Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Yeah,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
Speaker 1: so much for tuning in during these our days of
Speaker 1: pandemic that continue. Today's story is about another sort of infection.
Speaker 1: But it's an infection. Uh. You know, we've been going
Speaker 1: back and forth about this off the air. We will
Speaker 1: quite enjoy the title of this. We're gonna call this
Speaker 1: Henry d I and your Mysterious English Sweat. I am Ben.
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know, I like to say switch
Speaker 1: the Swits. That's a little more Australian maybe maybe New Zealand's. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the sound watch out the bits swits, which which
Speaker 1: for sweet swit switten bits. Never mind got off to
Speaker 1: a smashing story here, But no, Ben, you had the
Speaker 1: brilliant idea of the Henry the Eighth and the English
Speaker 1: Sweats sounds like some kind of like new wave band
Speaker 1: or like a band that might have played it like
Speaker 1: C B G B S in the eighties. Like I
Speaker 1: don't know, what do you think? I think you're spot
Speaker 1: on with the time period. It maybe could have been
Speaker 1: part of the earlier British invasion, some group that like
Speaker 1: just never got out of Yorkshire. Yeah, like a skiffle band.
Speaker 1: Perhaps you're reading the headlines about the Beatles and they
Speaker 1: were like one day fellas one day MIT's uh. Speaking
Speaker 1: of mates, we want to give a shout out of
Speaker 1: course two our super producer, Casey Pegram case he has,
Speaker 1: like the three of us, never suffered as far as
Speaker 1: we know. From the notorious English sweats. I assume, right, Casey,
Speaker 1: you're English sweat free. I had the American sweats a
Speaker 1: few times, but not the English ones. I think when
Speaker 1: I was over there it was like October, so you
Speaker 1: know it was it was nice weather, sweating was not necessary.
Speaker 1: That's a Casey on the case right there. When I
Speaker 1: think of American sweats, when you first said that, Casey,
Speaker 1: I was thinking of the meat sweats. Do you guys
Speaker 1: know what that is? Right where we eat so much
Speaker 1: barbecue or something that you're like, I'm sweating from the
Speaker 1: physical exertion of eating. I have to lay down. That's
Speaker 1: the American sweats right there. But yeah, we're not talking
Speaker 1: about meat sweats though. We're talking about, like, you know,
Speaker 1: pretty serious disease sweats that could lay you out and
Speaker 1: then eventually kill you. Um and it was something that
Speaker 1: very disproportionately affected like the wealthy, which is kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: I sat, I gotta say there's a certain poetic justice
Speaker 1: to that, you know, a disease that only affects the wealthy. Um,
Speaker 1: And there's some reasoning behind that in this story about
Speaker 1: this kind of strange pandemic that swept the land and
Speaker 1: then Boo just blipped out of existence, like Trump thinks
Speaker 1: the coronavirus is going to Yeah. Yeah, sweating sickness real thing,
Speaker 1: also known as the sweats, the English sweating sickness. We'll
Speaker 1: find out why in a second. Where English sweat or
Speaker 1: for the Latin lovers in the crowd, sudor anglicus. You're right, No,
Speaker 1: this is a mysterious infection. Uh. To to examine this story,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to start in the late fourteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: We don't know whether there was a patient zero for
Speaker 1: sweating sickness. We don't know first got it, but we
Speaker 1: do know that there's a contingent of historians who believe
Speaker 1: it originally was brought to land by mercenaries hired by
Speaker 1: Henry the Eighth's father. Uh, they're the mercenaries were there
Speaker 1: to seize the throne of England for Henry's line. This
Speaker 1: move bringing in the mercenaries ended what's known as the
Speaker 1: War of the Roses in fourteen eight seven. But as
Speaker 1: as historians believe, again we're not on this. As the
Speaker 1: historians believe the same importation of these foreign soldiers may
Speaker 1: have ushered in the infection known as sweating sickness. That's right.
Speaker 1: Some I'm gonna call them historical epidemiologists, but that might
Speaker 1: not be a thing. They might just be regular historians.
Speaker 1: But there's some theories, um that indicate that, uh in
Speaker 1: that this this disease was brought to England by the French,
Speaker 1: specifically mercenaries um in Henry Tudor's army. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different theories behind this, and there aren't really
Speaker 1: any reports of it affecting the Tutor army, which is interesting.
Speaker 1: So Tutor arrived in London following the Battle of Bosworth Field,
Speaker 1: which is the most British sounding name for a field
Speaker 1: I could think of. That happened in the August five
Speaker 1: and that's kind of the event that you know, you
Speaker 1: can sort of mark as the beginning of this epidemic. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's started about three weeks later, on the nineteenth
Speaker 1: of September in fourteen eighty five. Uh, we don't really
Speaker 1: know who patient zero was exactly, um, but it kind
Speaker 1: of spread pretty widely, at least in the region where
Speaker 1: it first appeared. It became it was it was remarked
Speaker 1: upon as a new kind of sickness. Has it been
Speaker 1: plague plague times? Not not plague time. But the people
Speaker 1: were aware of these kinds of diseases. It was a
Speaker 1: big deal. The plague killed an obscene number of people
Speaker 1: in the uh hundreds, The Black Death, the bubonic plague,
Speaker 1: you know the Do you know that they call those
Speaker 1: things the pus filled boils? They call them bubas, yeah, bubos.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. I've always found that comical sounding, but it's
Speaker 1: obviously not comical at all. This is gonna sound weird
Speaker 1: out of context. But when I was really going through
Speaker 1: my black Plague phase, I had a fish named Bubbos.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I was just I don't know my young
Speaker 1: way connecting it. I love that movie A fish called Bubbos.
Speaker 1: A fish called Bubbos, Yeah yeah, yeah. It's a spinoff
Speaker 1: of the earlier film The Navigator. Uh so you're right,
Speaker 1: between thirteen forty six and thirteen fifty three. This unprecedented
Speaker 1: wave of bubonic plague devastated the known world, and it
Speaker 1: had such an impact that people alive in the late
Speaker 1: fourteen hundreds were very much aware of this. The world
Speaker 1: population was still struggling to cover. Over twenty million people
Speaker 1: in Europe alone died because of the bubonic plague. This
Speaker 1: is serious, serious stuff, and as a better off fact,
Speaker 1: a bit of a tangent, we can see the consequences
Speaker 1: of the bubonic plague in twenty today. In fact, some
Speaker 1: people in parts of Europe are born naturally genetically resistant
Speaker 1: to uh HIV infection due to historians believe the bubonic plague.
Speaker 1: But to your point, sweating sickness does not seem to
Speaker 1: be related to the plague. You didn't get bubos with it,
Speaker 1: you didn't have some of the same signs of transmission.
Speaker 1: As far as medical authorities at the time could tell,
Speaker 1: Sweating sickness just sort of popped up randomly in different locations,
Speaker 1: and it was they found some patterns. They said, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's always after a long period of rainfall, or it's
Speaker 1: always after flooding, and usually it affects two demographics of people.
Speaker 1: Either the very very wealthy or the very very poor. Okay,
Speaker 1: my bad. I said it affected the wealthy, uh, disproportionately,
Speaker 1: but apparently it was proportionately with the poor. Uh What
Speaker 1: what about the middles? What? What? What? How they get
Speaker 1: out of it? What's what's the deal with that? I
Speaker 1: don't understand. Were they just spared by the sweat gods,
Speaker 1: England soldiers on man, you know, England and doors or however?
Speaker 1: How did they say that in v for Vendetta. Well,
Speaker 1: if you're a fan, you know that what we're talking about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right. It is a bit of a mystery, isn't it.
Speaker 1: For those historians of epidemiology, we know that the disease
Speaker 1: was deadly. It killed thousands of people, and just like
Speaker 1: parts of the world today with the coronavirus pandemic, people
Speaker 1: were terrified. They were they were panicking, and they were
Speaker 1: panicking because not only were people of the time very
Speaker 1: unclear on how the disease spread, but we all also
Speaker 1: knew that it could kill people at an incredibly quick rate.
Speaker 1: Like if you traveled back to London in this time,
Speaker 1: you could spend a day there and you would hear
Speaker 1: multiple people just you would overhear them as you walk
Speaker 1: by talking about how they saw someone drop dead in
Speaker 1: the street with no no like, no preface, no pre
Speaker 1: existing condition. Maybe they're just kind of sweaty. And then yeah,
Speaker 1: like in the same way that like, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: for coronavirus, the fever is a big indicator. With this one,
Speaker 1: it was the sweat. So if you see someone sweating profusely,
Speaker 1: you probably we're gonna steer clear. Uh. It's pretty interesting. Um.
Speaker 1: It was like, like we said, it was really out
Speaker 1: of control in London. Um. And we have this delightful
Speaker 1: and that's the wrong word entirely. I say it's delightful
Speaker 1: because it's written in this kind of old English style
Speaker 1: account of one of these moments that you're describing, ben
Speaker 1: by Thomas forrest here. Uh Forrestier, he's a Frenchman. Uh,
Speaker 1: and he had this to say about such an encounter.
Speaker 1: We saw two priests and this is me interpreting this
Speaker 1: old English writing, so bearing with me it might be fun. Uh.
Speaker 1: We saw two priests standing to gator and speaking to Gator,
Speaker 1: and we saw both of them die suddenly. Also in
Speaker 1: Dae Proximy, we saw see the whiff of a tailor
Speaker 1: taken and saddenly died. Another young man walking by the
Speaker 1: street fell down suddenly. That was a weird one. I
Speaker 1: feel like I was lapsing into like Russian and then
Speaker 1: like a little bit of Irish, and I don't know,
Speaker 1: I was just reading it phonetically, but I think the
Speaker 1: takeaways he saw two priests talking, uh, and then he
Speaker 1: saw one of them die suddenly. Yeah, it makes you
Speaker 1: think right close and a tailor as well, a tailor
Speaker 1: nearby in proximy, I assume means in the same area,
Speaker 1: there was a tailor who also suddenly died. I think maybe,
Speaker 1: and maybe we all care, but I think it could
Speaker 1: be proximity, as in a little bit later in time.
Speaker 1: But either way, either way we know either like right
Speaker 1: in the same location, that's probably right, it's probably the
Speaker 1: same location. Well, then there's a third one. There's also
Speaker 1: a young man walking by the street also fell down soddenly,
Speaker 1: but we don't know if he died. Yeah, because at
Speaker 1: that point we can only uh, we can only imagine
Speaker 1: that our French physician decided caution was the better part
Speaker 1: of valor and ran away. Yes, sir, so the symptoms
Speaker 1: were incredibly swift. Okay, you I said there were no
Speaker 1: pre existing conditions. What we mean by that is it's
Speaker 1: not a situation where over the course of eight days
Speaker 1: you would see someone steadily degrade. Instead, just a few
Speaker 1: hours before they died. From what we understand, the them
Speaker 1: would start having cold shivers, severe pains in the head
Speaker 1: and their neck, and then that would be followed by
Speaker 1: those notorious hot sweats and finally an overpowering urge to
Speaker 1: take a snooze. And um it's it's strange because there
Speaker 1: are also other symptoms that are reported. Right, according to
Speaker 1: past medical history dot co dot uk, people said that
Speaker 1: the sufferers smelled bad. I don't want to be rude,
Speaker 1: but I do want to point out that in Europe
Speaker 1: and in England in the late four hundreds, hygiene was
Speaker 1: a different game. So for someone to smell noticeably bad,
Speaker 1: it would be something that was incredibly apparent to someone
Speaker 1: living in Right, we're just showering less often. We didn't
Speaker 1: have a whole industry to make a smell less human. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was just a smelly time. Remember the stink of London.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a thing it was in general,
Speaker 1: it was a smelly town, you know, there would be
Speaker 1: there like, wasn't proper indoor plumbing yet, I mean there
Speaker 1: was was there? The great stink of London is what
Speaker 1: caused those uh advancements in plumbing, right, yeah, because at
Speaker 1: the time before that, even after that, one of the
Speaker 1: most common ways of disposing sewage or food waste from
Speaker 1: your house was to throw it in the gutter, which
Speaker 1: was in the middle of the street. So it was
Speaker 1: it was rough. And we have the description from our
Speaker 1: French physician about what the disease looked like. And remember
Speaker 1: this is a learned individual and he, you know, is
Speaker 1: still writing in that same language which we tragedy aside.
Speaker 1: I think the three of us find it. It's somewhat delightful,
Speaker 1: so he says, and the sickness coming with a great
Speaker 1: sweeting and stinking. We read niece of the face and
Speaker 1: the vould body, and of a continual fust with a
Speaker 1: great hit and hi dick because of the fumes and
Speaker 1: the venoms all over the place. With that, do you
Speaker 1: see how what it makes you do? Though the fumes
Speaker 1: he sound like inspector clus you know for a second there,
Speaker 1: I love it. And we're not making fun of anybody
Speaker 1: because these people aren't alive anymore, and nobody talks like
Speaker 1: this anymore. So we've got Carte blanched to go to town. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and you know, to be honest, not to
Speaker 1: talk too much about the acting process here, but it's
Speaker 1: a it's a French physician writing in old English. So
Speaker 1: there's some layers. I'm kidding. That was just that was
Speaker 1: just a garbage accident. But an even scarier thing about
Speaker 1: this is that we know that this was not just
Speaker 1: one phase, right, There wasn't just one epidemic, right, No,
Speaker 1: And you know, and again it's interesting one to do
Speaker 1: doing right now because we're in a we're in a
Speaker 1: time right now where a lot of governors and a
Speaker 1: lot of the states are like reopening and kind of
Speaker 1: just talk about like, oh, let's just send kids back
Speaker 1: to school. Uh, and uh, we haven't even seen the
Speaker 1: second wave yet of our personal pandemic. And um, if
Speaker 1: history is to be believed, and it should be and
Speaker 1: often repeats itself, if it's not, um, then you know,
Speaker 1: we could be looking at at a pretty nasty situation
Speaker 1: with a second wave. And that's what happened here. Um,
Speaker 1: much like the second wave of the Spanish flu of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighteen. From fourteen eighty five through fifteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: they had five epidemics of this uh very very dangerous
Speaker 1: sickness UM that absolutely just burned its way through England
Speaker 1: UM and then also made its way into Europe UM
Speaker 1: and and it had like what are we looking at
Speaker 1: for coronavirus? The mortality rate is super low compared to this.
Speaker 1: This was thirty to fifty percent mortality rates. That's bonkers,
Speaker 1: Like that's I mean, you know, you think we're living
Speaker 1: in a panic situation right now. Can you imagine if
Speaker 1: of the people that contracted COVID nineteen just dropped dead
Speaker 1: on the spot. Yikes. And another difference here is that
Speaker 1: the sweating and sickness, when it came on so fast
Speaker 1: and so uh intensely, it also led to a quick recovery.
Speaker 1: The idea was if you were one of the fifty
Speaker 1: to seventy lucky percent who would not die in the
Speaker 1: first few hours of exhibiting symptoms, once you got two
Speaker 1: hour twenty four, you were kind of out of the woods.
Speaker 1: They were guessing because nobody knew how to prevent this,
Speaker 1: nobody knew how to treat it. They just knew people
Speaker 1: started sweating, and then they died. That outbreak in five
Speaker 1: lasted until late October and then it disappeared a kaiser
Speaker 1: associated for several years. You would hear some aller reports
Speaker 1: of smaller outbreaks at the you know, every so often
Speaker 1: every blue moon until that is fifteen o seven. Don't
Speaker 1: call it a come back, or do call it a
Speaker 1: come back because the sweating sickness returned, and people who
Speaker 1: were alive in four five and it lived through that
Speaker 1: hellish time instantly knew that this was the same disease,
Speaker 1: the same infection had come calling again. And then it's subsided.
Speaker 1: And people thought, okay, second wave, we survived, right, But
Speaker 1: they were wrong. Yeah, I think like you said, there
Speaker 1: were five waves, um, and they were absolutely wrong. And
Speaker 1: then the third wave in fifteen seventeen hit and that
Speaker 1: was even more severe um. And that actually made it
Speaker 1: across the English channel to Calais. I love Calais. I've
Speaker 1: always loved when people talk about Calais, cal Calais, Oh
Speaker 1: frept justus day. Isn't that from Alice in Wonderland? No? Wait, jabberwocky, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there we go. But it still seemed to be that
Speaker 1: the English were the ones that were bearing the brunt
Speaker 1: of this UM that it was almost like a cursed
Speaker 1: kind of situation in UM. It reached its peak epidemic
Speaker 1: level proportions once again UM, this time spreading into Europe. Hamburg, Switzerland, Sweden,
Speaker 1: Norway and Denmark were all affected, but none of them
Speaker 1: got hit nearly as hard as England UM, and at
Speaker 1: the time French ambassador named Cardinal du Belllet described it
Speaker 1: as the easiest disease in the world to die of. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In June of he put the facts pretty plainly. He said,
Speaker 1: you have a slight pain in the head and at
Speaker 1: the heart all at once, you begin to sweat. There's
Speaker 1: no need for a physician. They're taken off without languishing, uh. He.
Speaker 1: He also talked about the escalation of the number of
Speaker 1: deaths in the pandemic wave that you described. Noel, He says,
Speaker 1: about two thousand have been attacked by in London. Twelve
Speaker 1: years ago when the same thing happened, ten thousand people
Speaker 1: died in the space of ten or twelve days, but
Speaker 1: it was not so sharp as it's now beginning to be.
Speaker 1: Everybody's terribly alarmed. He's almost like a he is almost
Speaker 1: like one of those medical experts in the very end
Speaker 1: of very beginning of who are telling us this is
Speaker 1: going to be bad? Uh? He predicted a rise. The
Speaker 1: last major outbreak of the disease sweating sickness, occurred in
Speaker 1: England in fifteen fifty one, and after this it's disappeared
Speaker 1: completely and hasn't been seen since so far. I hate
Speaker 1: to do it. I have I have to drop so far.
Speaker 1: Of course you do, um. And you know, I actually
Speaker 1: posted a thing on my Instagram story a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks ago that was just kind of like adding insult
Speaker 1: to injury. It was an article from the New York
Speaker 1: Times saying, bubonic plague found in Chinese herdsman. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like, of course it was. It turns out they
Speaker 1: find it every now and then, right, Yeah, it's certainly
Speaker 1: it's a thing, Like so, I know it was. I
Speaker 1: definitely was being alarmist about it, like, yeah, okay, great,
Speaker 1: we got plagues of locusts and you know, disease and
Speaker 1: uh famine and you know all of this stuff and
Speaker 1: wildfires in Australia. Now we got bubonic plague again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've got one closer to home for you. I did
Speaker 1: a story for this on on Strange News Daily. So
Speaker 1: those two Mongolian brothers who tested positive for the plague,
Speaker 1: they were locked down. You're right, it does happen um
Speaker 1: more often and gets reported. Squirrels in Colorado tested positive
Speaker 1: for bubonic plague like this week, tight love that did
Speaker 1: you say tight? I did say tight? But what's the deal?
Speaker 1: So are we are we immune? Are we like inoculated
Speaker 1: against that? Or I mean, I know you can just
Speaker 1: treat it with like uh uh penicilla um, but with
Speaker 1: like why why why is there why would that not
Speaker 1: spread in the way that novel coronavirus is spread if
Speaker 1: squirrels have it. Well, in the case of bubonic plague,
Speaker 1: there's some good news which arrived too late to save
Speaker 1: the millions of victims in the Dreds. There's like a
Speaker 1: very small chance that you might get bubotic plague. And
Speaker 1: if you did, humanity as a cure. Now, so we
Speaker 1: can we can cure the plague. That's why when you
Speaker 1: see those reports of like prairie dogs in the western
Speaker 1: part of the US having plague, you shouldn't freak out.
Speaker 1: I mean, animals are reservoirs of disease. Armadillo's can get leprosy,
Speaker 1: which I think is just patently unfair to them. They've
Speaker 1: got a lot going against them already. I did know that,
Speaker 1: and you can probably catch it, right. Could you catch
Speaker 1: it from touching an armadillo? I know, as leproty supposed
Speaker 1: to be like intensely communicable. You know that. I don't.
Speaker 1: I'm going to assume that you can and steer clear
Speaker 1: of armadillas because they're weird little bastards. Anyway, I don't
Speaker 1: think you should handle armadilla's general. I'm I'm a hands
Speaker 1: off armadillo policy kind of guy. I want to go
Speaker 1: to your point, Noel, because said something that I think
Speaker 1: it mystifies me about this case, and I think we
Speaker 1: kind of get to an answer about why this happens.
Speaker 1: But as you said, one of the most mysterious aspects
Speaker 1: of this mysterious disease, the English sweats, was that the
Speaker 1: upper class of England, especially rich young dudes, seemed particularly
Speaker 1: vulnerable to it. That's right, um, unlike you know the
Speaker 1: plague which spared none, the bubonic plague, and seemingly much
Speaker 1: like I hate to harp on it, keep coming back
Speaker 1: to it, but here we are coronavirus. It seems to
Speaker 1: spare the very young, um, well, not the very old
Speaker 1: in the coronavirus case, but in this case it did.
Speaker 1: It seemed to spare the very young and the very old, uh,
Speaker 1: the English sweats. It also didn't ever spread to Scotland,
Speaker 1: by the way, so that's why they call it the
Speaker 1: English sweats specifically, or Ireland or Wales specifically, London, England,
Speaker 1: and then a little bit in Europe some of these
Speaker 1: other countries that we mentioned. It was very commonly seen
Speaker 1: in rural areas, but very common as well in um
Speaker 1: areas where nobility, uh we're kicking around, especially in London
Speaker 1: and the student populations of some of these very high
Speaker 1: prestige universities Oxford and Cambridge. Cardinal Wolsey UM actually had
Speaker 1: a brush with the disease two times, and that he
Speaker 1: got it twice uh and and luckily for him, he
Speaker 1: was able to recover both times. But a lot of
Speaker 1: the folks that were in his household, like his staff, uh,
Speaker 1: did not end up being so lucky. A lot of
Speaker 1: folks did flee to Ireland, Scotland and France just to
Speaker 1: die there. You know, there's there's there's no uh, what
Speaker 1: is it there's no geographical solution for a spiritual problem,
Speaker 1: or in this case, you know, a deadly disease. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it started to take root in the zeitgeist, the
Speaker 1: popular culture of the time. You know a disease is
Speaker 1: serious when people start giving it street names, like coronavirus
Speaker 1: has been called the rota. For instance, the sweating sickness
Speaker 1: got the nickname stop Gallant, Stop gallant because it stopped
Speaker 1: so many young gallants. Uh. And and monasteries seem particularly vulnerable.
Speaker 1: You might think that monasteries are maybe not part of
Speaker 1: the upper class. They occupy a unique position though, because
Speaker 1: monasteries are centers for literacy, right, They're they're academic in
Speaker 1: many ways. Um, but one outbreak didn't affect monasteries near
Speaker 1: as much, not because they practice better hygiene, but because
Speaker 1: monasteries were dissolved by then. There is one theory, and
Speaker 1: I wanted to see what you thought about this, the
Speaker 1: theory that people in the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder,
Speaker 1: which were the majority of people there. Uh, there's this
Speaker 1: theory that they were able to weather this storm of
Speaker 1: disease a little bit better because they had just been
Speaker 1: exposed to more disease kind of like to let your
Speaker 1: kids get dirty theory, I guess mm hmm exactly let
Speaker 1: him just go around licking door knobs and stuff. No,
Speaker 1: definitely not anymore ever again oh boy um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I don't know. I wonder about this sometimes been
Speaker 1: you know, we say, oh, I've got a strong immune system,
Speaker 1: like because I'm you know, a filthy, disgusting man. Is
Speaker 1: that true? What do you what do you know about
Speaker 1: the science behind this idea of boosting your immune system
Speaker 1: by like living in squalor. Well, I am not a doctor.
Speaker 1: Neither you. Neither is Casey. So this is not medical advice.
Speaker 1: You can't see the zoom, folks. But I'm waving my
Speaker 1: hands yeah in an emphatic, furious way. So that is
Speaker 1: not us saying go lick the floor or go get
Speaker 1: your kids to play in horse poop or something. Those
Speaker 1: are both just bad ideas. Both of those sound like
Speaker 1: really solid insults, say go lick the floor or go
Speaker 1: tell your kids to play in horse poop. Here we go,
Speaker 1: just put just putting that out there. I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know, I had a realization is thinking about places
Speaker 1: that we can't go and this year and probably beginning
Speaker 1: next year and and miss the Renaissance Fair festival or
Speaker 1: whatever it's called. And uh, you know, proost is right
Speaker 1: in remembrance of things past. The sense of smell is
Speaker 1: our primary gateway into memory. And when I think of
Speaker 1: Renaissance Festival, I smell, you know, like beer, and I
Speaker 1: smell those nor miss delicious turkey legs. But I also
Speaker 1: smell horsepoop with nostalgia totally. Um, yeah, no, absolutely is
Speaker 1: a very powerful sense memory. I have that for the
Speaker 1: circus as well. I can think of popcorn and uh
Speaker 1: an elephant poop, which is pretty much the same as horsepoop.
Speaker 1: It smells very similar. Uh. But we're not here to
Speaker 1: talk about animal feces. We're here to figure out what
Speaker 1: the hell happened to the English sweats. How could something
Speaker 1: that had just ravaged the land and with no medical
Speaker 1: answer of any kind just kind of sweated itself out?
Speaker 1: O good turner phrase there, man. Uh we know that.
Speaker 1: In eight one UH fellow named Dr Arthur board Year
Speaker 1: wrote a paper that he sent to the Anthropology Society
Speaker 1: of Paris, where he said he proposed a pretty racist
Speaker 1: thing that maybe had the predecessor of genetic research in there.
Speaker 1: His theory was the sweating sickness effects appeared to affect
Speaker 1: people who were English, but really was affecting people who
Speaker 1: were descended from Anglo Saxon's and people who were descended
Speaker 1: from the Celts were spared because of some inherent inborn
Speaker 1: resistance or because of some Anglo Saxon vulnerability. This is
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff that that counted as a scientific
Speaker 1: research back then. But you know, it's weird that Henry
Speaker 1: the Eighth took the pole position. In our headline today
Speaker 1: we mentioned that the actions of his father may have
Speaker 1: led to I don't know, probably, I'm gonna say it
Speaker 1: probably led to the sweating sickness entering England. But why
Speaker 1: why are we talking about Henry the eighth? What what
Speaker 1: on earth does he have to do with the English sweats? Well,
Speaker 1: he is Henry the eighth, the as Henry the eighth,
Speaker 1: the as he is. Uh And it actually there's a
Speaker 1: theory that it possibly led to him becoming king because
Speaker 1: uh um, you know, there was such high instance of
Speaker 1: infection among the royal class it possibly affected or rerouted
Speaker 1: kind of historical events. So in fifteen o two, Arthur,
Speaker 1: who was the Prince of Wales died quite suddenly and
Speaker 1: unexpectedly the age of fifteen. This was just six months
Speaker 1: after he married Catherine of Aragon. That sounds familiar. Um, well,
Speaker 1: we'll get to that. There was no official like record
Speaker 1: of of what his cause of death was, but a
Speaker 1: lot of folks in the historical circles believe that he
Speaker 1: was another one of the long list of nobles that
Speaker 1: succumbed to the sweating sickness. So he was the oldest
Speaker 1: man in the family, and he would have become king
Speaker 1: had he not died at fifteen, So his younger brother,
Speaker 1: Henry the Duke of York got the job instead and
Speaker 1: was crowned. Um. And that Henry the Duke of York
Speaker 1: became the Henry the Eighth of legend that we know
Speaker 1: so well. And he ended up marrying his brother's widow,
Speaker 1: Catherine of Aragon. She was, in fact the first of
Speaker 1: those six wives that that he uh you know, burned
Speaker 1: through uh, much like the sweating sickness burned through the land.
Speaker 1: Henry was not a good dude. Um. But yeah, if
Speaker 1: it wasn't for potentially sweating sickness, he might never have
Speaker 1: had the opportunity, yep, to be the full piece of
Speaker 1: work that he ended up being hold the phone. Uh,
Speaker 1: we we're doing we're doing that thing again. Um, where
Speaker 1: we've already gone long, We're only halfway through the amazing
Speaker 1: research materials that we have. We think this one deserves
Speaker 1: a two parter. We're really not just trying to mess
Speaker 1: with you, lovely, lovely listeners. Um, we just try to
Speaker 1: we we try to have a standard. We try to
Speaker 1: keep our episodes in the thirty five to forty minute range.
Speaker 1: And um, this one is looking to be a doozy.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna come back to you with a part
Speaker 1: two of the English Sweats. Yeah, peek behind the scenes. Uh,
Speaker 1: Casey starts indicating to us there's this sort of a
Speaker 1: storm cloud that so slowly builds across his brow. We're
Speaker 1: getting too long. So thanks as always to you, super producer,
Speaker 1: Casey Pagraham. Thanks to Gabe Loes Yeah, our research north Star.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Alex Williams, who composed the perfect soundtrack to
Speaker 1: this story of the Sweating Sickness. If you wish, you
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Speaker 1: you can interact with your fellow ridiculous historians, and to
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Speaker 1: You can also find us as human beings individually on
Speaker 1: social media. I am at how now Noel Brown exclusively
Speaker 1: on the Instagram. Honestly, folks, Uh, it just make me
Speaker 1: laugh with a pun and you're into ridiculous historians, or
Speaker 1: just teach me a word. I don't know. I would
Speaker 1: love to learn some more weird words. You can also,
Speaker 1: while you're on the internet, find me on Instagram where
Speaker 1: I am building. Uh, I'm building survival kits right now,
Speaker 1: so find out more about that at ben Bullin. Or
Speaker 1: you can find me on Twitter where I have hot
Speaker 1: takes some plenty at Ben Bullen hs W. And finally,
Speaker 1: thanks to Jonathan Strict on the Quister, Uh, we hope
Speaker 1: to have you back very soon. Buddy. You promised you'd
Speaker 1: bomb our zooms, but you haven't showed up yet. I'm
Speaker 1: actually starting to miss you, and I hope you're Okay,
Speaker 1: keep up that loot practicing. We'll see your next oplix.
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