To determine to a day when epidemics which have been long in preparation have broken out, is, even for an observer who is present, exceedingly difficult, nay, sometimes, under the most favourable circumstances, impossible; for there occur in these visitations, certain transitions into the epidemic form, of diseases which are allied to it, as well as a gradual conversion into it of morbid phenomena, which have usually begun some time before. Unless we are greatly mistaken, such was the case in the pestilence of which we are now treating; although it must be confessed, that we can obtain no precise information on this point from the physicians of those times. The following statements, for the absolute precision of which we cannot pledge ourselves after a lapse of 300 years, must therefore be judged according to this general experience; and though singly they may prove little, yet taken altogether, they are capable of demonstrating the peculiar and almost wonderful manner in which the Sweating Fever spread over Germany.
In Lübeck, the next city in the Baltic, the Sweating Sickness appeared about the same time; for so early as the Friday before St. Peter _in vinculis_ (30th of July), it was known, that on the preceding night a woman had died of it[578]. On the following days cases of death fearfully increased, and the disorder soon raged so violently, that people were again reminded of the Black Death of 1349. The inhabitants died without number, as well in the city as in the environs, and the consternation was equal to that felt in Hamburgh[579]. In general, as was everywhere the case, robust young people of the better classes were affected, while, on the other hand, children and poor people living in cellars and garrets almost all of them escaped[580].
Now one might, either on the supposition of a progressive alteration in the atmosphere, such as occurs in the influenza, or on that of a communication of the disease from man to man, which, however, cannot be considered as a principal cause of this epidemic, have expected a gradual extension of the Sweating Sickness from Hamburgh and Lübeck to the surrounding country. This did not, however, in fact, take place; for the disease next broke out at Twickau, at the foot of the Erzgebirge, distant from Hamburgh fifty German miles, and without having previously visited the rich commercial city of Leipzig. By the 14th of August, nineteen persons who had died of it, were buried at Twickau; and on one of the following nights above a hundred[581] sickened, whence it is to be deduced that the pestilence was severe at that place.