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 The Sweating Sickness Returns?

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Temperance
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PostSubject: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptySun 27 Nov 2016, 13:34

I have been very poorly this week after I had my first flu and pneumonia jabs: I actually thought I was going to die on Wednesday night and rather hoped I would.

Many others this year have apparently suffered a similar nasty reaction to the jabs. I was most disgruntled because I am (touch wood) reasonably healthy (my mega-whatever-it-was madness/anaemia is now well under control): I eat well - sensibly and moderately - take lots of Vitamin C (1000mgs in tablet form daily, plus fruit and veg) and am generally rather confident that I have an excellent immune system.

Pride, of course, even if the only legitimate source of one's pride is one's immune system, always comes before a nasty (and very feverish) fall. Having a good immune system can, ironically, actually prove to be a Bad Thing. This year's flu vaccine contains H1N1, the swine flu virus, a particularly sinister bug which apparently prides itself on its ability to kill off those people whose immune systems are strong. It is an immensely cunning virus which actually stimulates the victim's immune system to turn on the body it is supposed to be protecting. It is thought to be very similar to the old sweating sickness which so mystified Tudor physicians like Henry VIII's Doctor Butts because it attacks the vigorous, the well-fed and, ironically, the young. I seem to remember this was discussed on the old BBC board. Anyone remember?

We probably have more to fear from the pandemic that is apparently just waiting to happen than from Isis, Trump and Brexit put together.

Plague or sweating sickness anyone?
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Islanddawn
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptySun 27 Nov 2016, 18:51

Well look at the bright side Temp, you are now immune to N1H1 and won't be getting it again.
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nordmann
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptySun 27 Nov 2016, 19:16

She now can never be a N1H1list, you mean?

Janet Lane-Claypon, the criminally unheralded epidemiologist having lived and worked at a time when only those with testicles could pronounce on anything (she was the first to actually study and report on breast cancer, pioneering coordinated detection strategies and diagnostic procedures still in use today), once remarked in an article published in Lancet that English Sweating Sickness was a perfect example of what happens when lay people get to christen diseases - they make a balls of it.

All three words in its name were actually incorrect. Its "Englishness" was based purely on the fact that this is where the misdiagnosis was made. "Sweating" was neither universally accurate as a symptom nor in fact even prevalent in the majority of so-called cases recorded by physicians, and in strict epidemiological terms it was not a "sickness" but either a pathological disease or, more likely, a confusion between several such diseases.

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Priscilla
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptySun 27 Nov 2016, 19:22

In reply to ID's observation - I was cross posted by Mr n. 

Well, yes. So we all hope - mark you, I sent her a none too cheerful e-mail about the problems of the scientists involved with their concern about constant virus mutation. From an 'in' source I gather they paddle frantically to keep up.


Last edited by Priscilla on Sun 27 Nov 2016, 19:24; edited 1 time in total (Reason for editing : Cross post ref.)
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LadyinRetirement
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptySun 27 Nov 2016, 22:23

Sorry to hear about your reaction to the flu jab, Temperance, but if it helps you withstand the flu this winter I guess it will be worth it.  I reached the magic age where I could have the jab for free a couple of years ago and I felt rather under the weather for a day or so after receiving it - though not as bad as you appear to have been.  I didn't fare so badly with the flu jab this year - I suppose other concerns took precedence.  It seems that a lot of the things I've had like the joint pain, the rash and the fatigue could possibly be effects of the coeliac disease.  Anyway, I hope you are back to "normal" now.
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Islanddawn
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptyMon 28 Nov 2016, 02:45

Isn't that the point of flu jabs though? You are supposed to feel slightly unwell because they give a person a mild dose of whatever variety of flu the injections are infecting you with, so as to become immune in future. In the same way as measles injections work. In Temp's case, she unfortunately reacted rather worse than she was supposed to.

And as P points out, as the thousands of varieties of flu viruses are continually mutating we are forever playing catch up. Ugh, it is a depressing thought going into winter.  Sad
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Temperance
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptyMon 28 Nov 2016, 07:06

nordmann wrote:
All three words in its name were actually incorrect. Its "Englishness" was based purely on the fact that this is where the misdiagnosis was made. "Sweating" was neither universally accurate as a symptom nor in fact even prevalent in the majority of so-called cases recorded by physicians, and in strict epidemiological terms it was not a "sickness" but either a pathological disease or, more likely, a confusion between several such diseases.

The "sudor anglicus" was brought over by Henry Tudor in 1485 - or so I have read. As for the "sweating" symptom, this was noted by John Caius and other physicians of the time. This is only Wiki, but it summarises what I've read elsewhere.

The disease tended to occur in summer and early autumn. The symptoms and signs as described by physician John Caius and others were as follows: The disease began very suddenly with a sense of apprehension, followed by cold shivers (sometimes very violent), giddiness, headache and severe pains in the neck, shoulders and limbs, with great exhaustion. After the cold stage, which might last from half an hour to three hours, the hot and sweating stage followed. The characteristic sweat broke out suddenly without any obvious cause. Accompanying the sweat, or after was a sense of heat, headache, delirium, rapid pulse, and intense thirst. Palpitation and pain in the heart were frequent symptoms. No skin eruptions were noted by observers including Caius. In the final stages, there was either general exhaustion and collapse, or an irresistible urge to sleep, which Caius thought to be fatal if the patient was permitted to give way to it. One attack did not offer immunity, and some people suffered several bouts before dying.

Sweating sickness does seem to have been a form of virulent influenza, although this has been disputed: the hantavirus has also been suggested. The latter is apparently spread by rats, or rather by rat droppings - no fleas involved. Sweating sickness being reported as more prevalent in the hotter months, rather than in winter, would support this theory, perhaps?

Some info about flu here - I had no idea the Greeks got it too:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/rxforsurvival/series/diseases/influenza.html

Historians believe it was influenza that plagued Greece in 430 B.C.E. during the Peloponnesian War, and that it also ravaged Charlemagne's army in 876 C.E. The first recorded appearance, though, came in New England in 1647, where residents colorfully dubbed the unknown affliction as the "jolly rant," the "new acquaintance," and the "grippe."

I've come across the name "the new acquaintance" in my reading, but have never heard the sickness called "the jolly rant". La grippe, of course, is still the French for flu.

PS Hope you too are feeling better now, LiR, and are not finding your gluten-free diet too expensive and generally tiresome. The supermarkets are making a fortune out of their "free-from" ranges.

PPS I didn't have a rash - just a swollen, very sore and inflamed right arm, but that was my pneumonia-jabbed limb. And I was very hot and sweaty, but cold and shivery at the same time. Typical 'flu symptoms, of course. But I'm perfectly OK now, and real flu does not clear up in just five days - you are usually in bed for at least a week. I'm just making a fuss.  Smile
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Meles meles
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptyMon 28 Nov 2016, 09:55

Temperance wrote:


The "sudor anglicus" was brought over by Henry Tudor in 1485 - or so I have read.

Although didn't Thomas Stanley claim an attack of sweating sickness as his excuse not to join with Richard some time before Bosworth? Although as he did finally turn up at the battle, he'd probably really been suffering from man flu' or just a case of "cold feet".
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Temperance
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptyMon 28 Nov 2016, 10:15

Or just a bad hangover?
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nordmann
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptyMon 28 Nov 2016, 10:24

Any condition that causes excessive perspiration is a "sweating sickness". Poor bashful shrinking violet Stanley's could have been on the lines of ...

The Sweating Sickness Returns? Panic-attack-cartoon-300x289

We call it stage fright these days.

Arthur Tudor's "sweating sickness" is also rather difficult to ascribe to any cause. The lad had been reported as getting steadily weaker since his marriage to the Spanish lassie (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) and then rather rashly decided they should up and lord it over the Welsh marshes for a while (or was that the Welsh Marches?), foolishly thinking they had taken precautions enough by ensuring the castle they lived in was just over the border in Shropshire. Either way, both he and Catherine came down with a dose from "a malign vapour which proceeded from the air" when there, and though she bounced back immediately to live out a long and happy ... no, wait a minute. Anyway, Arthur snuffed it from the vapours (which we assume blew in from the west).

I have been in a train carriage on at least one occasion with a lot of gaseous Welsh males after a rugby match and can vouch for the noxiousness of the vapours. I can also vouch for the fact that I was indeed sweating, especially by the fifteenth rendition of Cwm Rhondda. I can also vouch for the fact that a young Spanish lady in the same carriage got up and danced. They are obviously immune.
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Temperance
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptyMon 28 Nov 2016, 20:47

In June 1528 a young woman and her father both went down with "the sweat", an illness which Professor Eric Ives describes as "a highly contagious and frequently fatal disease (probably a virus infection akin to the Spanish flu of 1918)". Had that sick girl died, the course of English history would have been different. She was Anne Boleyn and her father was, at the time, the Viscount Rochford referred to below in Tuke's note to Wolsey.

Anne, her father and their nasty flu bugs were swiftly packed off to Hever Castle in Kent, and an alarmed Henry dispatched William Butts, his "second-best doctor", to minister to his ailing "sweetheart" and her parent. He sent with Butts a from-a-very-safe-distance letter of sympathy (signed with one of his nauseating little heart drawings), telling Anne he would willingly suffer "half of her pain". Not all, of course, but still, half was a pretty good offer from this man. Butts' expertise saved the day, and the Boleyns survived, possibly because their doctor was ahead of his time and understood the need for fluid replenishment. This "second-best" physician allowed his thirsty patients to drink copious amounts of water, thus preventing deadly dehydration. Henry, of course, fancied himself as an expert on the disease (he was an expert on everything), and Master Brian Tuke, one of the king's  counsellors, was obviously treated at the time to a lecture on the subject. Tuke reported to Wolsey that the King thanked the Cardinal for his advice on the sickness...

"...and showing me, first, a great process of the manner of that infection; how folks were taken; how little danger was in it, if good order be observed; how few were dead of it; how Mistress Anne, and my lord of Rochford, both have had it; what jeopardy they have been in, by returning in of the sweat before the time; of the endeavour of Mr. Butts, who hath been with them, and is returned; with many other things touching those matters, and finally, of their perfect recovery."

The link given below offers lots of interesting information, including details from parish records - also this about/from John Caius whom I mentioned in an earlier post:

Aside from the references to letters, chronicles and other contemporary literary documents to provide information about the sweating sickness, the primary contemporary source of clinical information about sweating sickness is A Boke or Counseill Against the Disease Commonly Called the SWEATE, published by John Caius in 1552, the year after the last epidemic. He was a physician who had studied under the anatomist Vesalius in Padua and practiced and taught medicine. Caius’ description follows:


This disease is not a Sweat onely (as it is thought and called), but a feuer, as I saied, in the spirites by putrefaction venomous . . . . First by the peine in the backe or shoulder, peine in the extreme partes, as arme, or legge, with a flusshing, or wind, as it semeth to certeine of the pacientes, flieng in the same . . . . Secondly by the grief in the liuer and the nigh stomacke. Thirdely, by the peine in the head, & madness of the same . . . . Fourthly by the passion of the hart . . . . Whereupon also followeth a maruelous heauiness, (the fifth token of this disease), and a desire to sleape, neuer contented, the senses in al partes beynge as they were bounde or closed vp, the partes therefore leaft heuy, vnliushe, and dulle . . . . Laste foloweth the shorte abidinge, a certaine Token of the disease.

In medical parlance, this description suggests myalgia, headache, delirium, cardiac palpitation, tachycardia, tachypnea, chest pain, agonal breathlessness, and death.




Another treatment advised by Sir Thomas More when his daughter Margaret contracted the disease was a clyster, or enema. She recovered but whether it was due to Sir Thomas’s prolonged prayer for guidance or from fluids absorbed from the enema resolving her dehydrated state is a matter for debate.



http://www.hektoeninternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=114
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Gilgamesh of Uruk
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptyTue 29 Nov 2016, 15:41

Hmm. Viral diseases usually abate in warm weather - the infective agent doesn't survive as well. hence winter flu epidemics, and foot & mouth outbreaks typically peter out in late spring. Warm weather outbreaks suggest a direct-transmission zoonosis or a bacterial agent.
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Temperance
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptyTue 29 Nov 2016, 18:30

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:
Hmm. Viral diseases usually abate in warm weather - the infective agent doesn't survive as well. hence winter flu epidemics, and foot & mouth outbreaks typically peter out in late spring. Warm weather outbreaks suggest a direct-transmission zoonosis or a bacterial agent.


https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17100-warm-weather-may-not-halt-swine-flu/



2009 H1N1 has been circulating, geneticists estimate, since last autumn, but it was first recognised in Mexico in April. New data released by the Mexican health ministry (pdf) reveals disturbing similarities with the last H1N1 pandemic, in 1918.

Health officials have expressed hopes that summer weather in the northern hemisphere will stop H1N1, as it does ordinary flu. But “pandemic flu doesn’t seem to be as sensitive to warm weather,” says Lone Simonsen of George Washington University in Washington, DC. A relatively mild first wave of the 1918 pandemic spread through the northern hemisphere in the spring and summer.
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptyMon 29 Oct 2018, 22:13

nordmann wrote:
English Sweating Sickness was a perfect example of what happens when lay people get to christen diseases

Same goes for Spanish Flu.

As a neutral country during the First World War, the press in Spain was not subject to wartime censorship and so was able to fully report on the epidemic in that country. And when King Alfonso XIII himself became ill with influenza the name stuck:

The Sweating Sickness Returns? K0LvM1yq-4FKIowAXsHIDDl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9

October 1918 would see the second wave of the disease reach its highest death toll and thereafter a sharp decrease in the number of new cases of infection would be noted. There would be a further wave in the summer of 1919 but not as severe as the second wave of 1918.
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Meles meles
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptyMon 29 Oct 2018, 22:38

It could with more justification have been called American Flu as the first major outbreaks occurred in US military camps towards the end of 1917, from where it was transported with US troops to France. But as you say wartime censors tried to suppress news of the outbreak, and I'm still not sure if there is agreement about where it originally mutated or first jumped species from either pigs or poultry to humans.
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PostSubject: Re: The Sweating Sickness Returns?   The Sweating Sickness Returns? EmptySun 14 Jan 2024, 13:28

Meles meles wrote:
It could with more justification have been called American Flu as the first major outbreaks occurred in US military camps towards the end of 1917, from where it was transported with US troops to France. But as you say wartime censors tried to suppress news of the outbreak, and I'm still not sure if there is agreement about where it originally mutated or first jumped species from either pigs or poultry to humans.

It could even be named ‘Kansas flu’ after the fact that there were early documented sources at Camp Funston in the state’s army mustering station at Fort Riley. Some have suggested Haskell County (250 miles southwest of Fort Riley) as the source of the infection with some even naming a specific ranch and individuals who worked there when the virus jumped species. Others dispute this and suggest that strains of bronchial infection were already in evidence in overcrowded British army camps in France as early as 1916 and that these could have mutated. Simultaneously there was also an ongoing flu pandemic in China which too could have mutated into the killer ‘Spanish’ variant.

What is interesting is how both the ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918 and Covid-19 followed a similar pattern in terms of waves. Initially the warm weather of summer seemed to exacerbate the pandemic of 1918 and again in the summer of 1919. With Covid-19 there had been talk in the winter of 2019-20 that the coming summer of 2020 would kill-off the virus (as suggested by Gil upthread). This proved not to be the case, however, with the warm weather seeing spikes in infections that year and notably the following summer of 2021. That second summer saw the Indian variant (a.k.a. the Delta variant) being particularly virulent. Indeed, the Delta variant was similar to the Sweating Sickness in that it seemed to attack the young and healthy more so than the elderly and infirm (as mentioned by Temp in the opening post).

Since then, Covid-19 seems to have followed the flu to become of concern only really in the winter months with general practices in the UK offering those in the at-risk groups a ‘covid booster’ vaccination in the autumn along with the seasonal flu vaccine. How long this continues remains to be seen.
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