The Sweating Sickness: A Boke or Counseill Against the Disease Commonly Called the Sweate or Sweatyng Sicknesse

In Tudor England, a disease swept through the population with terrifying speed: victims would be struck by sudden profuse sweating, then dead within hours. The sweating sickness killed nobles and commoners alike, vanishing as mysteriously as it arrived, leaving physicians baffled and a nation terrified. John Caius, physician to Henry VIII and founder of Cambridge's Gonville and Caius College, wrote this slim volume in 1552 as both medical treatise and public reassurance. He documents the disease's brutal efficiency, catalogs symptoms observed across multiple outbreaks, and proposes his theories on cause and prevention. The remedies range from the practical (cleanliness, proper diet) to the now-strange (bleeding, herbal preparations). What makes this book remarkable is not just its historical priority as one of the first English medical texts, but what it reveals about the boundary between superstition and early science. Here is a physician applying rational observation to a disease that would not be understood for centuries, doing his best with the tools available when death could come before a doctor could finish his examination.