It began very suddenly with a sense of apprehension, followed by cold shivers (sometimes very violent), dizziness, headache, and severe pains in the neck, shoulders, and limbs, with great exhaustion.

In the final stages there was either general exhaustion and collapse, or an irresistible urge to sleep, which Caius thought was fatal if the patient were permitted to give way to it.

The first confirmed outbreak was in August 1485 at the end of the Wars of the Roses, leading to speculation that it may have been brought from France by French mercenaries.

[5] However, an earlier outbreak may have affected the city of York in June 1485, before Henry Tudor's army landed, although records of that disease's symptoms are not adequate enough to be certain.

[6] Regardless, the Croyland Chronicle mentions that Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby cited the sweating sickness as reason not to join Richard III's army prior to the Battle of Bosworth.

However, relapsing fever is marked by a prominent black scab at the site of the tick bite and a subsequent skin rash, neither of which are described as the symptoms of sweating sickness.

A criticism of this hypothesis is that modern-day hantaviruses, unlike the sweating sickness, do not randomly disappear and can be seen affecting isolated people.

[11] Numerous attempts have been made to define the disease origin by molecular biology methods, but have so far failed due to a lack of available DNA or RNA.

[13][3] The large number of people present in London to witness the coronation of Henry VII may have accelerated the spread of the disease, and indeed many other airborne pathogens.

The battle's victor, Henry VII, arrived in London on 28 August, and the disease broke out there on 19 September 1485;[15] it had killed several thousand people by its conclusion in late October that year.

[18] Because of its extremely rapid and fatal course, and the sweating which gave it its name, the sickness was regarded as being quite distinct from the Black Death, the pestilential fever, or other epidemics previously known.

He noted the common treatment of the disease was to go immediately to bed at the first sign of symptoms; there, the affected person was to remain still for the entire 24-hour period of the illness, abstaining from any solid food and limiting water intake.

[15] In the 1517 epidemic, the disease showed a particular affinity for the English; the ambassador from Venice at the time commented on the peculiarly low number of cases in foreign visitors.

The earliest written reference to it was on 5 June 1528, in a letter to Bishop Tunstall of London from Brian Tuke, who said that he had fled to Stepney to avoid infection from a servant at his house who was ill with "the sweat.

[30] It spread along the Baltic coast, north to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway as well as south to Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Marburg, and Göttingen in September of that year.

It emerged in Flanders and the Netherlands,[15] possibly transmitted directly from England by travellers; it appeared simultaneously in the cities of Antwerp and Amsterdam on the morning of 27 September.

[32] Although burial patterns in smaller towns in Europe suggest that the disease may have been present elsewhere first,[4] the outbreak is recorded to have begun in Shrewsbury in April.

[2] John Caius wrote his eyewitness account A Boke or Counseill Against the Disease Commonly Called the Sweate, or Sweatyng Sicknesse.

Henry Machin also recorded it in his diary: the vii day of July begane a nuw swet in London…the x day of July [1551] the Kynges grace removyd from Westmynster unto Hamtun courte, for ther [died] serten besyd the court, and caused the Kynges grase to be gone so sune, for ther ded in London mony marchants and grett ryche men and women, and yonge men and old, of the new swett…the xvi day of July ded of the swet the ii yonge dukes of Suffoke of the swet, both in one bed in Chambrydge-shyre…and ther ded from the vii day of July unto the xix ded of the swett in London of all dyssesus… [872] and no more in alleThe Annals of Halifax Parish of 1551 records 44 deaths in an outbreak there.

[34] An outbreak called 'sweating sickness' occurred in Tiverton, Devon in 1644, recorded in Martin Dunsford's History, killing 443 people, 105 of them buried in October.

[3] In a 1906 outbreak of Picardy sweat which struck 6,000 people, a commission led by bacteriologist André Chantemesse attributed infection to the fleas of field mice.