Sweating Sickness Strikes England

1485

A mysterious disease appeared in London shortly after Bosworth: sudden sweating, fever, collapse, and death within hours. Whole households died in a day. It vanished as abruptly, returned in five later epidemics across sixty years, and then disappeared from history. Nobody today knows what it was. Modern epidemiologists have proposed hantavirus and relapsing fever, but no identification has been made, leaving the disease an enduring medical mystery.