The Sweating Sickness: The Tudor Plague That Killed in Hours and Then Vanished

2026-06-23 · Strange Mass Events · 8 min read

Some were merry at dinner and dead at supper. The line has been worn smooth by five centuries of retelling, and it remains the most exact short description of the disease the Tudors called the sweat. It did not creep. A man could wake healthy, work a full morning, sit down to eat and be a corpse before the candles were lit.

The course of the illness was described consistently by those who watched it. It began with a nameless dread, a sense that something was badly wrong, followed by a cold shivering violent enough to shake the whole body, headache, pain driving through the neck, shoulders and limbs, and a crushing weariness. Within a few hours the cold gave way to its opposite: a drenching, foul-smelling sweat that soaked the bedclothes and gave the disease its name. The heart raced, the breath came in gasps, and over all of it lay an overwhelming urge to sleep. To surrender to that sleep was very often to die.

Reader comments (0)