July 23, 2020 • 25 mins
While history often only remembers Henry VIII as a real pill, he was also a profound hypochondriac -- and, rightly terrified of contracting the English Sweats, Henry hightailed it to a series of safehouses as he sought to isolate himself from any possible infection. Join the guys as they continue exploring the long-term consequences of the mysterious English Sweats.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. As I always like
to say, thanks for tuning in. This is part two
of what we're calling Angry Dight in the English Sweats.
Unfortunately not a band yet, but we have a lot
of musicians in the audience. Please tune into part one
so you get the full journey. Here we are investigating
(00:51):
a real life, actual facts mystery, as our palal Law
and Vogel bomb over its savor would say, and us,
we can only do this with the help of our superproducer,
Casey Pegrum, So why don't we join the show already
in progress. Henry the Eighth has always been an interesting
character to me. Um. I think maybe for selfish reasons
(01:14):
as a kid, because I picked up on the name
Boland even though it's spelled differently, and like, oh I
am Boleyn. Yeah, Um, because kids are selfish, I said it.
But here's something a lot of people might not know
about Henry the Eighth. He probably did not survive the
sweating sickness by sheer luck or by the will of
the divine. Uh. He was the equivalent of a Howard
(01:39):
Hughes type. He was very wealthy. He was also a committed,
uh fervent hypochondriac. I like the way that History Extra
describes him as one of the greatest hypochondriacs to ever
sit on the English throne. He was examined daily. Imagine
having a physical every single day of your life. He
(02:00):
was subjected to a physical at his own requests pretty
much every single day. Uh. He had a medicine cabinet
filled with potions. UH. Any time he had an errand cough,
or he had like a sore throat, or maybe somebody
told him his excrement looked weird. That was a big
tool of medical uh investigation. At the day, he would
(02:23):
freak out, he would lose his mind. So when he
heard about the outbreak of the sweats in he closed
down the court. He shut it down the way the
responsible country shut down activities during the pandemic today. Uh.
He high tailed it. He went from one safe house
(02:44):
to the next. He quarantined away from his mistress and
Boleyn no relation that I'm aware of, and a lot
of his court members followed suit. They high tailed it
off to unentree estates, ancestral homes and so on, similar
to the activity and maybe the Crazy Party, similar to
(03:07):
the activities of the aristocrats in Edgar Allan Poe's Mask
of the Red Death. Oh, Ben, I'm really glad you
mentioned that. I think it's a really great parallel Mask
of the Red Death. The idea that you can't escape
it just because you're rich, like it's it's still coming
for you, and that's a lot of kind of what
we're seeing, you know right now. Um, very very good point. Then,
(03:29):
thank you, know, I mean, thank you Edgar Allan Poe.
I think he made that point. He also wrote a
super creepy story that may have been an episode of
precognition or enormous coincidence. You've probably heard of it. Arthur
Gordon Pym h his tail for a different day. But
we're getting closer to Halloween, so I'm just gonna get
increasingly creeping off the rails. Anyway, points to Henry the
(03:49):
Eighth Terrible Person. But he understood the value of self
isolation or quarantine. Again, self isolation is just kind of
the less scary word for warrantine. It's what we're all
doing now. And Nol we found that he learned and
BAlN had contracted the dreaded sweats. And even though he
(04:12):
had been, you know, telling her how over the moon
he was with her and now how much he loved her,
with a love that was beyond this mortal coil, he
didn't go see her. He didn't even send his best
doctor to help her. He kept that person for himself.
And he sent his second best doctor with a with
(04:35):
a love letter, kind of like how William Shakespeare sent
his wife his second best bed, second best bed. Yeah,
and his will oh is that that's that's sort of
a bit of a bit of a slap in the
face't Yeah, Well, it's a slap on the springs at least. Yeah,
he gave as Shakespeare gave his wife Ann Hathaway his
second best bed. And Willie Shakes, I like to call
(04:58):
him Willie Shakes a big shake in his defense. At
the time, people tended to give their best stuff to
their kids and then their second best stuff to their spouse.
That's fair. Remember that bad System of a Down, you
guys do? Oh? Yeah, that guy's got an amazing voice,
really great range, but he always there's always a lyric
(05:19):
that he had on the first System of a Down
record where he says shake your spear at Shakespeare. I thought,
how has no one else thought of that? It's so
stupid and on the nose, but just really kind of
cute and clever. Uh. But here's the thing, we still
don't really know where the where where it came from,
the sweating sickness, and where it went. Uh. There's been
tons of different theories and hypotheses over the years about
(05:40):
what the deal was with sweating sickness. Um. Some thought
that it was just like a more extreme kind of flu.
Others thought that it was caused by anthrax. Okay, that's
a lot of unpacked there. I didn't even know anthrax
was a thing back then. And then a lot of
people thought it was like some form of relapse of
(06:00):
people that had been affected by a previous kind of fever.
And one of the most popular theories was that it
was something called Hanta virus pulmonary syndrome um that, much
like the bubonic plague, was spread by a specific types
of rats. Yeah. Yeah, so we're gonna go a little
(06:21):
bit more recent than we usually do. As you know,
one of our only rules and ridiculous history is we
consider history stuff that happened before, which still sounds like
I don't. I think that's a hilarious rule for us
to make because we made that rule while we were
breaking it in an episode anyway, So this is why
(06:44):
isn't that within our isn't that within our range? Though
I thought we were ninety four? I think it was.
It was the one about the the ape in Johannesburg. Yeah,
during during apartheid, we were using apartheid as our kind
of Okay, this is now what constitutes history. But saying
that now, living in the time that we're living in,
(07:05):
I think you might need to throw all that out
the wind. So yeah, and also a show like we
did that a year ago, so maybe the boundary just
ticks up a year with us. Anyway, Look, this is
not a show about math. In there was an outbreak
of HPS or a hant of virus pulmonary syndrome, and
(07:27):
it struck the vulnerable uh population of the Navajo people
in New Mexico. This is today known as the Four
Corners outbreak, named after the region which occurred. And this
outbreak had a lot of resemblance to the sweating sickness
of English history, and that's what prompted investigators to look
(07:48):
back and say, hey, maybe what they called the sweating
sickness in England at the time was simply HPS or
hanta virus. And even to this day, there's no cure
for that thing. Uh, there's no vaccine that'll slow it
down or stop it. The CDC says to avoid rodent infestations, um,
(08:11):
which was really really, really really difficult to do back
then because of the stinkiness of it all and the
you know, lack of like any kind of organized sanitation
that we have today. Uh as imperfect as it, maybe
it's a hell of a lot better than it was
back then. Um garbage piled on the streets and whatnot.
So we don't really know the cause of the sweating sickness,
(08:33):
but we definitely know that it left its mark on
the zeitgeist and in history because William Shakespeare at Henry
the Fourth the second Part in sixteen hundred, this is
a half century after the last outbreak of the English sweats,
and he had Falstaff, who was one of his most
famous characters overall, die of quote a sweat. He died
(08:55):
of a sweat. And you know, there's a great article
on history dot com. One of our favorite site. Uh,
that sort of questions like what was he talking about
like an STD or was it a pointed reference to
that sweating sickness? Uh? And that's actually a debate as
well as many things in Shakespeare's writing can be as
to even the ownership of some of the writing, whether
(09:17):
it was him or one of his What was it,
Mark Marley? Was that guy's name Francis Bacon? Uh? Marlowe
marlow excuse me? Yeah? Yeah. But then on the other side,
you will also hear some people who are not in
the mainstream, by the way, argue that Shakespeare wrote part
of a version of the Bible. It's just you get
(09:38):
past a certain threshold of fame, like William Shakespeare, La Bush,
and people just make up all kinds of stories about you.
Have you heard the rumor that he wrote Jurassic Park,
Because that's that's a real noodle scratchy right there. Well,
you know, I would challenge I would challenge people who
disagree with that theory. It's not a rumor, it's a theory.
(09:59):
I we challenge of people who disagree with that not
to just base your opinions off your preconceptions man or
off off the film. Read the script, look at what's
in the text and on the page, and then come
back and get off your high horse and tell us
about Jurassic Park. Sorry, I'm heated up. I have a
tech X talk about this. Yeah, you're you're getting a
(10:19):
little bit of a sweat going on there, you really
are you? Okay? Oh gosh? Okay? Well, um, yes, hopefully
because we are armed with modern medicine. Uh, but just
in case, maybe maybe we can hit the road today.
Noel and Casey and I'll go for a quick lie
down here. Okay. Normally this is where we would, uh
(10:49):
we would pay our respects in our thank you's, and
we would we would call it a day. But uh,
we're not gonna do a lie down because we talked
a little bit off off the air here, and the
three of us agree that there are more interesting things
to follow up here. So what are you saying? Well,
(11:11):
you wanna you wanna cavalcade? Maybe like the top two
or three that really stuck with us. We didn't know
where to put them in the show. But we feel like,
I don't know, we feel like we should mention them.
Oh they're worthy to be sure. Um. We talked about
the seeming randomness and the like, I don't think we've
(11:31):
ever come across like why the rich, you know there
there wasn't notion. One report was that it affected fair
haired people more. Yeah, you know, the science was just
so imprecise back then, and then the thing vanished, so
it's not like there's anything left for you know, modern
day epidemiologists to study. So we really are just kind
of like going by the historical record here and you know,
(11:53):
making some kind of leaps of faith and judgment. Um.
But another random element of it was that it occurred
UH in the summer quite randomly, and the and there's
an article on History today dot com that indicates that
this might have had to do with climate change. Yes,
the climate has been changing low these many years. The
(12:14):
sweats began at the beginning of a three hundred year
UH cycle of cooling trends in Europe. Um, and that
was triggered by a series of eruptions in Indonesia, volcanic
eruptions in Indonesia. So that could have been part of
like almost like an El Nino type thing that we
(12:35):
might see today. Um. History does such a great job
of going through this and inciting Paul Himen Dr Paul Hyman,
who's a medical researcher at Queen Astrid Military Hospital in
Brussels and Ben do you do you know he tell
us a little bit about what he found. Absolutely not alright, No,
here's what he said. So he did a great job
(12:56):
tracing this since the outbreaks may have followed years when
crops were damaged by floods. Remember one pattern that contemporaneous
forces found during the waves of sweating sickness epidemics was
that they seem to correlate right with floods and lots
of rainfall, and so rodent numbers, according to Dr Paul Hayman,
(13:23):
increased during the summer, and they spike in years when
trees are particularly productive. So this doctor says, this stuff
could have swung the needle with nobody in Europe realizing
that this series of volcanic eruptions a half a world
away ultimately led to erratic activities in the rodent population
(13:48):
which ultimately spread HPS hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. And that was
the true genesis of sweating sickness. And to be completely fair,
you know, we can't blame the medical authorities at the time.
How were they to know that's something that occurred so
(14:10):
far away, so long ago in Indonesia could have resulted
in the death of so many people. They just didn't
have the information. However, there's another thing here for our mysteries.
We said, it's you know, predominantly in English disease. That's
proven unfortunately, but Germany did use information to battle this
(14:36):
these waves of infection. Sorry, there's a weird fruit fly
that's just terrorizing me right now in my studio and
I keep trying to grab him in my hand like
Mr Miyagi, but he seems to have eluded my grasp
so far. But yeah, it's true. The Germans were really good,
as we know, at manipulating information and misinformation and propaganda.
(14:57):
But yeah, in Hamburg in Germany, UM where they had
over a thousand deaths in one single month, UM three
thousand people died in Danzig, my favorite German state, my
favorite uh short, aggressive horror movie, obsessed, rock star, dirty
black summer Man. I hope you're doing okay, Danzi Wholloa.
(15:19):
I always think I think Mother is so much like
Rebel Yell by Billy Idol. Have you ever thought about that?
They're very they have a similar vibe the rebel yell mollow.
That's all I got. Um, But yeah, Danzig, uh, and
then there was also one again in lubec Um and
some other cities as well, when it made it along
(15:42):
the Baltic coast into Denmark and Scandinavian then into Russia. UM.
A gentleman named John L. Flood talks about how very
differently the German government and the English government handled these outbreaks. Um.
You know, the Germans are kind of known for possibly
being a little bit tight with information or you know,
(16:04):
a little bit clandestine. But in this case, they did
a really good job of disseminating information about the disease.
They warned people, Um, they you know, explained about what
the communicability of it all was and what to look
for and symptoms, etcetera. And they did this through printing
and they disseminated like pamphlets and such throughout this epidemic.
(16:25):
And England just didn't really do that. They didn't do
a very good job of informing the public, and so
it probably ballooned out of control. They're a bit more Yeah,
fully agreed, knowledge is power. Knowing is half the battle. Uh.
Casey helped me out with a cheesy sound cue the
more you know, but not not a sound que will
(16:53):
get sued for. Please be careful. Is anything with a
star where you yeah, wait, wait, oh, what are you
talking about? Don't sue us, nobody, nobody call our legal department.
We also know that. Sadly, I know I say this
(17:13):
a lot, but people hundreds of years ago we're the
same as people in the modern day. We just have
more information because we stand on the shoulders of giants
who came before us. Sadly, this means when we say
people are the same, we mean the bad stuff too.
Medieval doctors were, you know, composed of a lot of
(17:34):
different factions. There are very sincere, genuine people doing the
best they could to save lives. There were also some quacks.
There were also some opportunists. In short, a lot of
doctors made bank off this enormous tragedy because people, you know,
people didn't know how this disease infected folks. They didn't
(17:58):
know how it would strike you. Doctors did try to
find out what was happening, and one guy in particular,
named John Kay's looked around and said, you know what
this disease is Church, Sure, it's terrible it's terrible, but
it's also an opportunity because who was it most likely
to infect the wealthy and they could become my patients.
(18:23):
And then he did like a little money dance, I
guess for the time. I don't know what a medieval
money dance looks like, sort of like a jig, I
think maybe, or like one of those fancy ballroom dances
you know, where you where you hold your hands up
and make a bridge, you know, I I don't know.
I like to picture him like maybe dabbing or maybe
(18:43):
doing Oh my god, how cool would it be if
he was doing a moonwalk dressed as a plague doctor.
That probably didn't happen. You know. If you've got a
medieval getting money dance, feel free to record a short
video posted on any of our social media's. But but
he was onto something right man, because he's right like
the demographic is predominantly uh composed of people who can
(19:08):
pay a doctor. Pretty well, that's right. He gave himself
um he changed his name to Johannes Caius, and he
began to uh do his business with some very well
to do Englishmen who were also a paranoid, much like
they're there King Henry the Eighth, who, as we mentioned
(19:30):
earlier in the episode, uh was giving himself checked out,
you know, from stem to stern and was utterly hypochondriact
and totally paranoid about this thing. Um So, Caius thought
that he could really cash in on the sweating sickness,
and he wrote about this from his own mouth, from
his own brain to his own pen. And two he
(19:53):
published a book or a book uh called the Wedding
Sickness and the I love the subtitle a book or
counsile against the disease commonly called the sweaty or the
sweaty ng siekness. Love it, love it, Uh yeah, and
(20:13):
uh now it's considered a classic. Actually um uh it's
it's a series of medical observations of these symptoms, ideas
about how to prevent it, and uh, you know, ideas
about a cure. But we never got a cure, did
We've been I didn't think we actually think no, no,
(20:34):
and we and we do. We have guesses about what
modern disease it might be, but we don't know. We
don't no, we just know that some experts are convinced,
not all of them. Kaius at this time is warning
people against one of my my favorite uh medical maladies
of the era, which is evil missed my asthma. Uh.
(20:58):
He also said, exercise eyes frequently. That's a bummer, but
it's already always good advice. And he said, hey, hey,
you jokers, your clowns, stop eating all that rotten fruit.
These people are just eating bad fruit. They're running head
on into evil missed and they're not exercising enough. The
rotten fruit thing, though, is interesting because being able to
(21:21):
afford fruit would have also been the domain of the
upper class. It's very true. That's why you see so
many fancy still lives of fruit and bowls, because that
would have been something that you would have seen around
these households and not necessarily in poorer situations. But you know,
like we were kind of indicating, I mean, his vice
(21:43):
was pretty spurious. Uh. And there's a quote from Biomedical
Research with the name of Derek Gatherer, great last name, uh,
saying despite most of Kay's patients still ending up dead,
he was eventually rich enough to make a splendid endowments
to his old Cambridge college. And there is still a
school at Cambridge with Caius's name. And you know, Caius
(22:06):
or any other doctor for that matter, was not able
to explain the disease at all. Um So we hate
to leave you, you know, with a kind of an
unsatisfying climax here. But we don't know what caused it.
We don't know what stopped it. We really don't know
anything except that it happened, and that it was a
pretty big deal and effected the line of succession to
(22:29):
the throne in England, and therefore it affected the history
of the world from that point, meaning that it affects
the world in which we live today. This has been
a strange journey. Happy to report that if you are
sweating while you listen to this, you probably do not
(22:49):
have sweating sickness. Uh so you've got you've got that
feather in in your figurative cap at least. But this
is an important story. And to thank everybody for tuning in,
we were glad to be able to explore this with you.
Thanks as always to Gabe Lousier, thanks of course to
(23:11):
our own version of sweating sickness. Jonathan Strickland ak the
Quister should have brought him in for this one. That
would have been fun. He loves this kind of medieval crap. Yeah.
Sometimes he just text me late at night with with
strange medical maladies. Yeah. I like the Luke music he
accompanies it with. Well, he's been practicing. He's had a
(23:31):
lot of time on his hands in quarantine. Uh. Ben,
I gotta say, I want to bring this up at
the end of this episode. I really think that Bobos
is a really cute name for a pet, despite the
horrific implications of it as a you know, side effect
of the bubonic plague. I fully support this, thanks man.
He was a mean fish, but he had a personality
(23:53):
I could respect. Was he a Japanese fighting fish? Uh?
He was a beta fish. That's that's That's what that is.
Was okay? Yeah, Well, well you know, Bobos was Boobos
was Boobos, just like a rose as a rose, as
a rose, he was his own he was his own thing. Well,
Boobo's by any other name would still smell pretty rank. Uh.
(24:14):
And that's where we're gonna leave you today. Ridiculous stories.
It has been a fun one, a little depressing, uh,
and prescient of what's going on in society today, a
little weird um. But I enjoyed having this conversation. I
was not aware of the English swits and turns out
and not a skiffle band that went on tour with
Herman's Hermit's Um. But I learned a lot today, Ben,
(24:37):
I hope you all did too. Out there in podcast lands,
stay inside, Everybody huge thanks to super producer Casey Pegram
as always, Alex Williams who composed our theme, Christopher aciotas
here in spirit, and I'm gonna go go ahead and
drop a double thanks on Gabe. If you're listening, you're
double thanks to my friend. And of course we want
to thank all of the medical professionals past and present
(24:59):
who have been doing their best to keep this grand
experiment called the human species alive despite our concerted efforts
to end ourselves. We'll see you next time Fox. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
(25:20):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. As I always like
to say, thanks for tuning in. This is part two
of what we're calling Angry Dight in the English Sweats.
Unfortunately not a band yet, but we have a lot
of musicians in the audience. Please tune into part one
so you get the full journey. Here we are investigating
(00:51):
a real life, actual facts mystery, as our palal Law
and Vogel bomb over its savor would say, and us,
we can only do this with the help of our superproducer,
Casey Pegrum, So why don't we join the show already
in progress. Henry the Eighth has always been an interesting
character to me. Um. I think maybe for selfish reasons
(01:14):
as a kid, because I picked up on the name
Boland even though it's spelled differently, and like, oh I
am Boleyn. Yeah, Um, because kids are selfish, I said it.
But here's something a lot of people might not know
about Henry the Eighth. He probably did not survive the
sweating sickness by sheer luck or by the will of
the divine. Uh. He was the equivalent of a Howard
(01:39):
Hughes type. He was very wealthy. He was also a committed,
uh fervent hypochondriac. I like the way that History Extra
describes him as one of the greatest hypochondriacs to ever
sit on the English throne. He was examined daily. Imagine
having a physical every single day of your life. He
(02:00):
was subjected to a physical at his own requests pretty
much every single day. Uh. He had a medicine cabinet
filled with potions. UH. Any time he had an errand cough,
or he had like a sore throat, or maybe somebody
told him his excrement looked weird. That was a big
tool of medical uh investigation. At the day, he would
(02:23):
freak out, he would lose his mind. So when he
heard about the outbreak of the sweats in he closed
down the court. He shut it down the way the
responsible country shut down activities during the pandemic today. Uh.
He high tailed it. He went from one safe house
(02:44):
to the next. He quarantined away from his mistress and
Boleyn no relation that I'm aware of, and a lot
of his court members followed suit. They high tailed it
off to unentree estates, ancestral homes and so on, similar
to the activity and maybe the Crazy Party, similar to
(03:07):
the activities of the aristocrats in Edgar Allan Poe's Mask
of the Red Death. Oh, Ben, I'm really glad you
mentioned that. I think it's a really great parallel Mask
of the Red Death. The idea that you can't escape
it just because you're rich, like it's it's still coming
for you, and that's a lot of kind of what
we're seeing, you know right now. Um, very very good point. Then,
(03:29):
thank you, know, I mean, thank you Edgar Allan Poe.
I think he made that point. He also wrote a
super creepy story that may have been an episode of
precognition or enormous coincidence. You've probably heard of it. Arthur
Gordon Pym h his tail for a different day. But
we're getting closer to Halloween, so I'm just gonna get
increasingly creeping off the rails. Anyway, points to Henry the
(03:49):
Eighth Terrible Person. But he understood the value of self
isolation or quarantine. Again, self isolation is just kind of
the less scary word for warrantine. It's what we're all
doing now. And Nol we found that he learned and
BAlN had contracted the dreaded sweats. And even though he
(04:12):
had been, you know, telling her how over the moon
he was with her and now how much he loved her,
with a love that was beyond this mortal coil, he
didn't go see her. He didn't even send his best
doctor to help her. He kept that person for himself.
And he sent his second best doctor with a with
(04:35):
a love letter, kind of like how William Shakespeare sent
his wife his second best bed, second best bed. Yeah,
and his will oh is that that's that's sort of
a bit of a bit of a slap in the
face't Yeah, Well, it's a slap on the springs at least. Yeah,
he gave as Shakespeare gave his wife Ann Hathaway his
second best bed. And Willie Shakes, I like to call
(04:58):
him Willie Shakes a big shake in his defense. At
the time, people tended to give their best stuff to
their kids and then their second best stuff to their spouse.
That's fair. Remember that bad System of a Down, you
guys do? Oh? Yeah, that guy's got an amazing voice,
really great range, but he always there's always a lyric
(05:19):
that he had on the first System of a Down
record where he says shake your spear at Shakespeare. I thought,
how has no one else thought of that? It's so
stupid and on the nose, but just really kind of
cute and clever. Uh. But here's the thing, we still
don't really know where the where where it came from,
the sweating sickness, and where it went. Uh. There's been
tons of different theories and hypotheses over the years about
(05:40):
what the deal was with sweating sickness. Um. Some thought
that it was just like a more extreme kind of flu.
Others thought that it was caused by anthrax. Okay, that's
a lot of unpacked there. I didn't even know anthrax
was a thing back then. And then a lot of
people thought it was like some form of relapse of
(06:00):
people that had been affected by a previous kind of fever.
And one of the most popular theories was that it
was something called Hanta virus pulmonary syndrome um that, much
like the bubonic plague, was spread by a specific types
of rats. Yeah. Yeah, so we're gonna go a little
(06:21):
bit more recent than we usually do. As you know,
one of our only rules and ridiculous history is we
consider history stuff that happened before, which still sounds like
I don't. I think that's a hilarious rule for us
to make because we made that rule while we were
breaking it in an episode anyway, So this is why
(06:44):
isn't that within our isn't that within our range? Though
I thought we were ninety four? I think it was.
It was the one about the the ape in Johannesburg. Yeah,
during during apartheid, we were using apartheid as our kind
of Okay, this is now what constitutes history. But saying
that now, living in the time that we're living in,
(07:05):
I think you might need to throw all that out
the wind. So yeah, and also a show like we
did that a year ago, so maybe the boundary just
ticks up a year with us. Anyway, Look, this is
not a show about math. In there was an outbreak
of HPS or a hant of virus pulmonary syndrome, and
(07:27):
it struck the vulnerable uh population of the Navajo people
in New Mexico. This is today known as the Four
Corners outbreak, named after the region which occurred. And this
outbreak had a lot of resemblance to the sweating sickness
of English history, and that's what prompted investigators to look
(07:48):
back and say, hey, maybe what they called the sweating
sickness in England at the time was simply HPS or
hanta virus. And even to this day, there's no cure
for that thing. Uh, there's no vaccine that'll slow it
down or stop it. The CDC says to avoid rodent infestations, um,
(08:11):
which was really really, really really difficult to do back
then because of the stinkiness of it all and the
you know, lack of like any kind of organized sanitation
that we have today. Uh as imperfect as it, maybe
it's a hell of a lot better than it was
back then. Um garbage piled on the streets and whatnot.
So we don't really know the cause of the sweating sickness,
(08:33):
but we definitely know that it left its mark on
the zeitgeist and in history because William Shakespeare at Henry
the Fourth the second Part in sixteen hundred, this is
a half century after the last outbreak of the English sweats,
and he had Falstaff, who was one of his most
famous characters overall, die of quote a sweat. He died
(08:55):
of a sweat. And you know, there's a great article
on history dot com. One of our favorite site. Uh,
that sort of questions like what was he talking about
like an STD or was it a pointed reference to
that sweating sickness? Uh? And that's actually a debate as
well as many things in Shakespeare's writing can be as
to even the ownership of some of the writing, whether
(09:17):
it was him or one of his What was it,
Mark Marley? Was that guy's name Francis Bacon? Uh? Marlowe
marlow excuse me? Yeah? Yeah. But then on the other side,
you will also hear some people who are not in
the mainstream, by the way, argue that Shakespeare wrote part
of a version of the Bible. It's just you get
(09:38):
past a certain threshold of fame, like William Shakespeare, La Bush,
and people just make up all kinds of stories about you.
Have you heard the rumor that he wrote Jurassic Park,
Because that's that's a real noodle scratchy right there. Well,
you know, I would challenge I would challenge people who
disagree with that theory. It's not a rumor, it's a theory.
(09:59):
I we challenge of people who disagree with that not
to just base your opinions off your preconceptions man or
off off the film. Read the script, look at what's
in the text and on the page, and then come
back and get off your high horse and tell us
about Jurassic Park. Sorry, I'm heated up. I have a
tech X talk about this. Yeah, you're you're getting a
(10:19):
little bit of a sweat going on there, you really
are you? Okay? Oh gosh? Okay? Well, um, yes, hopefully
because we are armed with modern medicine. Uh, but just
in case, maybe maybe we can hit the road today.
Noel and Casey and I'll go for a quick lie
down here. Okay. Normally this is where we would, uh
(10:49):
we would pay our respects in our thank you's, and
we would we would call it a day. But uh,
we're not gonna do a lie down because we talked
a little bit off off the air here, and the
three of us agree that there are more interesting things
to follow up here. So what are you saying? Well,
(11:11):
you wanna you wanna cavalcade? Maybe like the top two
or three that really stuck with us. We didn't know
where to put them in the show. But we feel like,
I don't know, we feel like we should mention them.
Oh they're worthy to be sure. Um. We talked about
the seeming randomness and the like, I don't think we've
(11:31):
ever come across like why the rich, you know there
there wasn't notion. One report was that it affected fair
haired people more. Yeah, you know, the science was just
so imprecise back then, and then the thing vanished, so
it's not like there's anything left for you know, modern
day epidemiologists to study. So we really are just kind
of like going by the historical record here and you know,
(11:53):
making some kind of leaps of faith and judgment. Um.
But another random element of it was that it occurred
UH in the summer quite randomly, and the and there's
an article on History today dot com that indicates that
this might have had to do with climate change. Yes,
the climate has been changing low these many years. The
(12:14):
sweats began at the beginning of a three hundred year
UH cycle of cooling trends in Europe. Um, and that
was triggered by a series of eruptions in Indonesia, volcanic
eruptions in Indonesia. So that could have been part of
like almost like an El Nino type thing that we
(12:35):
might see today. Um. History does such a great job
of going through this and inciting Paul Himen Dr Paul Hyman,
who's a medical researcher at Queen Astrid Military Hospital in
Brussels and Ben do you do you know he tell
us a little bit about what he found. Absolutely not alright, No,
here's what he said. So he did a great job
(12:56):
tracing this since the outbreaks may have followed years when
crops were damaged by floods. Remember one pattern that contemporaneous
forces found during the waves of sweating sickness epidemics was
that they seem to correlate right with floods and lots
of rainfall, and so rodent numbers, according to Dr Paul Hayman,
(13:23):
increased during the summer, and they spike in years when
trees are particularly productive. So this doctor says, this stuff
could have swung the needle with nobody in Europe realizing
that this series of volcanic eruptions a half a world
away ultimately led to erratic activities in the rodent population
(13:48):
which ultimately spread HPS hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. And that was
the true genesis of sweating sickness. And to be completely fair,
you know, we can't blame the medical authorities at the time.
How were they to know that's something that occurred so
(14:10):
far away, so long ago in Indonesia could have resulted
in the death of so many people. They just didn't
have the information. However, there's another thing here for our mysteries.
We said, it's you know, predominantly in English disease. That's
proven unfortunately, but Germany did use information to battle this
(14:36):
these waves of infection. Sorry, there's a weird fruit fly
that's just terrorizing me right now in my studio and
I keep trying to grab him in my hand like
Mr Miyagi, but he seems to have eluded my grasp
so far. But yeah, it's true. The Germans were really good,
as we know, at manipulating information and misinformation and propaganda.
(14:57):
But yeah, in Hamburg in Germany, UM where they had
over a thousand deaths in one single month, UM three
thousand people died in Danzig, my favorite German state, my
favorite uh short, aggressive horror movie, obsessed, rock star, dirty
black summer Man. I hope you're doing okay, Danzi Wholloa.
(15:19):
I always think I think Mother is so much like
Rebel Yell by Billy Idol. Have you ever thought about that?
They're very they have a similar vibe the rebel yell mollow.
That's all I got. Um, But yeah, Danzig, uh, and
then there was also one again in lubec Um and
some other cities as well, when it made it along
(15:42):
the Baltic coast into Denmark and Scandinavian then into Russia. UM.
A gentleman named John L. Flood talks about how very
differently the German government and the English government handled these outbreaks. Um.
You know, the Germans are kind of known for possibly
being a little bit tight with information or you know,
(16:04):
a little bit clandestine. But in this case, they did
a really good job of disseminating information about the disease.
They warned people, Um, they you know, explained about what
the communicability of it all was and what to look
for and symptoms, etcetera. And they did this through printing
and they disseminated like pamphlets and such throughout this epidemic.
(16:25):
And England just didn't really do that. They didn't do
a very good job of informing the public, and so
it probably ballooned out of control. They're a bit more Yeah,
fully agreed, knowledge is power. Knowing is half the battle. Uh.
Casey helped me out with a cheesy sound cue the
more you know, but not not a sound que will
(16:53):
get sued for. Please be careful. Is anything with a
star where you yeah, wait, wait, oh, what are you
talking about? Don't sue us, nobody, nobody call our legal department.
We also know that. Sadly, I know I say this
(17:13):
a lot, but people hundreds of years ago we're the
same as people in the modern day. We just have
more information because we stand on the shoulders of giants
who came before us. Sadly, this means when we say
people are the same, we mean the bad stuff too.
Medieval doctors were, you know, composed of a lot of
(17:34):
different factions. There are very sincere, genuine people doing the
best they could to save lives. There were also some quacks.
There were also some opportunists. In short, a lot of
doctors made bank off this enormous tragedy because people, you know,
people didn't know how this disease infected folks. They didn't
(17:58):
know how it would strike you. Doctors did try to
find out what was happening, and one guy in particular,
named John Kay's looked around and said, you know what
this disease is Church, Sure, it's terrible it's terrible, but
it's also an opportunity because who was it most likely
to infect the wealthy and they could become my patients.
(18:23):
And then he did like a little money dance, I
guess for the time. I don't know what a medieval
money dance looks like, sort of like a jig, I
think maybe, or like one of those fancy ballroom dances
you know, where you where you hold your hands up
and make a bridge, you know, I I don't know.
I like to picture him like maybe dabbing or maybe
(18:43):
doing Oh my god, how cool would it be if
he was doing a moonwalk dressed as a plague doctor.
That probably didn't happen. You know. If you've got a
medieval getting money dance, feel free to record a short
video posted on any of our social media's. But but
he was onto something right man, because he's right like
the demographic is predominantly uh composed of people who can
(19:08):
pay a doctor. Pretty well, that's right. He gave himself
um he changed his name to Johannes Caius, and he
began to uh do his business with some very well
to do Englishmen who were also a paranoid, much like
they're there King Henry the Eighth, who, as we mentioned
(19:30):
earlier in the episode, uh was giving himself checked out,
you know, from stem to stern and was utterly hypochondriact
and totally paranoid about this thing. Um So, Caius thought
that he could really cash in on the sweating sickness,
and he wrote about this from his own mouth, from
his own brain to his own pen. And two he
(19:53):
published a book or a book uh called the Wedding
Sickness and the I love the subtitle a book or
counsile against the disease commonly called the sweaty or the
sweaty ng siekness. Love it, love it, Uh yeah, and
(20:13):
uh now it's considered a classic. Actually um uh it's
it's a series of medical observations of these symptoms, ideas
about how to prevent it, and uh, you know, ideas
about a cure. But we never got a cure, did
We've been I didn't think we actually think no, no,
(20:34):
and we and we do. We have guesses about what
modern disease it might be, but we don't know. We
don't no, we just know that some experts are convinced,
not all of them. Kaius at this time is warning
people against one of my my favorite uh medical maladies
of the era, which is evil missed my asthma. Uh.
(20:58):
He also said, exercise eyes frequently. That's a bummer, but
it's already always good advice. And he said, hey, hey,
you jokers, your clowns, stop eating all that rotten fruit.
These people are just eating bad fruit. They're running head
on into evil missed and they're not exercising enough. The
rotten fruit thing, though, is interesting because being able to
(21:21):
afford fruit would have also been the domain of the
upper class. It's very true. That's why you see so
many fancy still lives of fruit and bowls, because that
would have been something that you would have seen around
these households and not necessarily in poorer situations. But you know,
like we were kind of indicating, I mean, his vice
(21:43):
was pretty spurious. Uh. And there's a quote from Biomedical
Research with the name of Derek Gatherer, great last name, uh,
saying despite most of Kay's patients still ending up dead,
he was eventually rich enough to make a splendid endowments
to his old Cambridge college. And there is still a
school at Cambridge with Caius's name. And you know, Caius
(22:06):
or any other doctor for that matter, was not able
to explain the disease at all. Um So we hate
to leave you, you know, with a kind of an
unsatisfying climax here. But we don't know what caused it.
We don't know what stopped it. We really don't know
anything except that it happened, and that it was a
pretty big deal and effected the line of succession to
(22:29):
the throne in England, and therefore it affected the history
of the world from that point, meaning that it affects
the world in which we live today. This has been
a strange journey. Happy to report that if you are
sweating while you listen to this, you probably do not
(22:49):
have sweating sickness. Uh so you've got you've got that
feather in in your figurative cap at least. But this
is an important story. And to thank everybody for tuning in,
we were glad to be able to explore this with you.
Thanks as always to Gabe Lousier, thanks of course to
(23:11):
our own version of sweating sickness. Jonathan Strickland ak the
Quister should have brought him in for this one. That
would have been fun. He loves this kind of medieval crap. Yeah.
Sometimes he just text me late at night with with
strange medical maladies. Yeah. I like the Luke music he
accompanies it with. Well, he's been practicing. He's had a
(23:31):
lot of time on his hands in quarantine. Uh. Ben,
I gotta say, I want to bring this up at
the end of this episode. I really think that Bobos
is a really cute name for a pet, despite the
horrific implications of it as a you know, side effect
of the bubonic plague. I fully support this, thanks man.
He was a mean fish, but he had a personality
(23:53):
I could respect. Was he a Japanese fighting fish? Uh?
He was a beta fish. That's that's That's what that is.
Was okay? Yeah, Well, well you know, Bobos was Boobos
was Boobos, just like a rose as a rose, as
a rose, he was his own he was his own thing. Well,
Boobo's by any other name would still smell pretty rank. Uh.
(24:14):
And that's where we're gonna leave you today. Ridiculous stories.
It has been a fun one, a little depressing, uh,
and prescient of what's going on in society today, a
little weird um. But I enjoyed having this conversation. I
was not aware of the English swits and turns out
and not a skiffle band that went on tour with
Herman's Hermit's Um. But I learned a lot today, Ben,
(24:37):
I hope you all did too. Out there in podcast lands,
stay inside, Everybody huge thanks to super producer Casey Pegram
as always, Alex Williams who composed our theme, Christopher aciotas
here in spirit, and I'm gonna go go ahead and
drop a double thanks on Gabe. If you're listening, you're
double thanks to my friend. And of course we want
to thank all of the medical professionals past and present
(24:59):
who have been doing their best to keep this grand
experiment called the human species alive despite our concerted efforts
to end ourselves. We'll see you next time Fox. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
(25:20):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows
Ridiculous History News
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