as an injury to the
brain, to which, in all probability, was added a stagnation of black
blood in the torpid veins. Probably decomposing blood gave rise to the
offensive odor of the person. The function of the lungs was
considerably impaired. The petechial fever in Italy in 1505 was a form
of the sweating sickness. There were visitations in 1506 and in 1515 in
England. In 1517 the disease lasted full six months and reached its
greatest height about six weeks after its appearance, but was
apparently limited to England. Meningeal symptoms were characteristic
of the third visitation of the disease. In 1528 and 1529 there was a
fourth visitation which resulted in the destruction of the French Army
before Naples. It is said that in 1524 a petechial fever carried off
50,000 people in Milan, and possibly this was the same disease. In 1529
the disease had spread all over Europe, attended with great mortality.

Germany, France, and Italy were visited equally. The famine in Germany,
at this time, is described by authorities in a tone of deep sympathy.
Swabia, Lorraine, Alsace, and provinces on the border of the lower
Rhine, were frightfully affected, so that the disease reached the same
heights there as in France. In England Henry VIII endeavored to avoid
the epidemic by continual traveling, until at last he grew tired of so
unsettled a life and determined to await his destiny at Tytynhangar. It
was not the inhabitants of the land alone who were affected, but even
fish and the fowls of the air sickened. According to Schiller, in the
neighborhood of Freiburg in Breisgau, dead birds were found scattered
under the trees with boils as large as peas under their
wings,--indicating among them a disease, and this extended far beyond
the southern districts of the Rhine. The disease was undoubtedly of a
miasmatic infectious nature, as was proved by its rapid spread and the
occasional absence of a history of contagion. It was particularly
favored in its development by high temperature and humidity.

The moral effect of the sweating sickness, similar to that of the black
plague, was again to increase religious fanaticism and recreate the
zeal of persecution.

On the 15th of April, 1551, there was an outbreak of the fifth and last
epidemic of sweating fever in Shrewsbury, on the Severn. With stinking
mists it gradually spread all over England, and on the 9th of July it
reached London. The mortality was very considerable. The English
res