A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2): From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of PlagueCreighton, Charles
History
A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2): From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague
Creighton, Charles
Epidemics -- Great Britain -- History
In this remarkable progress over the mainland of Europe, France was
conspicuously avoided. The sweat does not appear to have entered Spain,
nor to have crossed the Alps. But all the rest of the Continent, from the
Rhine to the Oder (if not farther east) and from the Baltic to the Alps,
was reached by the English sweat in much the same way as if it had been an
influenza reversing the order of its usual direction. There need be no
hesitation as to the correctness of the diagnosis; the disease was
described by several foreign writers from their own observation, and their
descriptions agree entirely with those of Forrestier, in 1485, of Polydore
Virgil, perhaps for the epidemics of 1508 and 1517, and of the
letter-writers who were describing the epidemic of the year before (1528),
as they saw it in and around London. The striking thing in the accounts
from the continent is the enormous range of its fatality; in some towns
the proportion of deaths to cases was hardly more than in influenza, while
in others it was the death-rate of a peculiarly pestilential or malignant
typhus; and those differences cannot have depended wholly upon the method
of treatment.
These full accounts of the English sweat on the continent of Europe in
1529 are in striking contrast to the meagre records of it at home. They
were compiled first in 1805 from the numerous contemporary chronicles, and
printed pamphlets or fly-sheets on the sweat, by Gruner, professor at
Jena, in his _Itinerary of the English Sweat_, and his _Extant writers on
the English Sweat_, published in Latin[504]. In 1834 Hecker went over the
ground again in his well-known essay, improving somewhat upon the positive
erudition of Gruner, but at the same time hazarding a number of doubtful
interpretative statements, especially as to the sweat in England, for
which the meagreness of the English records then available may be his
excuse. The erudition of Gruner, Hecker and Häser deserves every
acknowledgement; but it is of value more especially for the extension of
the sweat to the continent of Europe in 1529, where it had abundant
materials at its service, in chronicles, printed essays, and “regiments.”
There are extant no fewer than twenty-one printed essays or sheets of
directions on the English sweat, which were issued from the German,
Netherlands, or Swiss presses between the month of October 1529 and the
month of June 1531, two or three of them being in Latin and most of them
brief summaries in the native tongue for popular use. The corresponding
epidemic in England did not call forth a single piece by any medical man,
so far as is known. Nor does the English treatment appear to have lost
anything thereby; for it was based upon the profitable experience of
previous epidemics as embodied in oral tradition. Down to the fifth
epidemic in 1551, the only English writing on the sweat so far as is known
was the manuscript of 1485, by Forrestier. Almost all that we know of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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