practice[640]; as also an anonymous person, (the names of the best often remain unknown in times of confusion,) who, in popular language, strenuously dissuaded the people against the use of feather beds[641]. It also soon became a common saying, ”the Sweating Sickness will bear no medicine.”[642] There is no ground for supposing that the influence of the faculty was much greater in the country where the Sweating Sickness originated than it was in Germany, for the number of learned physicians there was still fewer, and the knowledge of medicine not nearly so extended as it was in Italy, Germany, and France. The learned Linacre had already died in the year 1524. John Chambre[643], Edward Wotton[644], and George Owen[645], were the King’s body physicians about the time of the fourth epidemic visitation of the Sweating Sickness. William Butts[646] of whom Shakespeare[647] has made honourable mention, in all probability likewise held a similar office. These were certainly distinguished and worthy men[648], but posterity has gained nothing from them on the subject of the English Sweating Sickness. All these physicians were well informed, zealous, and doubtless also cautious followers of the ancient Greek school of medicine, but their merits were of no advantage to the people, who, when they departed from the dictates of their own understanding, and did not content themselves with domestic remedies, to which they had been accustomed, fell into the hands of a set of surgeons so rude and ignorant that they could only exist in the state of society which then prevailed[649]. SECT. 11.—PAMPHLETS. Inexplicable as the silence of the learned physicians of England, on the Sweating Sickness, appears at first view, (for where is the use of learning if it fail to throw any light on the stormy phenomena of life?) we may yet find, perhaps, its cause in a perfectly simple external circumstance. The reformation had not yet begun in England, the Catholic Church still stood on its ancient foundations, and an intellectual intercourse between the learned and the people was not by any means among the acknowledged desiderata. The faculty would hence have been able to treat of the new disorder only in ponderous Latin works, for they wrote unwillingly in their own language, and the subject could not seem to them an appropriate one for this purpose, because they found it unnoticed and uninvestigated by their highly revered masters the Greeks. They were ignorant that a sweating fever had ever appeared among the ancients, which, otherwise, might have incited them to make researches of their own on the subject; for Aurelian, who describes it to the life, was either unknown to them, or, what at that time was a valid ground, was despised by them, on account of his bad (unclassical) language.