Foot, Pleasure for Pleasure, the Tudors and Sweating Sickness

[shadowkat]

1. MD and my folks have convinced me not to overdo, just because I can stand on my foot without pain does not mean it is healed. This I believe is sound advice, especially considering CW broke her foot twice in the same place I broke mine. Eh rainy and overcast day anyhow...so sort of glad I'm stuck inside. I'm thinking - if and when I retire, I'm moving out of NY and to a cheaper state, near the water (is there such a thing? Eh, maybe Florida...that's where half my relatives are, but I'm not a fan), or the mountains, without the need to do too much driving or going up and down steps. Hmm...maybe the mountains is not such a great idea.

2. Pleasure for Pleasure is an exceedingly odd romance novel, I can't figure out who the hero is. I'm pretty sure who the heroine is - it's the only female character whose pov we've been in. Also unlike most of these books, it should be noted that she is decidedly plump. Usually the heroine is thin as a rail. (Which doesn't make sense in historical romance novels - since people who were wealthy tended to be plump and not thin. Full-figured was considered attractive back then - or have you not looked at the paintings from the period.) But.. the male points of view are shall we say a bit more scattered. And the most likely prospect is currently enamored with a rather likable and quite intelligent French woman who is advising the heroine on how to deal with a rather despicable rake who has ruined her season. So is it the despicable rake...because that would just be odd.
Tempted to spoil myself by reading Amazon and Good Reads reviews. If you want to spoil yourself on a book or tv show - you can, you just need to know how to find the right sites.
I'm exceedingly good at this sort of thing.

You can tell that I've been reading too many of these things. I'm starting to write like them. Blame Georgette Heyer for the word "exceedingly" - her verbage sort of stuck in my head. On "words with friends" - I was actually considering "peon" but decided "rowan" would give me more points. "Words with Friends" is odd too - some words such as QUA are allowable, while QUE is not. Or "JOE" is fine but not "OZ". Very odd and inconsistent game.

3. Finished watching another episode of S1 the Tudors, I think it is the 7th Episode of the Season, where the kingdom is plagued by The Sweating Sickness. I looked it up on Wiki and it had this to say about the Sickness in fiction:

The 1528 outbreak is depicted in the 2007 episode of The Tudors titled "Message to the Emperor". William Compton is killed by the disease and both Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey are stricken. In Season 1, Episode 5, Henry FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Richmond and Somerset, the king's officially recognized, illegitimate son dies of The Sweat at about 3–5 years old. The real Henry FitzRoy died about one month after his seventeenth birthday, probably of tuberculosis.

A small outbreak in 1527 kills Liz, the wife of Thomas Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey's advisor, in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. In 1529, the disease also claims the lives of Cromwell's daughter Grace and stepdaughter Anne.

The 2012 mid-season finale of Warehouse 13 titled "We All Fall Down" uses sweating sickness as a plot device. Agents of the eponymous warehouse are seeking a quasi-mystical artifact, a Chinese orchid, which within the fiction of the series was the cause of the 1485 outbreak. The episode ends with the artifact releasing the sickness, potentially infecting the entire world.

Sweating sickness is also featured in the British television series Merlin, though the illness historically did not show up until centuries after the events depicted in the show were supposed to have taken place.

But they don't appear to know what caused it - except that it came and went mysteriously.
Called the English Sweating Sickness - because started in England. They believe it may have been caused by the poor sanitary conditions of the time - sewage in the water, etc.

Further research uncovered the following information -

Here's what the Encyclopedia Brittanica states:

sweating sickness, also called English sweat, a disease of unknown cause that appeared in England as an epidemic on six occasions—in 1485, 1506, 1517, 1528, 1551, and 1578. It was confined to England, except in 1528–29, when it spread to the European continent, appearing in Hamburg and passing northward to Scandinavia and eastward to Lithuania, Poland, and Russia; the Netherlands also was involved, but the disease did not spread to France or Italy.

Ah, in 1997, two London researchers hypothesized that the Sweating Sickness is the same as the hatna virus that plague the Southwestern US in the late 1990s.

Medical historians have never known what caused the sweating sickness. That the disease was neither plague nor typhus was clear from contemporary accounts. Its victims bore neither the boils typical of plague nor the rash of typhus. Now physicians Vanya Gant and Guy Thwaites, both of St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, think they may have identified the killer. Sudor Anglicus, they say, may have been an early version of a disease that has made headlines in recent years: hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which erupted in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest in the summer of 1993.

The similarities between the two are striking, says Gant. First, there is hanta’s rapid course. Basically, you’ve got a headache in the morning, you’re short of breath in the afternoon, you take to your bed at teatime, and you’re on a respirator by midnight, he says. Second, sweating sickness left its victims breathless. Hanta also leaves people gasping, filling their lungs with fluid.

Perhaps most suggestive of a common identity for the two diseases is that each epidemic of sweating sickness appeared in the summer and often in rural areas, meaning that a rapidly breeding rodent may have been its primary host; hanta’s main refuge is the deer mouse.

And from...The Lumnarium Encyclopedia Project: England Under the Tudors - a more detailed description of the disease and its symptoms and probable causes:

Symptoms
The symptoms as described by Caius and others were as follows. The disease began very suddenly with a sense of apprehension, followed by cold shivers (sometimes very violent), giddiness, headache and severe pains in the neck, shoulders and limbs, with great prostration. After the cold stage, which might last from half-an-hour to three hours, followed the stage of heat and sweating. The characteristic sweat broke out suddenly, and, as it seemed to those accustomed to the disease, without any obvious cause. With the sweat, or after that was poured out, came a sense of heat, and with this headache and delirium, rapid pulse and intense thirst. Palpitation and pain in the heart were frequent symptoms. No eruption of any kind on the skin was generally observed; Caius makes no allusion to such a symptom. In the later stages there was either general prostration and collapse, or an irresistible tendency to sleep, which was thought to be fatal if the patient were permitted to give way to it. The malady was remarkably rapid in its course, being sometimes fatal even in two or three hours, and some patients died in less than that time. More commonly it was protracted to a period of twelve to twenty-four hours, beyond which it rarely lasted. Those who survived for twenty-four hours were considered safe.

The disease, unlike the plague, was not especially fatal to the poor, but rather, as Caius affirms, attacked the richer sort and those who were free livers according to the custom of England in those days. "They which had this sweat sore with peril of death were either men of wealth, ease or welfare, or of the poorer sort, such as were idle persons, good ale drinkers and taverne haunters."

Causes.
Some attributed the disease to the English climate, its moisture and its fogs, or to the intemperate habits of the English people, and to the frightful want of cleanliness in their houses and surroundings which is noticed by Erasmus in a well-known passage, and about which Caius is equally explicit. But we must conclude that climate, season, and manner of life were not adequate, either separately or collectively, to produce the disease, though each may have acted sometimes as a predisposing cause. The sweating-sickness was in fact, to use modern language, a specific infective disease, in the same sense as plague, typhus, scarlet fever, or malaria.

But in truth? They have no clue what it was or what actually caused it. There were no bites, and no rashes or bulbos...it was frightening in part because it was so mysterious and came on so suddenly. In the television version of the Tudors...Henry's brother and illegitimate son die of it. Historically, various courtiers died of it, Henry's brother died of it, and
Anne Boyelan's brother died of it, along with Charles Brandford the Duke of Suffolk - whose body is still intact in his tomb and could be exhumed to determine causation.

Comments

[paratti.livejournal.com]

Reality.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Well he's not dead from Sweating Sickness in the series. I think Hilary Mantel has him die of the Sweating Sickness in her novels, which means they aren't as accurate as I thought? Odd.

Although really, how do we know? I guess historical record? Or the actual bodies? Because I wouldn't trust a chronicler of history completely...they have an odd way of changing things.

History in the 20th Century is actually more reliable because of better and more impartial recording devices.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Eh never mind...I remembered my own entry wrong. Re-read it and it was someone else. Embarrassing that.

[paratti.livejournal.com]

Mary Bolynn's husband died of it, who'd be Anne's brother by marriage. But George definitely went to the block.