Nothing more is heard of the sweat in England after the autumn of 1551, at least not under that name. Francis Keene, an “astronomer,” prophesied in his almanack for 1575, that the sweat would return, “wherein he erred not much,” says Cogan[525], “as there were many strange fevers and nervous sickness.” Some years before that, in 1558 (a year after influenza abroad), there prevailed in summer “divers strange and new sicknesses,” among which was a “sweating sickness,” so described by Dr John Jones, who had it at Southampton. We are, indeed, approaching the period of frequent and widespread epidemics of fever and of influenza, in both which types of disease sweating was occasionally a notable symptom, as in the influenza of 1580 abroad, in the fatal typhus of 1644 at Tiverton, in the widespread English fevers of 1658, and in the London typhus as late as 1750. How those other types of fever, due as if to a “corruption of the air,” are related generically to the English sweat is a question upon which something remains to be said before this chapter is concluded. But the history of the English sweat comes to a definite end with the epidemic of 1551. Sweating sickness of the original sort was never again the _signum pathognomicum_ of a whole epidemic of fever. The English Sweat became an extinct species, after a comparatively brief existence on the earth of sixty-six years. Its successors among the forms of pestilential disease may have occasionally put forth the sweating character, as if in a sport of nature; but the most of the travelling, or posting, or universal fevers, and universal colds, are easily distinguished from the sweat--_nova febrium terris incubuit cohors_[526].
The history of the English sweat presents to the student of epidemics much that is paradoxical although not without parallel, and much that his research can never rescue from uncertainty. Where did this hitherto unheard of disease come from? Where was it in the intervals from 1485 to 1508, from 1508 to 1517, from 1517 to 1528, and from 1528 to 1551? What became of it after 1551? Why did it fall mostly on the great houses,--on the king’s court, on the luxurious establishments of prelates and nobles, on the richer citizens, on the lusty and well fed, for the most part sparing the poor? Why did it avoid France when it overran the Continent in 1529? No theory of the sweat can be held sufficient which does not afford some kind of answer to each of those questions, and some harmonizing of them all.