The Milroy lectures on epidemic diseases in England : the evidence of variability and of persistency of type delivered before the Royal College of Physicians of London, March 1st, 6th, and 8th, 1906 / by W.H. Hamer.

  • Hamer, William Heaton, 1862-1936.
Date:
1906
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Milroy lectures on epidemic diseases in England : the evidence of variability and of persistency of type delivered before the Royal College of Physicians of London, March 1st, 6th, and 8th, 1906 / by W.H. Hamer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Enough has been said to show how far we are from possessing a satisfactory description by contemporary writers of the supposed new disease; indeed, so far as the four earlier outbreaks are concerned, the particulars to hand in this country may be compared with the sort of information it might be possible to glean, say, concerning the influenza of 1803, from fragments of the correspondence of the Poet Laureate and the Italian Ambassador of the time. Much is capable of explanation, if once it is decided not to treat the contemporary records more seriously than they deserve. Is it not mysterious that when, ceasing to be peculiarly English, the sweat overran the Continent it did not affect France ? While the year 1551, that of the last sweat, “curiously coincided,” says Creighton, “with influenza (coqueluche) in France.” Strangest of all, “during the prevalence of influenza in Britain in 1510, Spain was afflicted with sweating sickness” (Villalba). The accepted account of five clean-cut English epidemics is almost certainly misleading. The Graf von Newenar, Provost of Cologne, maintained, indeed, that sweat broke out in England every year, but this Hecker considers “ unworthy of credence.” In 1511 (not a “sweat” year), Erasmus complains of his health being rather doubtful “ from that sweat ” (« sudore illo). This may, as Creighton says, “ possibly refer to the lingering effects of an attack in 1508 or to the influenza of 1510.” Again, there were “ hot agues ” in England in 1518 and 1540. The conditions, so far as importation of infection is concerned, were very different in the sixteenth from those in the nineteenth century, a point to which I propose to revert later, but it is conceivable that in some such way as the influenzas of 1803, 1833, 1837, 1847-48, and 1890, stand out in the history of the nineteenth centuiy, so the five sweats of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may merely represent marked exacerbations of a more or less established disease. May we not go a step further, and question Polydore Virgil’s dictum, “ man of affairs” though he was, that the sweat was “ a new kind of disease from which no former age had suffered, as all agree.” Influenza in later times was over and over again the “new disease,” or the “new acquaintance;” and certain it is that, as a literature of of “ignorant interlopers who with their pills and their hellish electuaries flit about from place to place, especially where rich merchants were to be found, from whom, should they be restored, they obtain the promise of mines of gold.”