The English sweating sickness, a disease about which we still know almost nothing, had epidemics in 1485, 1508, 1517, and 1528, killing thousands as it went, before disappearing, never to return (or at least not yet). It was followed in the 1550s by another strange fever—“the new sickness”—which “raged horribly throughout the realm and killed an exceeding great number of all
