Sweating Sickness: Earlier than Bosworth?

It is commonly stated (for instance, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness ) that the sweating sickness (which some think might have been hantavirus: http://discovermagazine.com/1997/jun/thesweatingsickn1161#.UxqwPYWwVQQ ) didn't appear in England (or anywhere else for that matter) until August of 1485, round about the time that Henry Tydder's French troops were flooding the countryside.

But interestingly enough, while on a totally different hunt, I ran across this information from page 45 of the book *East Anglia's History" Studies in Honour of Norman Scarfe* (parts of which are preserved in Google), referring to Master Stephen (d. 1257), the "medicus infirmarius" of Bury St. Edmunds:

"...It was, indeed, his zeal as infirmarer, notably during an outbreak of sweating sickness, which merited especial commendation."

The reference cited for this is one of the Lansdowne Manuscripts in the British Library: BL MS Lansdowne 416 (Register of Thomas Ickworth, infirmarer of Bury St. Edmunds, 1425).

This could of course refer to a totally different disease -- this is entirely possible, perhaps even likely. But I do wonder, and so I'm putting this out there for anyone who is researching this field of study.

Tamara

The question has come up as to whether it might have been anthrax. I think not, for the following reasons:

-- Anthrax still takes a few days to kill its victims, and can often take weeks; the sweating sickness usually killed, if it was going to kill within twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

-- Anthrax also would have been a disease known to the English -- its pulmonary version was called woolsorter's disease, as people who worked with raw wool from infected sheep were among the most likely to get it. Part of the horror of the sweating sickness seems to be in how unusual it was; it wasn't a known entity, like anthrax.

-- Being exposed to anthrax often conferred immunity (and of course anthrax vaccines have all but eliminated the disease in the developed world). But having the sweating sickness once didn't apparently confer immunity.

Now that I think on it, I've just described Spanish influenza, haven't I? (It should actually be called "Fort Riley Flu", since it first appeared in Fort Riley, Kansas, and made a dent in the U.S. war effort.) It appears quickly, strikes hardest at the healthy, kills a high number of its victims, and death tends to occur within twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

And, as flu viruses tend to do, it mutates very quickly, which is why vaccines against the flu are of limited effectiveness -- they take six months to make and get into production, by which time strains have mutated enough to partially foil them. (That would explain why people who survived one bout of sweating sickness weren't made proof against another.)

Also, really severe Spanish 'flu' epidemics happen only rarely, which would explain why it turned up in the late 13th C, then not again until 200 years later.

Tamara