During Tudor times, when the world seems to have been almost at its lowest stage of filth, there were great epidemics of typhus fever in Europe, especially in Italy; thus reviving memories of Athens and the Roman Empire, which to the eyes of modern men seem to have been an age of beauty. Typhus is beyond all other diseases the disease of filth, war, and misery; and that it spread so vigorously in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries seems to show that things at that time were less romantic than people try to depict. Probably, if we could get at the real truth, throughout recorded history, typhus has slain more people than any other epidemic disease, possibly even more than the plague itself. There can be little doubt as to the identity of the “Sweating Sickness” of Tudor times. It seems to have begun with the bloodshed of the Wars of the Roses, as the army of Henry VII marched in misery, slush, and triumph after the battle of Bosworth. Very soon after the king’s entry into London the sweating sickness began to spread among the overcrowded houses of the capital. It ravaged high and low; at first it spread largely among young and vigorous men; in one week it took two lord mayors and six aldermen. The coronation of Henry VII was postponed by reason of the general distress, and the disease spread without interruption over the whole country. Nobody seemed to be immune; and when it attacked Oxford the professors and students fled alike in a common terror, so that the ancient university was as deserted as it was, for a more worthy reason, during our late war. After its first appearance, sudden and savage, the English Sweat for a time abandoned its victims, and the mediæval world resigned itself to its normal accompaniments of epidemic typhus, smallpox, and plague. Soon after the return of Columbus we begin to hear of a new and terrible disease, syphilis,[22] though there has been great argument as to whether it may not have been yaws, which is a comparatively mild tropical long-continued ailment. To my mind the fact is convincing that we find no real traces of syphilis in the bones from ancient burial-places. If it had existed in the ancient world we should certainly have found such evidences. But the English Sweat was only biding its opportunity; for it returned mildly in 1506; and again severely in 1517; and again, in its worst epidemic, in 1528. By this time the world was beginning to think that we were eternally damned; and when in 1529, it spread to Hamburg, the good North Germans tried to signify their belief in the usual manner by confining their patients in the best replica of hell that they could imagine. Every patient, whatever his sickness, was hidden under a heap of featherbeds; the stove was driven to its full force; the windows shut and sealed with rags; and the patient’s relatives heaped themselves upon him until it sometimes happened that he was actually smothered by their well-meant efforts.