooms, but you haven't showed up yet. I'm
(32:55):
actually starting to miss you, and I hope you're Okay,
keep up that loot practicing. We'll see your next oplix.
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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