The cardiac disease began with rigors and a numbness in the limbs[818], and sometimes even throughout the whole body. The pulse then took on the worst condition, was small, weak, frequent, empty, and as if dissolving; in a more advanced stage, unequal and fluttering, until it became completely extinct. Patients were affected with hallucinations[819]; they were sleepless, despaired of their recovery, and were usually covered suddenly with an ill-savoured perspiration over the whole body, whence the disorder was likewise called _Diaphoresis_. Sometimes, however, a washy sweat broke out, first on the face and neck. This then spread itself over the whole body; assumed a very disagreeable odour, became clammy and like water in which flesh had been macerated, and ran through the bed-clothes in streams, so that the patient seemed to be melting away[820]. The breath was short and panting almost to annihilation (insustentabilis). Those affected were in continual fear of suffocation[821]; tossed to and fro in the greatest anguish, and with _a very thin and trembling voice_ uttered forth only broken words. They constantly felt an insufferable oppression in the _left side_, or even over the whole chest[822]; and in the paroxysms which were ushered in with _a fainting fit_, or were followed by one, _the heart was tumultuous and palpitated_, without any alteration in the smallness of the pulse[823]. The countenance was _pale as death_, the eyes sunk in their sockets, and when the disease took a fatal turn, all was darkness around them. _The hands and feet turned blue_; and whilst the heart, notwithstanding the universal coldness of the body, still beat violently, they for the most part retained possession of their senses. A few only wandered a short time before death, while others were even seized with convulsions and endowed with the power of prophecy[824]. _Finally, the nails became curved on their cold hands_, the skin was wrinkled, and thus the sufferers resigned their spirit without any mitigation of their miserable condition[825].
A striking resemblance is plainly perceived, from this description, between the ancient cardiac disease and the English Sweating Sickness in the most exquisite cases of each. In both the same palpitation of the heart, the same alteration of the voice, the same anxiety, the same impediment to respiration, and thence the same affection of the nerves of the chest, the same ill-scented sweat, and, by means of this sweat, the same fatal evacuation; in short, all the essential symptoms arising from the same circle of functions. For in the sweating pestilences of the ancients[826], as well as the moderns, the nerves of the abdomen remained unaffected; the liver, intestines, and kidneys, took no part in the primary affection; the diaphragm, as in the English Sweating Sickness, formed the partition. Hence the acute _Aretæus_ did not hesitate to call the cardiac disease _fainting_ (syncope), with certainly an unusual extension of the notion implied by this term, which in its common acceptation excludes the turbulent commotion of the heart. In the affection of the brain some difference occurs, for though the hallucination afforded an unfavourable prognostic in both diseases, yet the fatal stupor was peculiar to the English Sweating Sickness, no observer having made mention of it in the cardiac disease.